A board member asked me recently, with real surprise, why I like fundraising. He wasn’t being rude. He just couldn’t fathom it. As he told me, he didn’t enjoy it.
Why? The same reason just about everybody doesn’t like fundraising. Because it feels like begging.
Asking people for money? Ugh.
Here’s what I told him:
No nonprofit runs without funds. And no nonprofit ever raised a dollar without somebody, somewhere, doing the asking.
The choir, the school, the shelter, the food bank: every one of them makes the world a better place, and every one of them keeps its lights on because someone was willing to fundraise.
To love the cause but dread the ask is to love the fire and resent the wood. They aren’t two things. The asking is how the good work gets paid for. It’s the fuel for the fire.
Too many non-profit leaders draw a sharp distinction between programming and fundraising.
In this paradigm, programming is the real work of the non-profit. Fundraising, on the other hand, is merely an unfortunate necessity.
No wonder so many non-profits are struggling just to keep their lights on.
Fundraising is not separate from programming. Fundraising is programming.
Not just because you need fundraising to run programming. But because successful fundraising is based upon meaningful, human relationships - the kinds of relationships that make the world a better place.
See this clearly and the question turns itself inside out. It stops being “how can you like fundraising?” and becomes “how could I not?”
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