The Science of Connection: Aligning Yourself, Your Organization, and Your Donors for Lasting Impact

Hello, everyone. Welcome. Good morning. Oh, you’re already on. You can see me. Okay, I could just not see myself in the stream. So thank you for letting me know. This is why I love the chat so much. So it is so wonderful to be with all of you. I want to Read More

Hello, everyone. Welcome. Good morning. Oh, you’re already on. You can see me. Okay, I could just not see myself in the stream. So thank you for letting me know. This is why I love the chat so much. So it is so wonderful to be with all of you. I want to thank Mike again and Salus University for having us here. I’m so thrilled and grateful to be back for another consecutive year of helping to host this incredible community conference. And I loved the video that they just showed. I hear from nonprofits all the time how much they want testimonials and information from folks like them, nonprofits like them who are using different tools and how they’re using it, and I just think it’s so meaningful to hear about the work that folks are doing behind the technology. So the DonorPerfect team has put together a number of those different videos today. I cannot wait to see them. I need you to just tell me kind of how excited you are for today. You can just drop a big why in the chat? Because the lineup is outrageous. I was looking through all the incredible speakers that we have joining us. Today, I get to introduce one of my or welcome one of my very best friends next, Dana Snyder, I’ll get to introduce one of my other good friends later today, Floyd Jones, we have Tim Lockie, Meena Doss, Tammy Zonker. I mean, this is like, as my five year old, my five year old, would say, chef’s kiss agenda. So just give some love in the chat, because I know it takes so much from the DonorPerfect team to be able to put this together, and I’m just so grateful for the amount of free resources that they put together for the nonprofit community and this incredible conference. So thank you for giving them some love and emojis and all the things. So excited to have you all here with me. Bright and early. Mike gave me an incredible introduction. My name is Mallory Erickson. I am the host and author of what the fundraising, the creator of the power Partners Program, and now the founder of practiced the first ever conversation simulator for fundraisers to help them practice for donor meetings. And if you aren’t familiar with me or my work, I want to just give you a tiny bit of background of why I’m here and why I care about this. So like many of you, I became an accidental fundraiser, actually, first as. Managing Director and then an executive director, and I’m going to need you to put those why’s again in the chat if you are also an accidental fundraiser. And I will tell you recently, I met a few people who were like, born fundraisers, but most of the people, okay, that was an amazing amount of exclamation points. Whoever threw that in the chat, but I just started to want to work in organizations that were doing meaningful work, and as I started to get promoted, it came with big fundraising responsibilities. And if I’m honest, I really hated fundraising, and I call this my impact report, fake stage, where I felt this pressure to put up this appearance everywhere, like I had it all together when the reality was a constant hustle. I didn’t have a donor pipeline that I trusted. I didn’t have a CRM system that I trusted. To be honest, I didn’t know about DonorPerfect at that time. And I and I really sacrificed a lot of my personal health, my relationships, and I got to a breaking point where I thought, you know, a year from now, I can’t be doing this same thing anymore. I need to figure out a different way to fundraise to be in the nonprofit sector, or I’m going to have to leave it. And I knew I really didn’t want to leave it, and I had this sort of accidental, incredible combination of life experiences where I got certified as an executive coach, trained in habit and behavior design and design thinking, and those frameworks really came together and fundamentally changed the way that I fundraise, and it had big financial implications. I moved in organization from a million to 3.5 pretty quickly, but more importantly, I started to love fundraising, and then I just wanted to share these tools that had been so transformative for me, personally, with my peers, and I started to do so in 2020 I wanted to support other fundraisers like me. I wanted to improve the lives of other fundraisers, and that just sort of organically grew to it becoming my full time job as a coach and a consultant in this space, and now building technology that helps more fundraisers be able to do it in real time, but today I’m talking to you about one of my favorite topics, which is about connection. I’m going to and I’m going to start about talking about the science of connection, but I’m going to start with a story, and for those of you who are asking where the handout is in the slides, it’s my fault, because I was sitting here last night and thinking about what I wanted to tell you all today, and I realized that I wanted to make some changes, and I wanted to start by telling you a story. So I’m going to start by telling you a story about wallpaper. A few weeks ago, I found myself standing on a chair cutting strips of wallpaper off of a kitchen wall. And no, I have not totally lost my mind, but I did lose my grandma, my amazing 99 year old grandma Marge, who had been my best friend and the person I felt the most connected to in the entire world. So last night, as I was practicing for today, I started to think about Marge, and I started to think about the wallpaper, and I want to tell you about why I felt so connected to her, and other than the fact that she was my grandmother, because there are some incredible lessons here around the science of connection. So everybody loved Marge. Everybody felt connected to Marge. And I used to say that she was magic, but really what she knew was how to truly connect with people. She people would say she was the best listener. She was an active listener, which she would say was hilarious, because especially in the last few years, she couldn’t actually even hear very much. In fact, here’s a photo of her listening to my daughter Emmy teach her, read her a book in Spanish, a language that she also does not speak, but Emmy felt like she was hanging on to every word, and that was because of her emotional attunement, because she was fully present, and she gave everybody the feeling that they were the only thing that mattered in that moment, she was effusive. She was always verbally appreciating everything around her. I found a journal of hers in her house where she was talking about this party that she planned, where literally everything had gone wrong, and I’m reading through all the things that broke and all the things that were late and all the things that happened, and one of the last sentences in the journal is, I’m so grateful for how much abundance is in my life, and she always let that be known. She was always verbally appreciating people showing her gratitude. She made every effort to engage face to face. COVID happened, and this nine year old woman learned how to zoom. She knew face to face was important for connection, and she made it happen to build it. She listened without judgment, and she shared herself vulnerably. She was a very positive person and effusive and loving, like I said, But what actually made me feel the most connected to her, especially as an adult, was when she told me stories about hard choice this. Made guilt. She carried fears she had. It was in those tender moments that our connection deepened, and she showed up without judgment, too. And don’t get me wrong, she didn’t love all the decisions that I made, but she showed up without judgment, and we built a deeper connection as a result. And I hope you can hear in this story that I’m telling you about my grandma and in my relationship with her, that what I uncovered as I was processing this was this perfect example of the science of what builds connection, active listening and emotional attunement, appreciation and reciprocity, trust and vulnerability and face to face interactions, and then the final critical element of connection, which is shared experiences. And with Marge, most of those were around her kitchen table. My first birthday was in the same spot my two year old SAT reading a magazine. These shared experiences weren’t fancy or extravagant. It was the space where, actually, all of those other elements happened, where all of those other elements of connection took place. It’s where she listened, it’s where she was present, it’s where we we experience this reciprocal relationship, where we built trust, where we shared, vulnerably, all of that happened at our kitchen table. Which brings me back to the wallpaper. The wallpaper represented my connection with my grandma, these felt and shared experiences that happened there. It’s my anchor, my touchstone, and it’s why I found myself standing on a chair cutting wallpaper off of a wall, and you can build connection with your donors so that they want a piece of your wallpaper. No, donors probably aren’t going to love you the way that I love my grandma, but that’s okay, but the tenants of our connection are the exact experiences that your donors are looking for with you.

Donor connection is about human connection, and sometimes I think we over complicate fundraising. We try to operationalize this incredibly human experience, but human, but humans are predisposed to connection. We want it. It is our natural state of being. And there’s a lot of different scientific and neurobiological theory and research that’s done around this social baseline. Theory talks about the fact that we’re wired to expect social connection. We hear a lot about oxytocin, the bonding hormone, which plays a really important role in fostering trust and empathy. The idea of mirror neurons is that we can actually experience things, sort of by watching other people experience them, there are these like neural mechanisms that enable us to understand and resonate with other fear feelings, and then the limbic resonance, which is this idea that we can sort of synchronize our emotional states. And I want you to tell me in the chat, and I want you to tell me in the chat, have you ever had an experience where you walked into the room and you could feel the emotional experience of somebody else, and you found yourself either getting pulled up by that experience and sort of meeting their energy where they were at, or maybe in a negative way, getting pulled down by that energy and actually starting to notice yourself kind of CO regulating with that person. Absolutely, definitely, okay. The chat is already fine. You guys are with me. I love this. Okay. So there are all these ways that humans are wired to connect, and this is what happens with our donors, too. We talk a lot in our sector about our donors, like blank, our donors want X. A lot of the things that we a lot of the assumptions that we make around here are actually self fulfilling prophecies. We make assumptions based on past behavior, or we make assumptions because of our own limiting beliefs, and we project those onto our donors. The reality is that donors actually respond to our behavior, to our energy, to the prompts that we give or that we don’t give. We are the driver of what connection looks like in terms of our relationships with our donors. We set the tone we give the opportunities, and connection is a two way street, so we have to make some decisions as individuals and as organizations and as a sector around how we want to build connection that matters, and how we want to get beyond thinking about connection as just a strategy to connection as a biological and human experience. Experience that we actually have the best opportunity to facilitate, because our work is meaningful and values driven and connected to the deepest parts of who people are. The groundwork is laid for us to build meaningful connections, but we have to start to put those things into practice, and there are a lot of things in fundraising that get in the way these sort I said before that I feel like sometimes we over complicate fundraising. And I don’t mean that in any type of like shade way, or that we as individuals do that. I feel like as a sector, we do that. We’ve created a lot of fundraising norms and systems that actually pull us out of what our human, natural tendency is, right? We learn these transactional ways of fundraising, and so we go into these donor meetings looking for some secret somewhere when we can transition that conversation into something personal, to talking about giving money. And we didn’t. We weren’t transparent with the donor about that from the beginning, but we’re just gonna, you know, kind of gage their interest long enough and and in the back of our minds be looking for some bridge where we could change the topic of the conversation. I don’t know about you, but that’s how I was taught to fundraise, and that is never going to build a connected relationship, because I’ve already kind of screwed up all the things that build authentic, connected relationships, and so we have to get out of these transactional systems that a lot of us have been taught, these transactional practices that a lot of us have been taught, and move into authentic storytelling. I started this webinar telling you a story about my grandma. I didn’t expect to do that actually, until I realized what an incredible example it was. But tell me in the chat, how many of you hearing that story, learning a little bit about me, learning a little bit about my grandmother, help you feel a little bit more connected to me, know me a little bit better, and maybe the type of person I am or the things that I care about, right? That’s the difference between that’s what storytelling does. It bonds us with each other, right? And the reason you feel more connected to me from a story like that is maybe you have a similar story, or you have a similar person, or there’s an element of my grandmother that’s similar to somebody in your life. And so my story helped you connect, and that’s what we need to be doing as nonprofits, too. We have so many opportunities to share meaningful stories like that. One of the other things that gettin that gets in the way of connection is when we go move into fear driven language. Okay, there’s a lot of click bait fundraising out there that’s designed to activate a funder or donor’s nervous system, to freak them out so much that maybe they’ll give a gift just to soothe that anxiety inside of them. Sure, maybe you raise five more dollars, 10 more dollars, get a quick, one time gift. But you’re not building connection. You’re not building a relationship over time. When we see really low donor retention numbers, that’s often from strategies like that that focus on acquisition using tactics that actually don’t feel good to us as humans. They again might raise some money in a moment, but they aren’t building connected donor relationships, and we have to start to be aware of those practices and replace them with relational language focused on mutual impact reciprocity, the components of my relationship with my grandma that are built into the science of connection. And then another pitfall that we fall into as fundraisers and nonprofits is around the lack of follow through, and I’m going to deliver this one with extra care, okay? Because I know that you are all doing way too many things. Okay? Everybody is wearing too many hats. Has too many things on your plate, and myself as well. I struggle to follow through on everything that I started. It feels like there are just too many things these days, but we need to be really cognizant and intentional about when we are following through and honest about when we aren’t going to be able to or we aren’t because consistency, consistent, follow up, transparency and just consistency in being who we say we are is a really big part of human connection. And so I wanted to first start with some of these, like, you know, illuminating the ways you can take those pillars from my story with my grandma and start to think about them organizationally in terms of your nonprofit, and maybe recognize where you have been falling into some of the pitfalls you are not alone. Okay, I fell into absolutely every single one of these, and a lot of these are related to the way that we’re taught and trained around fundraising, but then making some conscious shifts to the areas where you want to switch some practices. Or switch some strategies, or switch some ways that you go about doing things that are actually move into that place of deeper connection. And I want to make sure that I bust a myth here as well. You do not need a lot of time or extravagance to build connected relationships. Okay? And I can hear, I can hear the eye rolls, okay, because I already just said you have way too many things on your plate and and yes, that is true, but we think that building these moments of connection have to be these huge like flagpole opportunities. We need to have a full team meeting to talk about how we’re going to create a core moment of connection for our donors this month. Something that’s really interesting about the science of connection is that a lot of what builds connection are through micro moments. Okay, micro moments like a smile, a quick check in a moment of genuine attention, asking somebody, Hey, how was the last day of school as the first sentence in your email outreach about something or I know the dance recital was a few weeks ago. I just want to check in see how it went. I was also hoping to touch base about blank these tiny, little moments allow us to deepen our connection. Micro interactions like that short, empathetic interactions and then proactive micro moments. Okay, that’s like asking somebody in advance how they’re going to feel about something. Hey, we have this going out. And I just wanted to be mindful of the fact that I know you care about XYZ. And so I just wanted to open up the opportunity for dialog there, right? And so I want you to think about, instead of doing some big new thing related to connection, what’s one way you could build connection with your donors through a micro moment, through something you’re already doing, through an activity that is already on your plate, but just adding a micro moment of connection to deepen connection through that activity. And I’m going to if folks want to share a few things in the chat, I’d be super curious to know what’s one way you could build connection with your donors through a micro moment. Can see if anyone wants to share a little bit in the chat while I take a quick sip of water.

It’s birthday messages, and this is such a good moment to just say, you know, this is where a tool, this is where DonorPerfect really comes in, right? Keeping track of some of these things, notes on your donor records, the CRM and DonorPerfect are what help you be able to actually do a lot of those micro moments as well, because it’s hard to remember all of these things, right? And if you’re a neurodivergent like me, it might be extra hard to remember things like birthdays and stuff like that. And so I have to have a system that helps me with that. And so there’s a great reminder of like updating your notes and your Donor Perfect profiles, things that can help you add a tiny bit of more connected interaction when you’re reaching out to your donors. Okay, I love these. Keep these coming, because I think these are great examples for everybody as well as they see what their peers are doing. So one of the other really critical pillars around connection and our ability to build connection with our donors and our consistency around connection is through organizational alignment. Okay, so consistency is yes, around follow up and follow through with the things that we say we’re going to do, the things that we say matter. But it also is about being consistent in our language, how we talk to people, how we treat people, and that really has to come from a place of organizational alignment, okay, alignment on an organizational level, makes it clear who you are. Okay. Clarity on organizational mission leads to more authentic relationship. Building alignment can create trust with donors because your messaging remains consistent from multiple folks inside your organization, multiple pieces of collateral, multiple emails, right? They don’t feel like, Oh, your organization is focusing on this thing here, and then this other thing here. Did priorities change? They’re wondering who sent that thing out, because it sounds so different from this other thing. And then organizational alignment also leads to, you know, transparency, more transparency around your values, and that is what strengthens your culture, and that’s what strengthens your culture internally, but also your culture with your donors. Okay, so in order to have that consistency in connection points, we have to come from a place of organizational alignment. So I wanted to give you a few strategies here, if you’re if you’re thinking, Okay, I know we want to build more connection with our donors, and I’m worried that maybe some of that disconnection is coming because we don’t have full organizational alignment. So here are just a few strategies around that in particular. Okay, one is regular values check ins with your team. So. Thing I’ve done in staff meetings before is all gone around in a circle, and everybody gives an example as a part of the staff meeting, of a moment during the week where they thought we really lived out our values as an organization, and a moment during our week where they really feel like we were misaligned with our values, or we didn’t show up with our values. Clear, and then you can start to notice, okay, where are there maybe processes or practices that we want to address as a group, because that misalignment over there is probably trickling down to some inconsistent communication with our donors. Storytelling practice, this can be really helpful in unifying messaging, role playing, storytelling practice, encouraging transparency about struggles internally. This does not mean that you tell everybody every little thing that’s happening under the hood of your organization, but something that can feel really misaligned is if there’s a huge thing happening behind the scenes in the organization, and the presentation to everybody externally, is not even acknowledging at all that very big thing, especially if that goes on for a long period of time, it can have your team members, your staff members, everybody in the organization, feeling this misalignment, right because there isn’t any transparency and there isn’t any awareness with the folks who we say are connected the most to our relationship with what’s actually going on, and that can’t foster deeper connection, right? Because there’s a really big missing piece there around vulnerability and authenticity and trust, and then the other piece here is around creating spaces without fear of judgment. I think we ask our team members, we ask our fundraisers to go out there and build authentic relationships with donors, and oftentimes we do that without them actually having a place inside our organizations where they can be authentic without judgment in a safe environment. And so I bring this up because we can’t just talk about connection in one silo of our work. We can’t just talk about connection with ourselves without talking about how that relates to how we connect with others. And we can’t talk just about how we connect with others, like our donors, without actually talking about, what does connection look like inside our organization, and what does connection look like inside of ourselves? Okay, so these different tiers, and they’re sort of like concentric circles, are all really related to each other, and in order to really understand and live out the science of connection in the work that we do, we need to be aware of all of the things that impact it and the other thing. So we talked a little bit about connection with our donors, we talked a little bit about connection inside our organizations. And now I want to talk about connection with ourselves and why that is so important. So even though we are wired for connection biologically, like I said, there is an epidemic of disconnection happening right now. Right? We’re hearing more and more research and reports around loneliness, and many of us are experiencing this too, right? This isn’t just about beneficiaries in our organization or people over there or out there. A lot of us as fundraisers, as nonprofit leaders, we’re experiencing disconnection in our lives too. Fundraising can be this incredibly isolating role nonprofit leadership. I remember being an executive director and being like, wow, this is the loneliest role in the world, right? I sit right between the board and all my team members, and I’m the only one right here, and it can be really isolating, and we want to be honest with ourselves about the ways in which we’re feeling disconnected from each other, perhaps, or the ways in which we’re feeling disconnected from ourselves, because that is going to directly impact The ways in which we are and aren’t able.

The core of being able to create connection is through our connection with ourselves and our awareness of ourselves, and our ability to be sort of in our body, in our energy, and be able to show up embodied and emboldened in the work that we do, and I talk about this a lot in my book, but one of the biggest challenges to building authentic relationships and fundraising, to connecting in meaningful ways is what’s happening inside our brain and our body as fundraisers. Because when our stress response comes on, okay, our amygdala, our lizard brain. It actually shuts off parts of our brain and body that are designed for connection, so our stress response, fight, flight, freeze, and I’ll talk a little bit about each of these in a moment. When those components of our brain come online, it has two jobs. You. Its job is to keep you from dying and to conserve as much energy as possible, and it shuts down all of these other functions in our brain and our body, the functions for empathy, collaboration, listening, all of these things that are required for connection, gratitude, feelings of gratitude and appreciation, reciprocity, all of those components of being human we cannot access when we are in a chronic stress state, when we are in fight, flight or freeze. And you might be hearing me say this and be like, Oh my gosh, Mallory, like the nonprofit sector as a whole has potentially never been so much in survival mode or in fight, flight or freeze, and this might be something that you really resonate with right now, and that’s okay, because we’re going to talk about some strategies to deal with that on an internal level, cognitive and somatic level, but it’s really important to me that You understand the relationship between stress and your ability to implement all of those strategies around connection. Because oftentimes, when we don’t take a break, when we don’t go for that walk outside, when we say, I don’t have time to rest, I don’t have time to take a day off, I don’t have time to stop working at this hour, we actually are driving ourselves towards chronic stress, chronic burnout, and it is reducing our capacity, our actual physical capacity, from doing the things that are going to move our fundraising forward the most, the things that are going to help us raise the most money. And I get it okay, I’m the queen of overdrive my first my first career coach, when I was 23 was like, Hey, girl, this is your thing. You’re going to deal with this your whole life. You go into overdrive, and you don’t even notice, right, how close you’re getting to burnout. So I get it okay. So maybe it’s putting a reminder on your next to your computer, maybe it’s having a notification in your phone. Maybe it’s having a partner remind you of something at a certain time, but we all need ways to come out of our stress response, okay? Stress, our fight, flight and freeze mode. These are important parts of our life, okay? Stress is an important part of our experience. The The goal is not to not experience stress. Stress motivates us. It drives us forward in many situations. It helps us take urgent action, right? Stress is an important part. But stress cycles have to end. They have to end. We actually have to close them out inside our body and when we don’t, when we’re in a chronic stress state, and then we ultimately get burned out. We lose our ability to be the fundraisers, to be the nonprofit leaders that we know that we can be. So I know this is a little bit heavy, but I don’t really feel like we can talk about deep connection with our donors without being honest about what’s happening inside of us that might be holding us back from building those most connected relationships. So can you just let me know in the in the chat, like, is this resonating with you? Does this feel true? I’d be really curious to hear kind of what’s coming up for you as you’re hearing this. And I wanted to highlight for a second, because a lot of times with stress, we kind of oversimplify it, right? And we’re like, I’m stressed, I’m burnt out. And I think it’s helpful to understand. And there are more, there are more stress responses than fight, flight or freeze. There’s new research around things like Fauci but I want to focus on fight, flight or freeze, because I think it’s really important that we don’t just sort of say, I mean, I’m not saying don’t admit when you are burnt out. But I think instead of just being like, oh my god, I’m so stressed, or oh my god, I’m burnt out, it’s helpful to actually understand which stress response is online at the moment, because the solutions are really different. Okay, so fight we might experience as like nausea, goosebumps, having the urge to scream, anger, resentment. That’s our fight response, our flight response is the desire to run away. It can be procrastination, avoidance of difficult conversations, overworking on unrelated tax tasks, excess preparation. Okay. Why are these things flight? Because we are fleeing the discomfort of sitting in something harder. We’re fleeing the discomfort of emailing that donor to ask for a meeting by writing another grant proposal that we have 1.5% chance of getting. Okay, I’m sorry for the gut punch, but I want you to understand, some people will be like, Oh yeah, well, me overworking. That’s my fight response. It’s your flight response. You are fleeing the discomfort of sitting in the uncertainty, of sitting in those harder, more uncomfortable moments and then freeze. That’s where we experience a lot of withdrawal. Emotional numbing, paralysis in decision making and complete disengagement. Okay? And so I want you to understand these, these pieces, because all of them impact our ability to build connection, but understanding where your nervous system is at allows you to design strategies that actually meet you where you’re at in that moment. And there are a lot of different cognitive and somatic ways of dealing with different types of stress responses in your nervous system. We don’t have time to go over all of them during the chat today, but I will say that just starting to bring awareness into just starting to bring awareness into the experience that you’re having and recognizing and maybe even naming which stress response is coming up for you is actually going to start to interrupt the stress cycles and start to build confidence in your own self efficacy, in your own agency, in your organization. Okay, so the good news is, yes, there are a lot of different things we’re going to talk about, practical strategies in a moment as well, to foster connection and to foster fundraising from a more aligned and embodied state. But the other thing I really want you to understand, if you take away one thing, is that just awareness around that stress response and naming that stress response is your first step forward in being able to take more control, to have more connection with yourself that’s going to allow you to build more connected relationships with your donors. Okay, so are you ready? I’m seeing the chat go off, but can you just give me like a ready in the chat or an emoji that you’re ready to talk about practical alignment strategies that foster connection. And again, this is connection with self organizational alignment and connection, and then connection with your donors, because it is all related, okay, I cannot kind of compartmentalize these pieces. Okay, I’m seeing lots of thumbs up. I’m gonna take quick water.

So in my book, what the fundraising? The first part of the book, I lay out a lot more details around everything. I just talked to you about everything, all of the different sort of transactional ways we’ve been taught to fundraise. A lot of the scarcity principles that continue to drive those transactional methodologies. And then what fundraising? What is happening inside our brain and body when we fundraise, and the impact that has on us doing the most critical work to our fundraising, which is building healthy relationships. The second part of the book is, what do we do about it? Right? Because, because, yes, all of those things are true, but for the last five years, I’ve been helping fundraisers actually get out of chronic stress and burnout and raise more money in a way that feels good to them and feels good to their donors. And so what are we doing? What have we been doing inside the power partners formula, the alignment fundraising collective and now with practivad, that is allowing fundraisers to do that? Okay? And I need to tell you, I if I can love fundraising, if I could have fundraising feel good to me. Anybody can have fundraising feel good to them. But it does require that we leave behind some of the things that are not making us feel good. I remember, you know, Floyd’s going to come on later today, and you’re going to get all the floydisms, because he’s just so good at those things. But I remember talking to him once and saying and saying, you know, we can’t, we can’t get butterfly wings, but keep our caterpillar body and think that we’re going to be able to fly. Okay, so I want to be clear about something, some of building more connected relationships with your donors, becoming more connected with yourself, it might require you to leave behind some fundraising practices that are not working for you okay, and change is hard, and change is scary, and grief can come from some of those things, but you are going to have to let go of some of the stuff that is not moving your organization forward, that is not feeling good to you, that is not actually helping you achieve your mission or your fundraising goals, because you can’t keep all that and then just try to add these things to the mix. Okay, it does not work that way. Talk about having too many things to do. Okay? So alignment, fundraising has has some core principles, right? One is around the mindset. And I don’t mean the mindset like a mantra on a mug, okay? I mean your beliefs, your thoughts and beliefs about what good fundraising is. When I started doing mindset and coaching work, and I started to think about okay, those moments where I’m so uncomfortable fundraising, what? What are my thoughts and beliefs behind those moments? And it was that I thought I was hounding people to give me money that they really didn’t want to give to me, right? I was trying to get people to do something that they didn’t really want to do, and I was just trying to figure out the best way to do that right. And then I remember this fundraising meeting that I had where three hours had gone by like that, and I was like, okay, so good fundraising. What’s happening in those moments? What’s happening in those moments? And I realized, in those moments, fundraising wasn’t an ask, it was an offer. It. Was about opportunity and partnership and creating the world that we both wanted to be a part of. And so when that started to become my focus, okay, I’m not looking for everybody to like me enough that maybe one day they want to give me some of their money, but I’m actually looking for people who are aligned with me and my organization, who want the same thing for our community, who want the same impact of this, right? It completely changes your or your orientation to how you’re building relationships. Okay? You’re building power partnerships, not just looking for transactional giving opportunities. Okay, I have a I have a coloring book for fundraisers, and on one of the pages, it says, Let them go. And on another, it says Not All money is created equal, right? We need to be looking for aligned funders. And alignment is not they have money, and you need money, okay? We are looking for, are we trying to do the same type of work together? And in my book, with the fundraising, I go through kind of all these different layers of alignment from that lens, another really important piece of alignment fundraising is coaching, identifying the thoughts and beliefs that shape our experiences. And I don’t mean you need to go and pay an individual coach for a lot of coaching. Self coaching is a thing tools like practiced where you can have a technology like an AI coach talk you through different things. There’s a lot of different ways to do coaching, okay, but what coaching is about is identifying the thoughts and the beliefs that shape our experiences, and then having cognitive tools that interrupt the loops and help us increase our curiosity and somatic tools that help us down regulate our nervous system. Okay? So the coaching piece is understanding that alignment isn’t something where you can go to a webinar one time and all of a sudden you know how to be an aligned fundraiser, staying in alignment. Okay, there’s so much about our world and our sector and fundraising that is designed to push us out of alignment. Okay? And so you might do a lot of that initial mindset work and be like, Okay, I’m coming from place of abundance. This is an offer, not an ask, all of those things, but you need to be ready for the fact that coaching, self coaching, or having a coach, or using a tool like practiced that needs to be a part of your ongoing experience, because everything is going to scarcity mindset is going to creep right in there again and try to pull you out of alignment. Okay? And then when we talk about alignment from a strategy perspective in fundraising that has to do with more on the organizational level, of clarifying your values, who you are, and communicating them transparently, right, not being everything for everyone. Because how does anybody know if they are aligned with you, if they don’t know who you truly are, okay? And part of how we know who people are is we know what they’re for and we know what they’re against and we know what they’re not for, right? And so we need to not try to be everything for everyone, because then we aren’t for nobody. Okay? And once you’re clear about your values and who you are and what you’re doing and why you’re here and what makes you different, then you can map alignment opportunities with donors who feel that way too, who want to make that change too, who are looking for organizations like yours, okay? There are, you know, I will tell you, there are a lot of people out there who can give $1,000 okay, we get So, kind of like, starry eyed maybe, you know, if we do this other new thing, we could get that donor who might be able to give $1,000 there are a lot of donors out there who can give $1,000 a lot of those are inside your DonorPerfect databases, right? They’re not, they’re not some new acquisition campaign you need to do, but there is only one organization that does exactly what you do. You are bringing a tremendous amount of value to your relationships with donors, but the only way for them to identify it and for you to identify it is to be really clear about who you are, what makes you different, and then translate that into the language of the donor to show where there is an alignment opportunity between what they care about and what you’re doing and how you’re the only ones doing it, okay? And then the third piece here is around personalizing relational fundraising approaches, okay? And this is another way that DonorPerfect can help you personalize outreaches, personalized emails, and really understanding what is driving donors to be engaged and involved, and how to talk to them where they’re at. Okay, this is a really big piece of why I told the story about my grandma, because every she didn’t know everybody okay. She came to my wedding. Everybody there knew who she was, okay, my friends, I talked about her my whole life. She did not remember probably any of my friends names. But you know what? She personalized her experience with them in the moment. She was fully emotionally attuned to them. She asked clarifying questions to build deeper connection in the moment we. Do a lot more of this than we give ourselves credit for. And here’s the thing I need you to hear there might be a lot of things that pull you into more transactional ways of fundraising or trick you into thinking there’s some quick win or click bait solution to something staying in alignment with yourself, staying in organizational alignment and building aligned partnerships with your donors. It works. It works in terms of how much more you’re going to raise this year, but it works in terms of how much more you’re going to raise every single year after and in a moment where so many organizations are feeling more scattered or more worried about what the future holds for our sector, the most important thing that you can do is build aligned partnerships that are going to walk through all of this with you for this year and beyond. Okay, so focus on alignment, prioritize genuine connection, and focus on building partnerships. I want you to tell me in the chat and take a quick sip of water. What’s one takeaway around building more aligned relationships that you want to make sure you take with you from this conversation today, and then I’ll get into an extra special surprise,

micro connections. I love that it can be about personal alignment, organizational alignment, donor alignment, finding out what’s meaning for them. Micro connections. I love that. Okay, maybe people are still thinking, that’s totally okay. Okay. So, you know, I’ve been doing this for five years. I’ve been building workshops and and courses and training fundraisers working with folks one on one and I, my North Star has always been to improve the lives of fundraisers. Okay? I want to help fundraisers build more connected and aligned donor relationships between all of those different areas. But recently, I launched proctivated, okay? Practiced is an AI enabled platform that helps fundraisers practice donor conversations, build confidence through personalized coaching and receive immediate actionable feedback to enhance donor relationships and your fundraising success. Again, my mission has not changed. It is to improve the lives of fundraisers, and now with practivad, we’re helping organizations be able to create deeper, more meaningful connections with donors. So how does it work? People have been asking me this question, you we have a coach inside the platform named TiVi, and so you can have coaching to prepare cognitively and emotionally for donor interactions. We have all these different types of practice scenarios. Practice scenarios. Role Play helps you with muscle memory, skill development and nervous system regulation. I don’t know if you’re already role playing inside your organization, but role play and practice is such an important part of what helps us actually build that kind of internal somatic resilience to a lot of the components of fundraising that can be really dysregulating, and then feedback and insights focused on what matters most, okay, so organizational alignment, providing more structured feedback and insights, relationship, focused feedback, so really prioritizing genuine interactions instead of transactional exchanges, and then micro moments of connection. You can actually on our feedback screen, you can bring TiVi in and talk to TiVi about something you could have improved in the conversation. And one of my favorite things that they do is that they talk to you about these micro moments that you could have said something different to build an even deeper emotional connection with the donor, something I missed on my own in that conversation with the donor. And why am I telling you all this? Because I have some really exciting news that we’re sharing today for the very first time for everybody who is on this webinar, okay, especially for those of you using DonorPerfect, we are really thrilled to announce that DonorPerfect is our very first CRM partner, and their users will have exclusive early access to practiced through a special 30 day free trial. So this offer will not be available again. So if you are in DonorPerfect, you are first in line, and you can just there’s going to be a poll that pops up if you want to be considered again. This is an exclusive benefit to DonorPerfect clients right now, or if you’re considering DonorPerfect, you should definitely click Yes, and you can find out more about this. And this is a one time only 30 day free trial of practice. And I’m just so thrilled. I’ve been working with the DonorPerfect team for so many different years, getting to host this incredible conference. And I’m just so honored that they are our first CRM partner, because I know how deeply they care about you all building real, meaningful relationships with donors and being able to make the most of the data inside your CRM to move relationships forward in the ways that matter most, and so make sure you respond. To the poll if you are interested in that one time opportunity, and for everybody else, I want to go over the takeaways from our time together today. Okay? So the first is that connection begins internally, okay? It impacts our organizational alignment and transforms donor relationships. You always want to be thinking about those concentric circles. The second is that you can use cognitive and somatic tools to prepare for the stress of fundraising and to manage the discomfort. Is that a quick fix? Is it always available depending on the level of chronic stress? No, I’m not trying to oversimplify how much stress so many of you are under, but starting to be able to name that stress, to be specific about the type of stress that you are experiencing, that is what is going to really help you then find and use the solutions that can help you end that stress cycle, and then alignment fundraising and prioritizing relationships over transactions, this is really helpful in in not just raising more money, but also feeling better doing it. And it helps you be able to deal with some and have less of those nervous system responses because you are acting from a place of alignment, from a values driven place, from a place that you feel really proud of, and that feels better to you, it feels better to your donors. So those are the big things I want you to take away. And we have to wrap up in a second. We have so many amazing speakers coming up next, but I want you to leave thinking about what’s one commitment you want to make today to enhance alignment in your fundraising. I started to see this a little bit earlier, but we only got through a few folks, so if you didn’t put it in the chat, that’s okay, but I do want you to make sure you make this commitment, one commitment today, to enhance alignment in your fundraising. And it can be go for a walk outside, because I realized that if I don’t end my stress response, I’m never going to be able to connect authentically with my donors, okay, but one step forward, one micro moment, one thing that builds more alignment, more connection, that is how you start to work towards having donors who want a piece of your wallpaper. Thank you so much for joining me, for this, for joining us today. We have the most incredible schedule that is coming up, Dana Snyder is coming up next, and so many other amazing, amazing speakers. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for your commitment to your missions and your work, and let’s help you raise more money and feel better doing it.