Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Back to the Relationship: Proximity, Presence, and the Future of Fundraising w/ Jason Lewis
35 Plays28 days ago
In the final part of my conversation with Jason Lewis, we move from diagnosis to direction.
If fundraising has drifted toward systems, scale, and transactional thinking, what does it look like to recover something more human?
Jason argues that the answer is not better technology or smarter dashboards. It is proximity. It is presence. It is getting fundraisers back in front of donors and letting real relationships shape the work.
In this episode we explore:
- Why fundraising may have a supervision problem, not a fundraiser problem
- How leadership culture shapes donor experience
- The importance of increasing proximity and real conversation
- Why young fundraisers should prioritize experience over optimization
- What it means to operate by different rules, like Dorothy stepping into Oz
If you are leading a team, entering the profession, or questioning where fundraising is headed, this episode offers both clarity and encouragement.
Find Jason's Substack, The Butterfly Effect Here: https://responsive.substack.com/
Looking for fundraising coaching? Check out www.abundantvision.net
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast. Whether you are a seasoned professional or a first-time fundraiser, we have the advice you need to take your next step toward major gift mastery.
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Dauber, President of Abundant Vision Philanthropic Consulting. Last week's conversation was a blast. I'm so excited to have you with me for this next segment.
00:00:30
Speaker
Let's get back to the show.
00:00:33
Speaker
So the tech
Technology and Natural Relationships
00:00:34
Speaker
technology companies are very good at turning relationships into numbers, yeah and to mimic natural relationships with algorithms and things like that. yeah How do we talk about money and donors internally in our organizations with our own staff without advancing the idea that relationships are numbers?
00:00:57
Speaker
How do we protect our relationships from that?
00:01:03
Speaker
Again, you're you're circling some of the answers. If you listen to some of the questions you're asking, you're circling back to some of the same, says you're answering some of the same sort of predicaments that I think we have because we have so much embraced the logic of the marketplace. um Walmart and Target and McDonald's, they all talk about consumers like as if they're as if we're like as if we're the commodities right they they buy our data and they you know they sell us the you know cheapest you know cheapest quality product that they can and and you know the the machine just keeps running right and we all know what those machines do there's a reason why companies like mcdonald's and
00:01:51
Speaker
Companies like McDonald's and and Walmart end up in the headlines for exploiting their employees and not manufacturing goods in the you know places in the world they shouldn't and all the accusations that get thrown at companies like that.
00:02:07
Speaker
When you
Fundraising vs. Corporate Systems
00:02:08
Speaker
look at some of our largest, most sophisticated fundraising operations, us those systems are not all that far off from the same, in many ways, the same sort of underlying systems.
00:02:19
Speaker
um And eventually, I do think that they'll eventually catch up um and they will bring about, i don't know if that's answering your question, but I do think eventually some of this is going to pop.
00:02:33
Speaker
I guess what i'm I'm trying to get at, Jason, is so we've identified what we don't want to be. and We don't want to be coercive like the state. yeah We don't want to be transactional. We don't want to be in sales market mode.
00:02:48
Speaker
yeah no We want to be into mutuality. We want to be into relationship. We want to be into trust. How as major gift officer, how as an executive director do I look at the work I'm doing and try to lean into that?
00:03:06
Speaker
What do I do? How do I look at the world differently? I think a lot of fundraisers do look at the world that way. But like I said many times on my own podcast, I came to the conclusion, I don't think fundraising has fundraiser
Market Logic in Fundraising
00:03:24
Speaker
problem. I think it has a supervisor problem.
00:03:26
Speaker
Okay, excellent. The more you utilize this logic of the state or the market, both of which tend to be very manipulative systems that learn how to basically manipulate and control and sort of anticipate. They kind of look at, they look at sort of people as things that they can sort of move around the way they want to, and they have their own ways of doing that.
00:03:51
Speaker
But a lot of that underlying assumption eventually translates into a lot of the unfortunate ways that fundraisers say that they're treated or the expectations that they have.
00:04:04
Speaker
And any experience that a fundraiser describes is essentially just the flip side of the same experience the donor is oftentimes experiencing. Interesting.
00:04:15
Speaker
What a fundraiser is experiencing, if a fundraiser experiences the unreasonableness of a board member or an executive director saying, hey, ah you need to generate all this money and do it in this short period of time and do it for this particular reason, et cetera, et cetera, and who cares what it costs us.
00:04:35
Speaker
The
Importance of Proximity in Fundraising
00:04:36
Speaker
donor just experiences that differently, but but in much way the same. ah Okay, so so we've narrowed down a bit into um supervision and how...
00:04:50
Speaker
maybe a sales mentality or a state mentality, co-host mentality, yeah is driving folks. And I'll bet this is especially true at large, like universities, hospitals, things like that. yeah That corporate approach that you see.
00:05:06
Speaker
So let's say again, I'm an executive director and I've got a team of people under me. How do I avoid that? like What can I do differently to protect against those other approaches creeping in?
00:05:22
Speaker
I think where most organizations can a more gift-like economy um is largely by increasing proximity.
00:05:35
Speaker
So it's it's relying on less sort of systems and more proximity. i think they can rely on conversation more less...
00:05:50
Speaker
um less you know relying on third parties we talked for a little while ago about third party data i wrote a sub stack a couple i don't know 18 months ago about what was happening and major league baseball where we were watching baseball players there wasn't enough activity on the field And so Major League Baseball has changed the rules of the game in order to get more field activity and focus less on home runs. So what's the relevance to your question?
00:06:20
Speaker
I think if we had fundraisers in closer proximity, in more conversation on the field, if you will, right, having more direct interaction, relying less on other mediums of communication, you know relying less on mail and relying less on digital communication, but real conversation.
00:06:43
Speaker
um i I think they would discover that some of these extraordinary opportunities that await them are actually there. They'll reveal themselves without needing a third party to tell you that these folks are extraordinarily wealthy.
Fundraising Compared to Adolescence
00:07:00
Speaker
um
00:07:03
Speaker
So does this boil down to get to know your donors, spend time with them and listen to them and try to build good relationships with them?
00:07:13
Speaker
It does. It does. Yes, Thomas, it does. But the word relationships is kind of like that word transactional that I kept hearing on the podcast, right? Okay, yeah. On the podcast, I kept hearing transactional.
00:07:29
Speaker
um And that's probably, that was one of those moments where the fundraisers are not, so the Thomas, that that statement wasn't wasn't me making it. That was 360 points.
00:07:40
Speaker
fundraisers and they kept saying it's transactional so i went looking for okay what does that word transactional mean and what i started to find is exactly where we started this conversation this idea of modes of exchange there's actually historically throughout all human history there's essentially three types of transactions right and you answer your own question what is that fundraiser saying to us when they say it's too transactional. What they're actually saying is it's too much like the market. It's too like sales. That's them. That's not you. That's not me. That's the fundraiser saying that. And my guess is that if the donor was doing the same conversations that I was doing with fundraisers, my guess is they would tell us something very similar, that it's too transactional.
00:08:32
Speaker
They would probably mean it's too much like the marketplace. It's too much like the... relationship I have with Target. It's not distinct enough.
00:08:43
Speaker
so It's not distinguishable enough. Yeah. So when you look at the state of the profession as it sits to today, yeah clearly there's there's lots of questions about CRMs, data, how that's going to be utilized yeah the market that's out there. Can the donor, the body of donors that we have, can it sustain all the need and all the asking and all the things that and So one might look at the profession with some cynicism, and one might look at the future um with some doubt.
00:09:21
Speaker
I called it, in my book, I called it It's Messy Adolescence. Yes. I said fundraising's in its messy adolescence. Fundraising at its...
00:09:32
Speaker
Fundraising at its best is 100 years old. A lot of times people will reference, ah I think his last name was Ward. He was an early 20th century fundraiser with the YMCA. And they wrote about him in London. and They wrote about him here in the U.S. ah Ward was his last name.
00:09:50
Speaker
um And he's oftentimes referred to as the father of modern fundraising or something. um So early twentieth century. Going back to the book that I was referencing earlier that talks about expertise and how experience evolves inys into expertise. One of the ways they start their book is the idea of the way we use bloodletting. The medical profession did bloodletting for like three or four centuries. Right. Right. And eventually they realized that there was something wrong with bloodletting, you know.
00:10:22
Speaker
Eventually, they got to the point where the idea of putting leeches on us and letting them suck our blood wasn't a good sort of an idea. But that was three or four hundred years before they figured that out. I should stop then.
00:10:33
Speaker
What's that? I should stop. What do you mean you should stop? With the bloodletting, I should stop. Yeah, you should definitely stop. Right. so If you're working with a doctor right now who's still using that particular approach, but you can see the point really quickly.
00:10:47
Speaker
and If fundraising has only given itself 100 years at best, then we can at least say we're just in our messy adolescence. Which means we don't actually have to be terribly, some people would say if they were talking about
Advice for Early-Career Fundraisers
00:11:02
Speaker
the way that Jason describes the profession, some people would say that I'm overly critical. I'm actually more optimistic than I think some people are because I'm just looking at us like my teenage son.
00:11:13
Speaker
You know, I'm saying he's 19 years old. He hasn't figured everything out. He's a young adult. He knows how to drive. He gets himself to work. He knows how to keep his boss happy, et cetera, et cetera.
00:11:24
Speaker
But he does at times make mistakes in ways. He will make foolish decisions. He's in his messy adolescence. He's 19. And my younger daughter, you know we've got four kids. You know what I'm saying. yeah If you look at a child or a young adult and you say they're in their messy adolescence, you're not sitting there saying that they're screwed up or doomed to... you know You're just saying, hey, they haven't figured everything out yet.
00:11:49
Speaker
Yeah. So... Looking forward. Yeah. When you think about early career fundraisers, people that are just getting into the profession right now. Yeah. yeah Yeah.
00:12:01
Speaker
What do you hope most that they recover about the nature of generosity so i have so when my book came out in 2018 and since then and then with the podcast and and and periodically conversations like this i've had events i'll be at a speaking engagement and a young fundraiser will come up to me Or I'll be working with a client and I'll i'll sort of be you know answering this question that you're, you know what what is it that I want for that younger Lessig? And you know what I tell them, Thomas, is I say, i want you in front of the donor.
00:12:36
Speaker
Hmm. I want you negotiating that relationship. I want you, like, kind of like what you and I are doing there. you know, I want you making eye contact. I want you to see and understand even some of the consulting work that I've done over the years. I get out in the field with my clients and I do what's called base coaching. So I'm very close to the game.
00:12:56
Speaker
I want the fundraiser to have the benefit of watching the way that someone experiences giving in a very meaningful, very close encounter. I want them to have a close encounter with the gift. And I think they can only really have that in some of our, what you and I would traditionally call major gifts type work.
00:13:19
Speaker
I don't want them to be terribly concerned, especially early in their career, about the size of those contributions. I would much prefer a young fundraiser go out and collect a $500 check from a board member and just navigate that.
00:13:34
Speaker
then worry themselves about whether they're maximizing that potential running well screening data and finding out just go experience, you know, get out in the field um and don't rely on these non-living machines to intermediate for us.
00:13:51
Speaker
And my guess is the more we do that, the more, to even some of the comments you've said, the more the work will align with that of the gift and not that of the commodity or the tax.
Fundraising vs. Sales
00:14:06
Speaker
That's fantastic advice. So my last question for you, Jason. and We've definite covered a lot of them, haven't we? We sure have. i hope you got listeners who really hold on this long.
00:14:17
Speaker
I hope I have listeners too. We'll see next week. Now, if I think about my audience, a lot of different types of people, but but many of them are new to the fundraising profession.
00:14:30
Speaker
ah Maybe they've come from some other field because they've been passionate about the cause and they've moved into it for that reason. Yeah, yeah. If if if that's that person, they're they're sitting out there, beyond what you've just said, early career people are, and maybe these aren't early career people,
00:14:50
Speaker
What's one piece of advice beyond getting in front of the donor, beyond working through that experience of the gift, what would you say to them? How would you encourage them in their work?
00:15:02
Speaker
Well, I didn't know where that question was going. I was sort of listening and thinking, okay, do i remember reading this question? So for some of those people who are mid-career and oftentimes transitioning from the marketplace, and I feel like we're, I don't want to, because I know at the end of the conversation,
00:15:20
Speaker
I would caution them. I don't get on the bandwagon of fundraising is like sales, for example, because I think that betrays the point that I'm trying to make with the gift.
00:15:32
Speaker
And I think the flaw in that thinking is that fundamentally sales relationship needs a commodity. It needs an object. That's what a commodity is about. The commodity is an object.
00:15:46
Speaker
There's two people, subjects, but their focus is really on the commodity that's being exchanged, the object. And in a gift relationship, the object doesn't really matter at all if it's even there.
00:16:01
Speaker
its it's It's secondary to the relationships that the two subjects are trying to have. So how does this get back to that mid-career salesperson? Mid-career salespeople, for example, who are coming into fundraising are in the business of selling objects.
00:16:16
Speaker
That's right. They've sold cars. They've sold widgets. They've sold objects. So where do they sometimes get in trouble? They get in trouble by basically finding things that are not really objects, like the cause itself or like the people that are being served. So they very easily could be accused of commodifying things that they shouldn't be commodifying, like the little kids at the school or the the homeless folks or whatever.
00:16:41
Speaker
but So I think that's... you know just be careful when you... Being aware of sort of the context from which you come in order to sort of transition into a space that essentially plays by different rules.
00:16:56
Speaker
Great. I'm a big fan of... This hasn't come up, but I'm a really big fan of Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. You know, Oz operated by different rules. It essentially was a different economy, unlike Kansas. That's essentially what...
00:17:12
Speaker
ah Alice in Wonderland is the same type of story. There's all sorts of stories in literature where people, where the character goes to a different land that operates by different rules and different economies and who you think's in charge really isn't.
00:17:28
Speaker
That's all we're really talking about here is that most of us think that we're still in Kansas, but we're actually in Oz or the other way around. There's different rules. The gift plays by different rules.
00:17:40
Speaker
And we're very accustomed to the rules that the marketplace gives us, the state gives us, but the gift wants to play by different rules. And so we
Closing Remarks and Podcast Promotion
00:17:49
Speaker
have to be a little bit like Dorothy or Alice or whoever who finds themselves in this unfamiliar place and kind of figure those new rules out.
00:17:58
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, Jason, you've been so generous with your time and your wisdom as well. Thank you so much for sharing it with us today. Yeah, this was fun. Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to subscribe and give us a five-star rating on your podcast provider.
00:18:15
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Dauber. Thank you for joining me as we journey together towards major gift mastery on the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast.