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When Fundraisers Have Money Baggage Too – Doing the Heart Work
44 Plays1 month ago
Do fundraisers bring their own money trauma to donor conversations? Absolutely—and Courtney offers powerful advice for confronting your own beliefs about money before asking someone else for theirs. From missionaries with $100 to major gift officers asking for $25,000, this episode explores how our past shapes our comfort with fundraising. Learn how fundraisers can shift from imposter syndrome to service, and what high-net-worth individuals really want in a meaningful donor relationship.
Key Themes:
- How childhood and early career experiences shape fundraisers’ scripts
- What wealthy donors hate about vague or premature asks
- Serving vs. soliciting: the mindset shift that builds trust
- How to ask better questions and challenge with care
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Transcript
Introduction to the 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.
00:00:18
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Dauber, President of Abundant Vision Philanthropic Consulting. Welcome to the final episode in our conversation with Courtney Markley.
00:00:30
Speaker
Today we turn inward. We're going to look at individuals with wealth and the things they deal with, but we're also going to look at the inner experience of fundraisers.
00:00:41
Speaker
Fundraisers often coach donors through emotional money issues. But what about our own? Courtney and I share personal stories of overcoming scarcity mindsets, moving from small asks to big gifts, and learning to serve from a place of integrity.
00:00:58
Speaker
If you've ever felt imposter syndrome or struggled to relate to wealthy donors, this episode is for you.
Overcoming Emotional Attachments to Money
00:01:08
Speaker
Well, I'm eager to hear from you about you know, maybe a few few stories you've had with clients. We've really been able to help them and transform the way they think about giving.
00:01:20
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I'll go back to ah the gentleman I mentioned to you earlier, who ah grew up with a father who abused alcohol.
00:01:31
Speaker
um He and his family, they're now millionaires. And there was a point in us working together where um he was starting to really succumb to just very unhealthy emotional attachments to money.
00:01:53
Speaker
where he's constantly looking at his portfolio, seeing, you know, every day, you know, where am I at, you know, right now, um constantly looking at the news and all of these just different things, worrying, you know, if if this market hiccups, what's it going to do to my bottom line, you know, all those kind of things.
00:02:13
Speaker
um Started not sleeping very well. And all the while, this is a Christian couple. And so we got to have just a really, really genuine, it was a series of conversations. It was probably a year long a conversation that happened with this person who had just some really traumatic things happen in childhood, who grew an unhealthy attachment to their money, now had a good surplus of money, and they were feeling called to give it. But at the same time,
00:02:46
Speaker
They just couldn't, right? Like just his hands were so tightly wrapped around this money. There was just a worry of like, but what if I don't have enough? What if I give it and I just don't have it for me when I need it?
Journey to Philanthropy
00:02:59
Speaker
And so it was probably about a year long process where we really started to unpack where those emotional attachments came from. And years later, well, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself a little bit.
00:03:14
Speaker
They were about to retire and we were having this conversation again. i know their advisor. I knew they're going to be meeting with him soon. And I'm like, he's going to ask you this and you need to have a plan. So tell me what what do you want to do in retirement? Because we you know, he'll start building out your financial plan based on these answers. Right.
00:03:32
Speaker
And so they they started to say, well, we don't really have a plan for retirement. We'll probably just, you know, hang out on the couch and we're just going to relax and kind of giving a very vague, generic answer, you know, that everyone says like, maybe I'll travel a little bit. Maybe I'll spend more time with the kids, yada, yada.
00:03:50
Speaker
But they really had not given any thought to retirement at all. Um, And so this is where the challenging comes in a little bit. But there is just this moment of looking at them both in the eye and saying, you realize that answer is not good enough.
00:04:07
Speaker
You need to give me better response the next time we meet. Like you have not been thinking about this at all. And going back to the values, this is the time in their life where they'll have more money and more time resources than ever before.
00:04:22
Speaker
And don't tell me you're just going to waste it away doing absolutely nothing. And so we talked just very, um very boldly into this couple. um And I can tell you now, years later, if we fast forward the clock,
00:04:37
Speaker
um They have gone on four missions trips this year. They are the first ones to give whenever you know they feel compelled, whenever there's an ask within their church.
00:04:50
Speaker
They're supporting multiple missionaries. um Over um over when school started, he sent me a note saying, hey, we just walked around Walmart for the day asking to pay for family school supplies and and praying for them.
00:05:07
Speaker
And I'm like, this is such a 180 because this person was nearly afraid to leave their home a few years ago. They had no plan for retirement. And now they're spending almost every waking hour and a lot of their income on just serving God's kingdom. And it's really, really cool to see.
00:05:28
Speaker
um So that is one of the success stories I love to share with people um because, again, it took several
Faith Over Finances
00:05:35
Speaker
years. It was not an overnight um you know, success story, but it was a daily struggle of them just, you know, where is God calling me right now? How can I be faithful right now?
00:05:48
Speaker
And having someone in their corner, just always being willing to ask good questions and just lead them closer to the values that they held really dearly.
00:06:01
Speaker
Wow, that's a great story. I mean, it sounds like this person was really held captive by those traumatic experiences as a as a kid and and the counseling and the the work put into it.
00:06:15
Speaker
kind of thinking through and praying through all those different types of issues really helped free that individual up to to really live out their values in ah in an amazing way. that is That is such a cool story, Courtney. I see why you love your job.
00:06:30
Speaker
I do. i think I have the best job in the world. So I would love more people to come join me. So consider this a recruiting call. No, There you go well Do you have any other encouraging stories from your work to share?
00:06:46
Speaker
I could share all kinds of stories. um I'm trying to which one to go to next. A lot of times when I talk with donors, the question I ask them is regardless of the size, you know what what story is most meaningful to you? And you may have shared that one already, but but is there another one like that?
00:07:04
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my goodness. There, there are a whole, whole lot. Um, one that comes to mind, uh, this happened just a few years ago. i was, um, I was meeting with a young girl.
00:07:16
Speaker
ah She was about to leave. I won't give too many details she's a missionary in a very sensitive part of the world. um But she was about to leave to a very dangerous place to become a missionary.
00:07:27
Speaker
And she had been working as a missionary for a few years. And of course, they have to raise their funds, right? They have to raise their their funds every year. and So she was kind of in that process.
00:07:40
Speaker
And in the midst of that, you know, missionaries have an interesting challenge because they raise their funds for the year simply for them to live on. They don't raise extra money so that they can be putting some aside into a 401k or having extra reserves into savings or anything like that.
00:07:57
Speaker
um But so she's like, i'm I'm kind of struggling because I'm young. i I hear everyone else saying I'm supposed to be you know saving X amount of dollars into retirement and I should have this amount of money set aside in ah in an emergency fund.
00:08:14
Speaker
And I'm not sure what to do because I am literally just earning what I'm spending every month you know just to get me by. And then at the same time, in the midst of these conversations, a relative passed away and she received a $70,000 inheritance.
00:08:32
Speaker
Now, logic and reason says, well, here's the solution to your problem, right? This is what we've been talking about. You can put some aside for savings. You can put a huge sum into investments, right?
00:08:50
Speaker
And at the same time, she said, I know, Courtney, that makes sense. That makes a lot of logical sense. But I am actually feeling a deep, deep pull from her spirit to give this money away.
00:09:07
Speaker
oh wow. To give it away. And so we spent a ton of time praying together. And essentially what it came down to She said, I spend all of my time fundraising and I never get to support anyone else.
00:09:23
Speaker
So this is my chance to truly put my money where my mouth is. ah but And she ended up giving away the money.
00:09:35
Speaker
Wow. And after talking to her yeah after talking to her years later, she is still completely at peace with that decision. And it was truly an act of sacrificial effort.
00:09:47
Speaker
love and generosity, because we could have absolutely made a case for why this young woman needed that money and why she could have kept it. But she was walking in obedience to what she believed was right.
00:10:00
Speaker
And that was really encouraging to see her follow through on such a sacrificial gift.
Personal Fundraising Transition
00:10:08
Speaker
And so it was really a pleasure for me and convicting for me to be able to have just a front row seat to what God was doing in her life.
00:10:17
Speaker
Tom Dauber here for Abundant Vision Philanthropic Consulting. Fundraising can be hard work and it can be hard to mentally get into the place you need to be in order to see new opportunities. Everyone struggles with it. We are like the fish in the fishbowl who just can't see the water they're swimming in.
00:10:36
Speaker
That's when having outside expertise comes in handy. For 25 years, I've been helping nonprofits analyze their challenges, discover new ways forward, and develop clear plans that lead to greater fundraising revenues.
00:10:50
Speaker
Now I am available to help your organization develop the abundant vision it needs to inspire new levels of philanthropy at your nonprofit as well. Check out AbundantVision.net to start your journey toward greater fundraising success today.
00:11:05
Speaker
Now, back to the show. You're talking in in that case about ah someone who is a fundraising professional. They raise money to support their salary. And it reminds me that fundraisers are bringing their own baggage to the table when they're trying to have these financial conversations.
00:11:22
Speaker
what are What are questions that fundraising professionals ought to be asking themselves that could help them work through some of the psychology of asking?
00:11:34
Speaker
Oh, I love this question. I love where you're going because I do believe that we can't really take someone deeper than where we've got ourselves. Right? It's true. It's absolutely true.
00:11:47
Speaker
so I would encourage people, boy, where would I start? I would probably encourage people first um just to start to reflect and say, what are my own attachments to money? What does that look like?
00:12:02
Speaker
What are the emotions that that I carry around money? you know do i Do i largely look at money as something that's icky, something that's dirty? ah Do I look at it as something that's just this tool to do amazing work in the world?
00:12:18
Speaker
um What do I look at it as? Do i look at it as something that brings constant tension and pain in people's lives? you know There's a lot of lot of ways people could fill in those b blanks.
00:12:31
Speaker
I would probably start there. What are your own emotions that you have around money? And then my favorite question to ask, I ask this to all new clients, is describe your relationship with money using three words or three phrases.
00:12:50
Speaker
How would you describe your relationship with money? And then you can very easily kind of back into the emotions that go into each one of those. But that's gonna, just right off the bat, that's gonna give you a lot of fertile ground to do some work if you can just answer that one question.
00:13:08
Speaker
Wow. No, those those are great. i See, my experience, so i was I was one of those fundraising missionaries for for the first part of my career for about eight years. And I got
Money Mindset in Fundraising
00:13:18
Speaker
into horrible debt as as a result, just trying to live on minimum wage while having a stay-at-home wife and having a child and a mortgage and all all those things.
00:13:28
Speaker
It's amazing I was able even to get into a mortgage. Yeah. But but it was it was a really traumatic experience for me. and And when I think about where I was coming from personally, you know I grew up in a home that you know we were very poor.
00:13:45
Speaker
you know I was one of those kids that got free lunches at school and and all that sort of thing. And so as someone who was raising money for missionary support, the most I could ever dream of asking for someone was like $100 a month. Mm-hmm.
00:14:02
Speaker
And I ended up having transitioned from that to a major gift role at a at a university. And it was just this psychological shock of going from feeling like 100 bucks a month was just this unattainable amount that seemed like um you know a lot of money to me.
00:14:24
Speaker
um to all of a sudden I'm asking for people, asking people for $25,000, you know, in one shot. And boy, that was hard.
00:14:34
Speaker
ah That was a really, really hard transition to make. And I find... you You know, that that for fundraisers, you know, you can go to schools, you can go training, you can do all the things, but you almost need to force yourself into those uncomfortable spaces to get to get past it.
00:14:53
Speaker
do Do you find that holds true generally with things relating to financial counseling? Oh, 100%. 100%. hundred per cent ah hundred percent I especially, you know, I had you you're talking about money scripts, essentially, and we all get these and most of them, you know, psychologists, psychologists have shown most people get their thoughts and opinions about money as early as age seven.
00:15:19
Speaker
So at age seven, you could have already had this idea of like $100 is like an impossibly large amount of money, right? That seems like a huge deal. And especially with how you grew up, that would have been like a huge amount of money, right?
00:15:34
Speaker
i grew up um I grew up a very standard middle-class home, but both of my parents, and this is the interesting thing about money scripts, they don't always come from you directly, but they can come from mom or dad.
00:15:47
Speaker
um Both of my parents grew up incredibly poor, incredibly poor, to the point where i was in high school before I realized that not everyone's grandpa and grandma live in trailer parks.
00:16:01
Speaker
I kind of had this assumption until I was probably 16. Like, oh, I guess when you get old, you just move into a trailer home. Like that's what everyone does. And it wasn't until I was a little bit older and started going to my friend's grandparents' houses where I'm like, wait a minute, this is just a regular house.
00:16:17
Speaker
Like I thought that they're not following the same script, the plan that I have in my head. And so I grew up with parents who grew up very, very poor. And so they had certain money scripts that they passed on to me That when I started working with people, especially people with significant wealth, I had to do a lot of work on myself so that I could, in a healthy way, serve this audience.
00:16:43
Speaker
Because I knew I carried some things, um just some just some misguided you know assumptions and different narratives that weren't healthy and weren't necessarily based on truth, but maybe were based on someone else's experiences in life.
00:17:01
Speaker
So I do think it's really important ah for people to do that like deeper heart work because we all carry something.
Focusing on Donor Needs
00:17:10
Speaker
Right. It's not if we carry something. It's like we all carry something.
00:17:15
Speaker
Now, are we willing to kind of do the heart work to just reconcile it?
00:17:24
Speaker
Boy, that's great advice. Is there anything else? I know we're we're coming to the end of our time together. Anything else that you'd like to share with maybe an executive director who's just trying to get his head or her head around how do I relate to wealthy people?
00:17:43
Speaker
Um, you know I'm not a wealthy person. It's it's not you know my background maybe as a fundraiser. how How do I relate to this person if I feel really like an other in that setting?
00:17:57
Speaker
Yeah. I would um first, I kind of go back to what we were just talking about. I would challenge yourself to say, a there is there some hard work that needs to be done?
00:18:09
Speaker
Because I would say that most people, if you ask them just point blank. Hey, do you think that your net worth equals your self-worth? Most people would say no. I think a few people might write out flat out just like, yeah, I do think there's some truth into that. And I'm not saying one is right or wrong. However, you know, most people will deny that.
00:18:30
Speaker
but But when I walk into a room and I can automatically pick up on the fact that I probably have the lowest net worth in the room, I might be automatically elevating that and lowering myself. And I'm coming from this place of now I'm trying to earn your approval or now I'm trying to um prove that I deserve to be here, prove that you need to listen to me or that I have a message that you should share, right? And so we're not coming from ah the best place in those moments.
00:19:02
Speaker
So would potentially... I would potentially shift the question instead of saying, you know how can I better relate to a donor? don't think you necessarily need to relate. I would say, what do they need and how can I serve them better than anybody else?
00:19:20
Speaker
Meaning, how can I show up and be someone willing to challenge them? What needs to be true about me? What work do I need to do? in my own heart.
00:19:30
Speaker
um What needs to be true for me to be able to ask really uncomfortable questions sometimes that's going to serve that person really, really deeply? How can I show them love?
00:19:42
Speaker
And just how can I be someone they can trust no matter what? So it's I don't think it's a matter of relating. I can think of people in my life who crossed all of those boxes for me, and we couldn't be more different.
Resources and Contact Information
00:19:57
Speaker
We couldn't be more different. And so I would just simply change the question around, don't put the light on ourselves, but let's put the light on someone else and just simply say, what do they need and how can I serve them really deeply?
00:20:13
Speaker
That's really great advice. um Well, Courtney, thank you so much for being on the show today. um Everybody could benefit from these types of conversations, whether they're wealthy people or or or fundraisers, or maybe they're wealthy fundraisers out there too. that's it if If someone needed service from you or or if they were looking for a financial counselor, how would they get in contact with you?
00:20:37
Speaker
Absolutely. So it would You're welcome to reach out to me directly from my email. It's Courtney at FinancialDiscipleship.Center. And we do have a lot of training events and different workshops and things that we do. So you're also just welcome to sign up for our email list at FinancialDiscipleship.Center.
00:20:58
Speaker
And you can get in touch with all kinds of different resources that we have for people. And you know most of them will be geared directly towards how do we engage people in a heart conversation around money.
Closing Remarks
00:21:11
Speaker
That's wonderful. Well, I'll be sure to share that email address on ah on the notes for this as well. Thank you so much again for being with us today. We've loved having you.
00:21:23
Speaker
um Boy, I just wish you the best in the work you're doing. it It's so valuable. Thank you. I could say the same thing to you, friend. So thank you for having me. Thank you for all the work that you're doing and serving people.
00:21:36
Speaker
So I appreciate you. Thank you, listeners, for joining in. You're so welcome. Thanks for joining me and Courtney for this powerful series. If today's episode helped you think differently about your role as a fundraiser, I hope you'll share it with a colleague.
00:21:54
Speaker
And remember... Fundraising isn't ah just about gifts. It's about relationship, vision, connection, and purpose. Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to subscribe and give us a five-star rating on your podcast provider.
00:22:09
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Dobbert. Thank you for joining me as we journey together towards major gift mastery on the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast.
00:22:30
Speaker
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