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Fund the Dream, Not the Gap
39 Plays18 days ago
Too many fundraising leaders fall into the trap of focusing on what’s missing—trying to “fund the gap” instead of casting a bold vision for what’s possible. In this solo episode, Thomas Dauber challenges nonprofit professionals to shift their mindset from scarcity to abundance. He explains why donors are more inspired by dreams than deficits, and how articulating a compelling future vision—not just this year’s shortfall—can unlock greater generosity.
Thomas unpacks what it means to dream responsibly: planning strategically, understanding true costs, involving your CFO and board, and building a roadmap donors can believe in. Whether you're a CEO, major gift officer, or faith-based ministry leader raising your own support, this episode will equip you to ask bigger, inspire more deeply, and lead with clarity.
Takeaways Include:
- Why funding a dream is more motivating than filling a budget gap
- How to answer “How much do you need?” in a visionary, donor-centric way
- What steps you must take to make your dream fundable
- How to involve your board and financial team in building a scalable growth plan
- A challenge to rethink individualized fundraising strategies in favor of collective vision
If you’re ready to grow beyond your current limits and raise more with confidence, this one’s for you.
Subscribe, share, and send this to a fellow leader who’s dreaming big.
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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. I'm your host, Tom Dauber, President of Abundant Vision Philanthropic Consulting.
Short-Term Funding vs. Dream Pursuit
00:00:26
Speaker
Just a short thought today, something I wanted to talk about ah for all of you fundraising leaders out there. One thing that I'm noticing as I talk with different individuals in the fundraising industry, there seems to be a tendency to lean in to funding the gap.
00:00:47
Speaker
What I mean here is if my organization needs $5 million a year, $10 million a year, whatever that number is, could be lower for you. When I'm talking with donors, I tend to, not I, other people tend to tell the donor, oh, we just need $800,000 just need more to get to goal And so no we're putting in an artificial floor for that donor. We're telling them, this is really what we need to get to goal this year.
00:01:17
Speaker
Now, it may seem like the right thing to do. They're going to ask me, how much do I need? And I tell them, well, I need... raise a certain amount of money each year to keep my nonprofit open.
00:01:30
Speaker
And so I'm going to tell them what our gap is, our gap to goal. But there's some problems here. and and And that is this, they may be able and willing to give far much more then what you need.
The Power of Funding Dreams
00:01:44
Speaker
So my suggestion to you, instead of trying to fund your gap, try to fund your dream. You know, a gap is really focused on what you don't have.
00:01:55
Speaker
A gap is focused on what's missing, right? um A dream is focused on what could be. It's focused on potential. And truly, it's going to be easier for you to fund the dream than the gap.
00:02:10
Speaker
I mean, think about this. Is a gap inspiring? Is a financial shortfall something that engages with your emotion? It doesn't.
00:02:21
Speaker
But a dream, ah dream inspires us all. I mean, we all still talk about Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, because it was a dream. It was a vision. It was a grand vision of how the world could be if we all just did our best.
00:02:39
Speaker
But that's the type of thing that's critical for successful fundraising. What is your organization's dream? On your best day with unlimited resources, what is the thing that your organization could do to change this world, to make it a better place?
00:02:59
Speaker
Do you have a I have a dream speech? Maybe your own little one? for your organization. I'm not suggesting you could compare to Martin Luther King. But what I'm saying is you ought to have a vision for the future.
Dreaming Big for Long-Term Impact
00:03:12
Speaker
You ought to have a dream for what your organization could do, what your organization could be, if it truly had all the resources it needed and all the access it needed and all the people it needed.
00:03:27
Speaker
So what could your organization be at its very best for And not just this week or even this year, but what about this decade? What about 100 years from now?
00:03:38
Speaker
If you keep working hard, if your organization keeps moving forward, what are going to be the downstream impacts? And I know I brought this up in previous podcasts, but it bears repeating.
00:03:51
Speaker
If you and your team and the folks that follow you stay true to your mission, stay true to your course, and you keep plowing away at the field you're in, how could you change the world for the better?
00:04:04
Speaker
How many lives could you impact? What problems in our society might you change for the better? You've got to think about that.
Communicating Long-Term Dreams to Donors
00:04:13
Speaker
So when that donor says to you, well, how much do you need?
00:04:19
Speaker
The answer isn't, well, we need 500,000 more or 50,000 more to get to this year. Really care about your annual goals. They're not Constrained.
00:04:31
Speaker
to an annual goal. They're asking about the needs of your organization. And if you're constraining it to this year, well, that's you imposing the silo you live in on your donor and on your personal vision.
00:04:45
Speaker
So what I would say to you is that your response to that question ought to be an answer that sums up what you need to achieve your dream, not to to fund your gap.
00:04:59
Speaker
Now, if your answer is to fund your dream, well, then that means you really need to make some plans. Because dream isn't fundable if you haven't written down what it takes to get there. Because it really is only a dream then.
00:05:15
Speaker
If you take the time to really invest the thought, the energy, the planning into all the steps you'd have to make along the way to make your dream a reality, well, then you've got something that you could present to a donor.
00:05:33
Speaker
Then you know, and you'll impress your donor, especially if they're business person. if If you could really
Planning and Readiness for Dream Funding
00:05:39
Speaker
tell them, well, this dream that I have, this grand vision for the future for my organization, I know that if we did ab B, C, and d it would result in this dream coming to fruition.
00:05:54
Speaker
But that takes some time. That takes some hard work. That takes meeting with your chief fiscal officer to really get your head around, well, what are the costs here? but How much do the benefits cost? Like if I need to hire extra people, many of us who are leaders know that it's not just a paycheck, it's the cost of benefits as well, which is a third more typically.
00:06:15
Speaker
than just what the person's income would be. But then if you're bringing more people on, you've got to think about your infrastructure. I mean, do you have enough managers to handle all those people? And where would they work? Would they work from home? Would you have to expand your office to have them in there?
00:06:31
Speaker
And if you had an all staff meeting, could you fit everyone in your space? There's a lot of questions that you have to ask. 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.
00:06:56
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.
00:07:10
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.
00:07:25
Speaker
Now, back to the show.
Resource Needs for Achieving Dreams
00:07:27
Speaker
Because you know other resources that you might need, you know it could include buildings. It could include expensive software. You might need a new CRM of some sort.
00:07:37
Speaker
In fact, you might need fundraisers. You might need some people to help drive that vision by bringing in more funding. Well, if you're going to bring in more fundraisers, who's going to support those fundraisers?
00:07:50
Speaker
Are you going to use them effectively by providing them administrative staff? are you going to force them to do lots of data entry themselves instead of getting in front of donors? You can't do both at the same time.
00:08:01
Speaker
So you're going to think about those types of staffing issues. But it all starts with the end in mind. It all starts with that dream. Whatever your organizational dream is. And you work backwards from there.
00:08:14
Speaker
In order to achieve X, we've got to do Y. And in order to do y we need to have Z, right? And so on and so forth down the line. And you know one organization I'm thinking about that I've interacted with a lot lately, and you know it's taken us really two, three months of hard work, not just sketching out what the dream looks like.
00:08:41
Speaker
mean, there was that, and a lot of that was done in advance, but it had never been put down in writing. And then once it was put down in writing, again, we needed to work through that exercise of what What does it actually take to do this and how much does it cost? And when would the money need to be in by in order to support this? Because if you're charting out the growth of your organization and its impact, you've you've got to have reasons for why that impact is going to grow.
00:09:11
Speaker
Really clear reasons. And you've got to know how much those reasons cost. But again, that could take you three, four months, maybe longer. If you haven't actually planned out what that thing is, it could take you six months to a year.
Board Members' Role in Realistic Planning
00:09:28
Speaker
So if you're ready to do that, let me know. I can certainly help you do that. But even if you don't need my help, you've got to make time in your schedule. You've got to make time in your schedule to think about these things.
00:09:40
Speaker
and have the meetings with the experts on your team who can help you get to these answers. Because it's unlikely that it's just going to be you. you know It might be your board chair. I mean, and honestly, kind of what we're talking about here and involves some real business planning.
00:09:55
Speaker
And if you're a nonprofit, that has a board, I'm betting that you probably have at least one entrepreneur on your board. If you don't, you should.
00:10:07
Speaker
You should get someone that knows about business on your team, even as a volunteer who can help you think through these things. And and and you can ask very honest questions.
00:10:18
Speaker
Does this plan make sense? Is this believable? When you see these numbers and the growth expansion that we're talking about, do you think that's realistic? Do you think this is a pipe dream?
00:10:30
Speaker
You need those types of people involved with your organization to to bring the expertise that you as a nonprofit leader may not have. mean, truthfully, many of us in the nonprofit world, we got involved in this work because we had a passion.
00:10:47
Speaker
We saw a need that we wanted to fill. And because we we understood organizational leadership, not because we were good at business planning or finance, right?
00:10:59
Speaker
But thank goodness that so many of us have those people on our boards to help us. Not just because, well, they're good at business and so they have money, but because they really add something valuable to the work that we're doing by bringing a business mindset there.
Critique of Funding Individual Needs
00:11:16
Speaker
Having that big dream is so important. you know I think about, you know there's a certain group of nonprofits out there. They tend to be in the faith-based world. And in those nonprofits, there's you know They have a lot of folks that are responsible for ah raising income for their own salary and their own programmatic needs.
00:11:42
Speaker
um And I think one of the things that we often miss in that particular sector is that if if the person is just raising enough money for themselves, they from a particular group of donors, it's unlikely that they're really raising all the money they could.
00:12:00
Speaker
The truth is, is that any given donor is only going to fund a certain percentage of your need. And so if if I'm asking you to contribute towards a $100,000 need, the likelihood is you may only give me 10% of that.
00:12:15
Speaker
But if I had a bigger vision, This is why you want to fund the dream, not the gap, right? If I had a million dollar vision, you may give me $100,000. hundred thousand dollars But because these particular nonprofit professionals are are really only limited to funding their own stuff, they don't ask for the big picture.
00:12:36
Speaker
In fact, they may be afraid to. They may think, well, gosh, if I ask for the big picture, may not get as much money. And maybe that's the case depending on how the organization is set up.
00:12:47
Speaker
But honestly, if I were running one of those organizations, I think the thing that I would lean into is is funding a dream That included the full salary and support for all of my employees.
00:13:00
Speaker
And I'd start selling that to people. Because the reality is, is taking that approach, you're much more likely to maximize the giving potential of the constituents you're working with.
00:13:12
Speaker
So if you had 10 people that all needed to raise $100,000 apiece but for their work, I would say the executive director or CEO ought to go out and when they're talking with donors, say, hey, look, we have a million dollar need here.
00:13:25
Speaker
rather than leaving it to all those individuals to raise $100,000 apiece. Now, some of you are going to disagree with me, and that's that's okay. And I know that, especially in the faith-based space, it's it's been like that for a long time.
00:13:38
Speaker
And not every organization wants to take that advice. But I'll tell you, I've definitely seen organizations that have changed their approach. um In the process of changing that approach,
00:13:52
Speaker
They've seen giving really grow and increase over what they were collectively raising before when they were only raising money ah for their little pockets.
00:14:05
Speaker
Each person focused on their individual gap.
Focus on Collective Organizational Dreams
00:14:09
Speaker
rather than thinking about the collective dream of the entire organization and the potential future growth of the organization.
00:14:16
Speaker
That's where we need to be focused as executive directors, as senior development officers, as any type of fundraising professional who's out there leading the charge.
00:14:29
Speaker
You got to be focused on funding the dream, not funding the gap. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to subscribe and give us a five-star rating on your podcast provider.
00:14:41
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Daubert. Thank you for joining me as we journey together towards major gift mastery on the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast.