Friday Inspirations, Episode 9 :)
Happy Friday!
If you are looking to reinvigorate your work and achieve at the next level, we recommend this great read (picked up at the airport like most good books): Great at Work: How Top Performers Do Less, Work Better, and Achieve More, by Harvard B-School prof Morten Hansen. It has great insights for fundraisers.
Hansen identifies seven principles that "accounted for a whopping 66 percent" of variation in work performance while also providing "better work-life balance, higher job satisfaction, and less burnout." Who doesn't want that?
Here they are:
- Do less, then obsess: Choose just the few things that matter most and then absolutely obsess - make huge efforts to do terrific work in those areas. (If you don't have it already, see our Purpose-Driven Productivity Formula!)
- Redesign your work: don't pursue goals, but value. For example, instead of "Visit with 150 donors," you might want to "Advance meaningful gift conversations with 100 donors." You know...
Friday Inspirations, Episode 1 :)
Happy Friday, Generous Changers!
We're about to add a new video, "63 Ways to Thank Your Donor," to Fundraisers' Monthly.
Which got us thinking that we'd like to thank you.
THANK YOU AMAZING CHANGEMAKERS!!. We appreciate you so much.
So we thought we'd begin to celebrate Fridays by sharing a few things that make us happy-dance every week. (We're shamelessly ripping off Tim Ferriss's Five Bullet Friday here, which, btw, we highly recommend.)
Here's what we're celebrating, pondering, fascinated by this week.
We're celebrating the late Maya Angelou's gorgeous quote:
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Making people - donors, colleagues, friends, strangers - feel terrific is a pretty great goal every single day!
We're admiring Pencils of Promise's outstanding tag-line:
250 MILLION KIDS CAN'T READ THIS | Let's change that
Any doubt about their mission? Try to get that brief,...
PURPOSE RULES FEAR
You know that thing that happens to you when you know it's time to bring up money in a donor conversation? That moment when you know you have to say it or you'll miss your chance or chicken out?
Your heart races, your face gets hot and you start to do that zoning in thing where all you hear is what’s in your head.
You are not alone!
After more than a decade of asking for money, this still happens to me.
It also happens to Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise, an amazing organization that has built 400 schools in Guatemala, Ghana and Laos and given tens of thousands of kids access to education.
In Adam’s fantastic book, The Promise of a Pencil: How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change, he has an entire chapter dedicated to his fear of fundraising. It’s called Vulnerability is Vital.
Adam describes his first ask of a six-figure commitment from a potential donor. He writes, “My face was still but my chest was pounding.”
Adam describes...