Baggage-Free Fundraising – 4 Questions to Reveal and Dispel Your Negative Beliefs about Money

How to Prevent Your Personal Feelings about Money and Wealth from Crippling Your Fundraising

Our attitudes about money develop from childhood. We carry that baggage to adulthood.
Image by songping wang from Pixabay

Imagine a person who loves organic food, but dislikes farmers. Seems kind of silly, right?

But when it comes to money and fundraising, a lot of fundraisers struggle with their own attitudes and beliefs about money. These beliefs impede their ability to connect with donors and ask for money.

Fundraising consultant Amy Varga wrote a terrific article about this in the July 2019 issue of Advancing Philanthropy. Varga challenges us to think about how our own beliefs about fundraising might be sabotaging our success.

It’s a great question.

I’m going to walk through Varga’s four primary points, and I hope it helps you re-think your own beliefs and feelings about money and wealth. The result will be more confidence as you pursue baggage-free fundraising.

1. How Were You Raised to Think About Money?

What will these girls grow up believing about money?
Image by Mary Bettini Blank from Pixabay

All of us were raised with a particular set of values and beliefs about money. Many of these beliefs were not directly taught, but indirectly acquired simply by watching how our families talked about money, and how they dealt with the financial situations that arose.

Therefore, you may be relatively unaware of how your upbringing shaped your beliefs about money.

Varga offered 19 prompts to help you unearth these beliefs. Here are a few of them:

• I would have more money if ___________
• Money makes people ____________
• My parents thought money was ______________
• Talking about money makes me feel ______________
• If I had more money, I’m afraid I would __________________
• If I could afford it, I would _____________________
• Being around people with more or less money makes me feel ________________
• My first job was ___________, and I used the money to ______________

For example, suppose one person says, “Money makes people greedy and selfish.” This belief will make it hard to be a good fundraiser. If you believed this, you would be approaching people that you already believe are unlikely to give, or will only do so under compulsion.

Or, “If I had more money, I’m afraid I would spend it all on clothes.” This belief suggests reckless spending. It implies that people are generally irresponsible with money, and spend it freely. With this belief, you may have a hard time respecting when people truthfully tell you they cannot afford to give more than a certain amount.

“Being around people with more money makes me feel jealous and suspicious.”

We’ll talk more about this one next, but our attitudes about wealthy people play a big role in our ability to ask for money. This kind of person might view money as a competition. Anyone who has more than me, I’m distrustful of them. Anyone who has less, sucks to be them.

A lack of contentment related to money distorts our ability to relate to different kinds of donors.

2. What Are Your Beliefs and Feelings about Wealth and ‘Rich’ People?

Even the concept of ‘rich’ is actually a lot more gray than you may realize. By the standards of many places in the world, nearly everyone in the U.S. is rich. Even the ‘poor’ people. How can that be?

Well, even the poorest people who have no homes can get three free meals a day from nonprofits and with government help. They have shelters to stay in. They can usually get free medical care too. Nearly every homeless person I’ve met has a smartphone.

By the standards of extreme poverty in certain other places in the world, that is wealth. Now to be clear, it certainly doesn’t feel wealthy. And most people – including me – wouldn’t dream of calling it wealthy. But wealth is a perspective. I have seen poverty in my travels to other countries, and from stories of friends of mine. We do not have that here.

So then, is someone with a million dollars wealthy?

Depends where they live. And in what form that million dollars exists. Is it an actual million sitting in a bank, or does that million include a business, or real estate, or company stock that could lose its value if the company fails?

And it depends on their life circumstances.

What happens if a millionaire also has a special needs child who needs frequent and costly medical care?

That person won’t qualify for any help from the government. They will have to pay for all the extra care their child needs, even into adulthood. So are they wealthy?

Why does this matter for fundraisers? Keep reading…

An Anti-Wealth Culture that Loves Big Donors

In our current cultural age, the rich and the business owners are often scapegoated as greedy villains and exploiters. Just look at the movies and TV shows. There aren’t any about heroic business people. Any shows about business – the business people are villains. The rich guy is nearly always evil.

Listen to how political leaders talk about the wealthy. Do you share those beliefs?

Wealthy?
Image by Eveline de Bruin from Pixabay

Yet, you are then going to turn around and ask these same people to sponsor your fundraising event. You’re asking them to become major donors, to give matching grants, and to fund your capital campaigns.

But a moment ago, they were greedy, fat cat rich pricks?

Or is that only on TV and in the news?

Your beliefs about wealthy people can put enmity between you and them. It divides you, and puts distance between your ability to effectively communicate with them.

If, deep down, you resent them and mistakenly believe they got their wealth lazily, like through a big inheritance, or unethically, and that they know little of real struggle, how are you going to engage with them and build a lasting, mutually beneficial relationship?

These are your major donors. You can’t resent them, and yet love their money.

3. Do You Have a Scarcity Mindset?

According to Varga, we all have some measure of this. We feel like there’s not enough to go around, that the pie is only so big. We say things like, if we only had more donors, we could do this and that.

The reality is, the pie can expand. There is not a fixed amount of money in the world. Varga recommends switching from scarcity to an abundance mindset. She says:

“The best fundraisers are optimistic and hopeful. They believe a different world is possible. That there is enough to go around. That things can change.”

The abundance mindset is a profound paradigm shift all fundraisers would be wise to think about.

Cynicism, Wealth, and Nonprofit Compensation

A scarcity mindset, and the distrust of wealth and money it produces, results in a cynical worldview. That cynicism will extend to the actual work of your organization. Do you actually believe your work can make a lasting difference and truly change the world?

If you struggle with that and aren’t sure why, a good place to look are your beliefs about money.

Another area affected by the scarcity mindset is nonprofit compensation. Nonprofits often say they can’t afford to pay their employees more, because “there isn’t enough money.”

I would suggest the opposite. Pay them more, and you will raise more. Abundance begets abundance.

There is no defensible reason why the nonprofit sector should pay its employees far less than they might make in the business sector. Your budget is not fixed. But stressed out employees are less productive, less focused, and more likely to seek other jobs.

Turnover is a major problem in the nonprofit sector, and it’s expensive. Hiring costs money and uses a lot of time. How much would you save if you paid your employees more, and they stuck around for a couple years longer than your current average?

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

Suppose a small nonprofit has a $1 million annual budget, and that $300,000 of that goes to pay their five employees, and the rest goes to their program. Suppose they increased compensation to $500,000 for staff, and hired an additional person too.

Here’s the critical question:

Does that mean they will now only have $500,000 left for their program?

No. It does not. The budget is not fixed. The pie can grow larger.

And your team, now making more money, will be more productive, more motivated, and more loyal. You can also tie some of their pay to growth, which gives you a little more breathing room.

4. How Do You Feel about Asking for Help and Receiving Help?

Your answers to these questions circle back to the ones asked earlier about how you were raised. But this also touches on our deeper human nature.

How do your feelings change when you ask for help, compared to when you give help to someone else? And how do you feel when you receive help?

Most people feel, to some degree, vulnerable, dependent, and powerless when they receive help. As humans, asking for help contradicts our desire for self-sufficiency, autonomy, and independence. Yet, most people also feel great when they get to help someone else.

The truth is, everyone needs help.

As Varga puts it, “The reality is that being human means you are interdependent. No one can survive and thrive on their own.”

As a fundraiser, you are in the unique position of having to do all three. You must frequently ask for money and receive gifts. But then, you get to turn around and give help to others, whoever your nonprofit serves.

So, think about how great it feels when you get to help someone.

That same feeling is what you’re making possible for someone else when you ask them to donate.

People want to help.

Learn to love asking them to help. Your fundraising will improve.

Want more content? Get weekly nonprofit fundraising and copywriting tips, strategies, and motivations in the ProActive Insights newsletter.