How to Love Fundraising

Imagine a baseball team full of players who don’t like baseball. To them, baseball is distasteful. A shady exercise that’s necessary to fill the stadium. The rules annoy them. They play with gritted teeth, resentful every minute. When they sit in the dugout, they complain about the fans who put them through this degrading spectacle. They dream of better fans — ones who will show up without demanding baseball.

Far-fetched? Not really. The fundraising world is full of teams like that: professional fundraisers who don’t like fundraising. Anti-fundraising fundraisers seem to dislike fundraising for one or more of these reasons:

• It’s emotional, not intellectual. Not a venue for showing off your smarts and education.

• It tends to be simplistic and repetitive.

• It’s often corny, not cool.

• It requires you to humble yourself and admit you need other people (your donors). Embarrassing.

• It sometimes annoys people. And those people might call and complain.

The horror!

These things are not untrue. Effective fundraising tends to be that way. Embrace it, and you’re on your way to career satisfaction and, ahem, fundraising success.

If you don’t like fundraising, please — leave the profession. Life is too short to waste your time doing something that bugs you. Anyway, you’re probably not doing a very good job.

But maybe it’s not that serious. Maybe fundraising just doesn’t sit quite right with you. In that case, here are some facts that can help you make it work.

The good news

• Donors like to give. Research shows that giving stimulates reward centers in the brain — the same areas stimulated by money, drugs and sex. Really.

• Giving makes you more evolved, more connected emotionally and spiritually. Part of what it is to be human is to freely give away some of what you have.

• Giving raises consciousness. When you give to something, you care more about it. That leads to other kinds of involvement — like volunteering, advocacy, passing on the values to children and more.

• Giving makes you happier. Donors are 43 percent more likely to say they’re very happy than non-donors.

• Giving improves your health. Donors are 25 percent more likely to say their health is excellent or very good than non-donors.

• Giving is good for society. A dollar given to charity stimulates better than $19 for the economy. And what about the impact of millions of healthier, happier, more involved donor-citizens? Priceless!

Call it karma. Call it reaping what you sow. Giving is very good for givers. It’s good for society. It’s good in every possible way.

And if you’re a fundraiser, you’re helping make it happen. I challenge you to name a good deed that has a more positive impact than fundraising. Isn’t it time to put any disdain for fundraising behind us?

Fundraising is a long way from perfect. We need to make it more relevant. More affirming. More efficient and effective. But you’ll make fundraising better by loving it, not by hating it.

If you want to like fundraising (or like it more), here are three steps you can take:

1. Know donors; have a Mrs. Boswell. When I first started in this business, I met a wise copywriter — a master of the craft. On his desk was a photo of a smiling older woman. Not his mother. He said, “That’s Mrs. Boswell. She goes to my church. She’s the kindest, most generous person. She cares about everything, and gives to charity. When I write fundraising, I write to her!”

2. Get into donors’ heads. As a fundraising professional, you’re probably younger and more conscious of the process than any normal person ever would be. One great way to escape your built-in biases: Read what donors read, especially things outside your comfort and taste zones. Like the National Enquirer. People magazine. Guideposts. These venerable publications know their audiences. Learn from them.

3. Be a donor. Hey, with all the good things it does for you, this is a no-brainer! Give to your own nonprofit. Give to others. Give by mail. Give online. Give casually to strangers. Study the feeling it creates in you. Study the flood of fundraising that comes your way. You’ll discover — with your heart and your head — what donors experience.

Jeff Brooks is creative director at Merkle/Domain.