If I'm a Fundraiser, Why Do I Need to Do Inner Work?
...especially because I know I'm a good person?
Inner work matters.
Buddhist monks meditate daily.
Psychotherapists need to regularly see their own therapists, so that they don’t end up projecting any of their trauma onto their clients.
Writers constantly practice listening to their inner voice.
Telling any of these people to prioritize keeping up with their inner work on a regular basis will likely bring nods and immediate murmurs of agreement.
But tell a fundraiser the same?
You’re likely to see a quizzical look…
… and you might even get some push-back.
Historically, fundraising has often been framed as the nonprofit version of sales, a place where the extrovert’s extrovert will be the most successful, where having the perfectly polished elevator pitch at the ready in any conversation is key, where you definitely shouldn’t take “no” for an answer.
This image of fundraising is hard-charging, rain-making, take-no-prisoners, constantly-on-the-move, making-things-happen, booked, and busy.
And I’m here to tell you, from experience:
a fundraising focused on external activities is a fundraising destined to turn off both the human doing it AND the human receiving it.
No matter how you slice it, fundraising is human-to-human work — so, in the purest form of its embodiment, fundraising should connect everyone involved, deeply, with both their own and with every other human’s humanity.
Too often, that is not happening — like, at all.
So what?
Is this really that important?
What even happens that’s so bad, if we’re disconnected from our own humanity while we’re fundraising?
What really happens that’s so avoidable, if we’re so busy raising money that we sideline any effort to honor the humanity of those with whom we’re working?
What happens, indeed?
Let me tell you a few stories to illustrate this….
Supervisory Reverberations
Sally the Supervisor, head of the Development Department, doesn’t have a great relationship with the org’s CEO or board. They are all friendly with each other, but Sally knows that they don’t respect her expertise in fundraising.
Because of power dynamics, Sally has never felt like she can point this out — or have a more honest conversation with them, at the very least.
So she mostly puts her head down, hustling to achieve the goals she’s given, even though she knows that they are unrealistic and that she and her team don’t have enough resources to do what’s necessary to achieve them.
Because she’s not voicing her frustration and anxiety to those who might actually have the power to help relieve them, she swallows them, and she has to tense up her body and spirit so that they stay buried.
She wants to shield her team from it all as much as possible…
…but by swallowing her feelings and reality, exposing the team to them is unavoidable.
She’s still frustrated… and anxious… and also stressed, because she feels disempowered and like her job’s on the line.
The feelings are inside her, so they are real.
So her team will feel them too.
Some members of her team are more sensitive than others, so they will probably be very aware of the tension with which Sally approaches them.
Others are less tuned-in, but they will find themselves feeling tense and extra-stressed at work, and they probably won’t be able to put their fingers on exactly why.
So…
…feeling unable to change them, Sally will transfer the stress and anxiety of the unrealistic goals, and her relationship to power, to her team…
… and thus, the team will become stressed too…
… and thus, the way they approach donors will likely be some combination of rushed, mechanical, tense, pushy, and/or de-humanizing.
Sally has been de-humanized…
… so she in turn de-humanizes her team…
… and they in turn de-humanize donors.
Sally hasn’t done her inner work. She hasn’t actively acknowledged her feelings and inner experience, let alone voiced them. She hasn’t made moves to resolve anything. She hasn’t brought the subterranean dynamics up to the surface, so they’ve remained below-ground, thus stealthily affecting the entire surface-level reality of everyone connected to that organization.
In the end, everyone is de-humanized here.
Resistance to Change
Olivia, the Development Operations Manager, is good at her job because she is very analytical and practical, and she develops and sticks to systems.
She has consistently been praised for these qualities, and they have helped her find what she feels like is her groove.
They also help her, on a very deep and not entirely conscious level, to feel valued, and needed, and worthy.
She knows that these are definitely her strengths, and she proudly wears them as a key part of her professional identity.
One summer day, Olivia’s boss comes back from a fundraising conference.
She has been to several sessions discussing the importance of prompt gift acknowledgement, with recommendations backed up by research.
The consensus at the conference was clearly that an organization should acknowledge a gift as soon as possible, ideally within two business days.
This means that Olivia’s system of batching and sending out gift-acknowledgement letters in the snail mail, every other week, will not work anymore.
Olivia’s boss tells her this matter-of-factly.
But Olivia immediately balks.
She begins to butt heads with her boss, as she explains all the practical reasons why printing, sorting, signing, and mailing out letters on an everyday — or nearly-everyday — basis is completely unworkable.
Her boss is not at all in-tune with Olivia or her needs.
In fact, she wants to get through this conversation as quickly as possible, because she has a to-do list practically as long as the Nile back in her office, and she has a donor meeting coming up in a half-hour.
She asks Olivia for a bit of clarification, somewhat distractedly and with some annoyance in her voice.
Olivia hears the annoyance and feels like her boss isn’t even listening to her, even though she’s asking.
She shakes her head, throws up her hands, and says, “Fine. How about I send a thank you email within a day of donation receipt… so the donor can be thanked promptly, and I can keep my schedule of paper mailings as it is?”
In a hurry, ready to be done with this conversation, but wanting to achieve her objective as closely as possible, the boss agrees.
This seems like an OK compromise.
They are both ready to move on.
But there are likely to be multiple problems created here and into the future, since neither Olivia nor her boss have been doing their inner work:
they haven’t really communicated with each other (as much as they’ve gotten annoyed with each other and talked past each other), so they are starting (or continuing) to create a groove in their ongoing relationship that will gradually break down any healthy relationship they might have;
Olivia’s boss has started to plant seeds in her own mind that Olivia is a bit of a problem, a bit difficult to work with — seeds she will let continue to grow and develop over time, and that she might fertilize in the future if she has another similar interaction with Olivia;
Olivia is left feeling annoyed herself, consciously — and, more unconsciously, she’s feeling de-valued and de-humanized;
because of the way this entire process began, Olivia always carries those subtle feelings of annoyance with her whenever she does this task in the future, and thus the emails she sends to donors are pretty perfunctory and done as quickly as possible, which means the donors on the other end are likely feeling a bit like the after-thought that they actually are.
Yet again, Olivia and her boss haven’t done their inner work. They haven’t actively acknowledged their feelings and inner experience, let alone voiced them. They haven’t made moves to resolve anything. They haven’t brought the subterranean dynamics up to the surface, so they’ve remained below-ground, thus stealthily affecting the entire surface-level reality of everyone connected to that organization.
In the end, everyone is de-humanized here.
Subtle Racism, or Sexism, or Ableism, or….
One of the realities of all of today’s “isms” — like racism, or sexism, or ableism, or classism, or colorism, or ageism, or… all the others — is that they are often not as obvious as they used to be.
Jim Crow isn’t law anymore.
The ADA has become law.
Women have so many more rights today than they used to.
And still…
… the “isms” persist.
The “isms” persist because they are so often subtle, subconscious, subterranean now — to the point that often, the folks perpetuating them aren’t even aware they are.
A few examples:
Tamara, a Black woman, has a donor visit near the end of the day, so she decides not to go back to the office after the visit. When she shows up at work the next morning, her boss immediately begins questioning her, saying he had been looking for her yesterday and hadn’t been able to find her. He tells her she needs to let him know if she’s ever going to do that again. I call this benefit-of-the-doubt racism, and, depending on the circumstance, there could be sexism thrown in there too. Think about it: how likely do you think it would be that a white man would be questioned in this way? Who gets the benefit of the doubt?
Zach is hard of hearing. He always has to bring up his need for accommodations in his job, when different situations present themselves; neither his boss nor his co-workers ever initiate them. They always help provide them (because of course, the law requires it!). But he always gets the sense that they’re annoyed with him and feel like he’s high-maintenance. He’s even noticed that sometimes the staff break-room gets quiet when he walks into it, so he feels like folks have been talking about him behind his back. These are some of the subtle, subterranean ways that ableism can persist in organizations.
Emma, a Development Assistant, is just a couple years out of college. She was a first-generation college student, so her parents could not help her pay for school at all. As a result, she has a ton of debt right now, and she doesn’t own a car. Even though she has known since a pivotal college internship that she wanted to work within nonprofit fundraising/development, she had a really hard time finding a job that didn’t require a car. And now that she’s in the job, she keeps feeling like the odd-one-out with her co-workers. They always want to meet up at restaurants that feel expensive to her after work, and she doesn’t want to always have to ask them for rides. Her org also wants her to front cash for work-related purchases and be reimbursed, but she barely has enough to pay her rent and buy her groceries. Her org also asks all employees to donate to the mission, and she feels really guilty that she cannot afford it. These are some of the subtle, subterranean ways that classism can persist in organizations.
The problem with realities like this is that they are subtle, subterranean, and often even subconscious (meaning the people involved are not even consciously aware of what’s happening).
People are being influenced and making choices in subconscious ways.
Power dynamics are moving under-the-surface.
Biases have been conditioned in people over many years, creating grooves in these humans that are so well-worn that they no longer think about them, in the same way they drive home without consciously making any of the turns anymore.
Growing more conscious requires deep inner work.
One must start to get in touch with one’s feelings.
One must start to see power dynamics as they’re moving between people.
One must overcome knee-jerk responses.
One must be very in-touch with one’s own self and humanity… if there’s any hope of being able to be in-touch with other peoples’ humanity.
Are you seeing it?
Are you seeing how vital inner work is to fundraising?
Are you seeing how harmful it can be to avoid that work?
Being Human Together Should Win Every Time
Remember: fundraising is human-to-human work — so, in the purest form of its embodiment, fundraising should connect everyone involved, deeply, with both their own and with every other human’s humanity.
We cannot do that if we’re just going through the motions.
We cannot do that if we’re not as present as possible.
We cannot do that if we’re not as rooted, as centered as possible.
We will have a very hard time tuning into others, and empathizing with them, if we have not first tuned into, and empathized with, ourselves.
We will never be able to untangle gnarly problems like interpersonal conflict, or racism, or work performance issues… if we refuse to do our inner work.
Inner work is essential to fundraising.
Are you seeing it?
How might you begin to prioritize your inner work… today, tomorrow, and the tomorrows after that one?
With Love,
Cecelia 💗