Latest / Nonprofit411 Podcast / Kelly McLaughlin on Building Individual Giving Programs | Nonprofit411 Podcast

Transcript

Kelly McLaughlin on Building Individual Giving Programs | Nonprofit411 Podcast · Nonprofit411 Podcast

0:00
Hello and welcome to Nonprofit411, where we dive into resources and strategies that help nonprofits not just survive, but truly thrive.
0:08
I'm Sarah Barton, your host and fundraising advocate.
0:11
Each episode we bring you inspiring conversations with experts in fundraising, sustainability, and best practices to equip you with the tools and confidence you need to make a real impact.
Today's episode of Nonprofit411 is sponsored by GiveSuite, and I'm really excited to share with you about them.
I work with a lot of small nonprofit teams, and I often see incredible people doing really meaningful work using five or six different systems that don't talk to each other.
They may have donor forums on one platform, an email platform, spreadsheets, ract donations.
They often don't have tech support to call when something breaks, and it's really hard.
That's why I'm so excited about Give Suite.
I use a similar version to run my own work, and their nonprofit version really pulls everything together.
Fundraising, marketing, supporter, communications, automations, giving pages all in one place.
If your team is ready to invest in something that actually makes your job easier, take a look.
I'm an affiliate because I believe in what this platform can do, and I've seen how much of a difference it can make for small teams who just need systems that work.
You'll find the link in the show notes, and now let's get into today's conversation.
Hello and welcome to this week's Nonprofit411.
I'm Sarah, and today I'm with Kelly McLaughlin from From From Scratch Fundraising.
She is the founder and CEO there.
Hello, welcome.
Thank you, Sarah.
I'm glad to be here.
Yes.
That's tricky.
I didn't realize how tricky that would say Kelly from from scratch.
Yeah, it's, yes.
So I set everyone else up for failure.
It's great.
Well, I'm so excited to have you on, actually, I don't know that you know this, but you were one of the first fundraisers that I reached out to when I started consulting as a fundraiser.
Okay.
Yeah.
And so we had chatted and it was really helpful just to get feedback from you.
And so I'm really excited to have you on and to introduce you to our listeners this week.
Oh, that's lovely to hear.
I'm so glad.
Yes.
So, Kelly, can you answer my favorite question before we start, which is, what is your favorite hobby? Okay, so I, fun fact that always catches people off guard.
I trained to be a ballerina like I was in a pre-professional company, all of that.
I got in an accident, a car accident when I was 17, which derailed my dance career.
But my teacher actually got me really interested.
She got me interested in teaching.
And so I got to go to this pedagogy training when I was 17 with like the Ballet Master of American Ballet Theater and the world's leading expert on Vaganova method ballet pedagogy.
And so I love nerding out on ballet pedagogy, like, not ballet, but like how do you teach ballet? And so, I actually teach in a community dance program on top of my consulting career.
I also teach ballet in a.
Community dance program that's making dance accessible to young people in my community.
I teach ballet and ballroom 'cause I also did competitive ballroom in college.
And, and you know, or gear we're already gearing up for Nutcracker and everything.
And so that is, that is my thing.
When I'm not consulting or parenting, I am I am dancing.
Oh, that's awesome.
Dancing.
Yeah.
Yes.
So you said you have kids.
Yes.
Are, do they dance? My daughter, yes.
Yes.
I have one kid.
She is avid, avid dancer.
That's actually how I started teaching again, was I quit teaching when I had her and then she got way into it.
And this, she was in this community dance program and the woman who runs the program knew about my history.
She and I had actually danced together in a, in a company for a while.
And so yeah, she came to me and it's because of my daughter.
She came to me and said, you know, I, I've lost a couple staff this year and I don't know if we can do the Nutcracker this year if I don't have more help.
And, and she's, and I, it's the first year that, that Lena is eligible to be in the Nutcracker.
It would really be a tragedy, wouldn't it? And I was like.
Would be a tragedy.
And here I am three years later, still helping run the program.
You know, she got me real good.
Yeah.
Well, that's awesome though.
And what a great way to like also be able to connect with your daughter and do something fun with her.
So Yes, it's a really, it's a really, really special to be in a creative space with your kiddo and watch them develop as an artist.
And yeah, it's been, it is, it is a really cool life experience.
I don't know.
Not something I was looking for, but it, you know, it was, it's, it's incredible.
It's an incredible experience.
Well, that's awesome.
Well, thank you for sharing that with us.
And now can you just introduce yourself to the listeners and tell 'em a little bit more about you and from.
Scratch fundraising.
Yes.
Beyond how difficult it is to say our name.
No.
So, I actually, I like to say if you, if you really take my life trajectory backwards from scratch, fundraising came from one, we help nonprofits that are starting individual giving programs.
We help them, create them, build the systems, all of that that will support their individual giving program.
So first off, the name from scratch is literally that's what we do, is we help build individual giving programs from scratch.
We wanted to make that very, very clear.
I.
There are so many incredible consultants out there that can optimize a program or teach you how to really dig into monthly giving or major gifts or anything like that.
What I really wanted to focus on was the leaders who are like, okay, individual giving.
Got it.
What? So that's, that's the gap that we.
Kind of fill is we can come in, we can look at a program that's not working or isn't getting off the ground, or somebody who's saying, well, I know I need to get into individual giving, but I have no idea how.
We come in and we craft fundraising plans and then build the systems to support those plans to get those programs up and rolling and going.
And then often what we'll do is then.
Pass those clients off to somebody who specializes in what we think.
Maybe eventually they will excel in, right? Mm-hmm.
But most of our clients can spend a few years working with our strategies and then we have clear growth paths for them to work with other specialists and that kind of thing.
So that's part of how From Scratch came to be named.
The other part is I.
The first fundraising thing I ever did was a big sale.
I like to say that that was my big learning experience about fundraising was I was five years old.
I saw a news story on, I don't even remember.
It was some refugee issue.
I.
And I just remember thinking like, that's horrible.
These people are having to leave their home and it's not their fault and that's not fair.
And I was five years old, right? And my sense of justice was really overdeveloped for a 5-year-old.
And yeah.
And so I went to my mom and I was like, I'm upset.
What do I do? My five-year-old selves was like, I'm livid that this is happening to people.
And my mom was like, we'll, we, you know, there's, there's a refugee resettlement nonprofit here.
Why don't, why don't we have a bake sale? You can raise some money and, and we'll donate that.
Plus you can save your allowance, whatever you want, and we'll donate that to that organization.
And so I did, I saved my allowance for weeks and weeks, you know, putting my pennies in my jar, right.
And then had this bake sale.
And got to donate and it was really a neat experience, right? And I went, my mom took me to the organization and they, they were so sweet.
They told me all about their work and, and all kinds of stuff.
And I just thought, this must be the best place to work in the world.
And I just.
Fell in love with nonprofits.
Right.
At five years old and I've done fundraising on and off.
I did fundraising for service projects in high school, all kinds of stuff.
And so I like to say I've been fundraising since I was five.
The first time I ever got paid for it professionally to fundraise was in 2009.
But yeah, so I've.
My whole career has been focused on fundraising and specifically individual giving.
And even more specifically, it has been coming in as that first development director looking at an individual giving program and figuring out how to build it.
So after I did that for three or four nonprofits as a development director, that's when I thought.
Gee, this seems to be a thing that a lot of organizations have and can't afford.
Mm-hmm.
And that's really what drove me to start from scratch fundraising was like looking at the landscape, having so many friends, having built a network of people in nonprofits and seeing how many organizations couldn't afford a development director.
And specifically seeing what organizations there were that were struggling with that.
Right.
Obviously.
Mm-hmm.
Marginalized, you know, it's, yeah.
It's the organizations that need it the most, that are making the biggest community impact, that are the most community embedded, that are the most responsive to the communities they serve, are the ones that can't afford it, right? Mm-hmm.
And so that's what I wanted to do with from scratch was create what I had really done in my career as a development director is really learned how to make things efficient and systematized and all of that.
And so that's really when I started kind of con started consulting with my friends for these smaller organizations as I was a development director, just teaching them, okay, well just, this is how you do this really efficiently.
This is how, here's the checklist, here's the whatever.
And seeing how much they could do with just that little bit of help.
Right.
And it wasn't.
That's really what motivated from scratch into being right.
Was this like, okay.
And, and I like say my mission is to make fundraising expertise.
Accessible for small startup organizations.
Right.
That's what I'm doing.
'cause I know the price tag on quality fundraising advice is very high in a lot of, in a lot of places.
And I think that's where my focus immediately went to was like, how do I make this as systematic and scalable as I can.
Mm-hmm.
So when I started the business, that was really where my brain went, was.
Where, how do I get this to a place where I can scale it really quickly so I can cost it really low? Right? Yeah.
And so that's, that's been what we've been doing is, is, is serving more and more organizations with that model.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's awesome.
It's, it's pretty aligned with what I have ended up doing it at nonprofit 4 0 1 1 because the organizations that come to me often, they're coming for fundraising advice, but there aren't really basic systems in place, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
The systems that make it doable to do fundraising en mass.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and fundraising's this tricky thing, right, where we are doing it relationally one-on-one, but a lot of times the methodologies that we use are bulk.
Bulk driven.
Yeah, yeah.
You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, and just having simple systems to stop one offing it.
Is Yes.
Can actually make a world of difference.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And a lot of the, you know, it's funny 'cause as we talk about the new world of AI and how that is changing a lot of work processes for a lot of people, what I, what I often think, is really humorous is the workflow systems.
You know, people are thinking that that's very new you know, new technology.
But really that's the technology we've been using in fundraising for at least since I started and I started in 2002.
Yeah.
So I don't know how much.
I mean, I know that workflows actually have gone back further than that.
'cause we had, when I started, we had a DOS-based system, but it did have workflows as part of it.
So, so workflows for the listeners, workflows are preset processes that your computer can help move you through when you're doing the fundraising process.
So, yeah.
But yeah, and, and it's not, you don't even have to have technology.
Right.
My, my first fundraising job, we had the world's most terriblest fundraising software.
I'm not, I'm not gonna name names.
It was awful, right? And 90% of the time I couldn't get it to do what I wanted to do anyway.
And I, I honestly just had a little sheet of paper, like printer paper that I put on my wall that was like, gift comes in, send, you know, do thank you.
Call, send letter.
Right.
You know.
Email still then was like a weird thing to cultivate donors around.
But you know, it was, it was very, and that's what I did every check that came in, I would, I would, I would copy the check, right? Take the check to the finance people, and then I would write like phone call letter, like, thank you, email.
Right? And I would check it off and then I would file it, right? And so.
Yep.
And I, I feel very old saying that, but you know, it, it was a system, it was a process and it's how that organization, I spent four years there.
I started as the department assistant.
I ended up being the person running their individual giving programs in the time, in the, in four years.
My first four years there, we grew from $300,000.
In individual giving income to 1.2
million.
Mm-hmm.
And like literally all I was doing, I feel like, I feel like all I was doing was just processes like that.
Right? Yeah.
It was just how, how do we steward more people in a way that feels really personal, but is at scale, right? Mm-hmm.
And how do we.
Yeah.
And, and, and then it was crazy that my little checklist that I wrote on every single check that I scanned, or, you know, we got an online donation, I would go print it out.
So I could do my same.
That's right.
Yeah.
Because I needed, I needed to do it that way.
Computers.
We kept real files.
We had real files on all of our donors originally too.
And so we actually had a room full of donor files.
Yeah.
You know, and you could go into the donor files and you could see all of the various gifts that they had given.
And there would be cards from them and letters from them stuck inside of it.
So.
And that wasn't too long ago.
I mean, we are not ancient.
No.
Really in the last 25 years have we seen a lot of these processes go from much more manual to very automated? Yes.
But there's so much to be said for understanding all of the manual processes.
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Because.
Understanding what they're like manually helps you be able to.
Visualize what should be happening for every person so that when it goes wrong or when it doesn't work out the way that you think it is, you have somewhere to look, right? Yeah.
And I'm, I, I'm kind of grateful that, you know, I'm a millennial.
I'm, I'm grateful that I.
Kind of came in at that edge of fundraising before we had all the cloud base.
You know, I'm, I'm the one that like pivoted the organization.
I was one of boomerang's first customers with this organization.
Oh, that's exciting.
Exciting.
They had just launched.
And I remember the big debate was like, well, but all of our donor files in the cloud, is that secure? I mean, is that blah, blah? And I'm like.
Somebody, if somebody like ruffles through my desk drawers enough and finds the key, they can get the donor in inform.
Really, I mean, so let's talk about data security, right? But like, yeah, it was, it, I'm grateful that I had that experience that year or two of fundraising.
Pre tech age, because this is something I, I, I talk about all the time on webinars and things is we're really relying on technology to do our job for us.
That, like those automated thank you notes and everything well, but, but my, my CRM send the thank you to the donor.
Why do I need to do anything? And it's like.
Be because I used to call every single donor, even if they gave $5, right? Just to say thanks.
Right? And I saw our donor retention rate skyrocket when I did that because I didn't have a CRM that was worth anything.
So I called every donor because I, you know, I was coming up in the age of like donor centered fundraising, right? And you gotta mail the letter within 24 hours, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Which.
You know, and I, I couldn't do that.
I couldn't get it done that fast.
So what I decided in my, not trained at all in fundraising brain was, okay, well I can't, I'll send a letter once a month or every other week, something like that.
I'll do all the letters then, but I will call every donor the day we get their gift and say thank you.
Right? And I did that for a while, and then I was looking at our stats.
And our donor retention went from 40% to 60% the first year that I worked at the organization.
And, and that's just be because I couldn't rely on anything other than my own ability to interact with the donors.
Right.
And so, yeah, that's something I talk to my clients about all the time is just like, no, you can't, technology can't do it for you.
AI can't write a letter like you can.
Right.
You know, yes.
All of those types of things.
Right.
That, I think, I think that's part of it.
Right.
I, I just did a talk on this recently was.
You know, we're, we're trying to outsource.
Relationship building to technology.
And then donors don't like that.
And then we're calling it donor fatigue.
Yeah.
And I'm, I'm like, I don't, but people are coming to you 'cause they believe in your cause and they're getting automations and things that read like AI and they wanna be in a relationship with you.
And so we're, we're not building the efficiencies we think we are, whereas.
It really didn't take me that long to call every single one of my donors.
Mm-hmm.
It really wasn't that big a burden, and it did so much for the organization.
Right.
And right.
Yeah, I have an organization who has just started and she's in her first year and she does thank you cards, and she's like, you would not believe the feedback I get on my thank you cards.
She's like, it's, I'm not even trying to get feedback, but they're just like, they're so grateful to get real mail and for it to be a thank you.
You know? And you're right.
We are in an age where we are learning a new balance with technology.
Right.
What is that balance? And I think we've been in this age of learning the balance for a while, but each generation has a new challenge with it.
Mm-hmm.
And, this generation has a challenge because we've interrupted some of our relational interactions, right? So it's gonna be some new things.
And these skills, these really concrete manual skills of relationship building are things that our organizations need to teach even to their staff because it may not be skills that the staff has coming in.
Yeah.
Where we may have built some of those, we may have had some of those.
When we started in fundraising, you know, hard writing letter writing wasn't a foreign thing, but my kids have to ask me.
My kids are a, my oldest two children, which they're twins, they turned 21 this year, but like, it wasn't very many years ago.
I remember one of them like asked me to check their envelope to make sure they had addressed it, right? Yeah.
And, and it's like no fault of theirs, right? Do we send real mail? And they were just wanted to make sure everything was in the right space.
And so that's something that is really interesting that we need to think about when we're training fundraisers.
Like, do you know how to make sure, you know, address your envelopes? Do you know how to write a letter? Or when you're writing a note, what might you want to include in it? You know, yeah.
I actually, it's so funny you said that my daughter, I was helping one of my clients who's local to me.
Send out their annual impact reports and I took my daughter along to make her like, put the stamps on things.
These are hard life skills that I want you.
Yeah, she's eight.
But you know, I was like, I still, I want you, I want you to understand that.
I mean, one, I wanted her to understand what my client did.
I wanted her to, you know, take your daughter to workday, right? I wanted her to understand what I do and why I do it, right? Mm-hmm.
But also.
Yeah, just the very real I, you know, and I told her, I was like, oh, we're sending these annual reports and they're going to the people who fund this work.
And she's like, oh, so these are really important people.
And I was like to, yeah, to the client.
They're really important people because they, they are providing the funding that lets this organization do the great work, right? And so she was so, it was so cute to watch her sit there.
Just trying to perfectly square the stamp in the corner because she, she wanted the donors to feel appreciated and everything.
It was very, like, it was a really fun experience helping her see that, that side, but also helping her understand that like, you know, yeah, you just took this off of one of their workers' plates so that worker can do more stuff.
So, you know, and this is, this is volunteerism.
This is.
This is how, you know, our industry works.
This is how you serve your community.
Right.
She's in Girl Scouts too, so, she's getting that community service thing down.
But yeah, it's fun to kind of train up that next generation.
'cause I think mm-hmm.
Yeah.
I, I don't see enough.
I don't see enough of that.
Yeah.
Kids getting involved in making the difference and stuff.
But definitely my mom spent a lot of time.
Instilling in me for sure.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that 'cause I think that that's a great space to help build community.
So I, most of my work in the last eight years has been in rural communities and I definitely have a soft spot in my heart for rural communities.
It's a different type of fundraising.
And I was just writing an article about it actually.
Like, you have to think of creative ways.
To really engage your community when you work in a rural community, because having that community support is so important.
But getting kids involved and getting teens involved, your local high school, like those are great ways to build community with your nonprofit organization.
If you haven't.
If you haven't done it before, because there are so many skills that they can learn from.
You have to plan and be thoughtful about it.
I used to work at a university, so I recognize like the challenges.
But when they learn how rewarding it is, it can be great, you know? Yeah.
Yeah.
And I mean, I think that's something that's definitely something I think a lot about is, I mean, just burnout is so high in this sector and especially these days where I feel like people are actively trying to tear our sector down, right? Mm-hmm.
It's, it's, so, I think it's so critical to let young people see and engage with this and see, you know, yeah.
I mean, communi community is so important and I think.
Again, I'm, I'm grateful to be a millennial that like Understood community building.
You know, I did grassroots advocacy before I got into fundraising and stuff.
Right? I spent a lot of years as a, as a organizer, you know, that in real life community build.
I'm grateful I had that experience before social media came around.
Right.
Because there's just something so different about being in a room with people working together on a goal when you're physically together that.
I, I like I said, I teach in this community dance program and so many of them were coming up during the pandemic and social media and everything, and it's, yeah, I just it's, it's interesting to see how it's morphed in, in good ways and bad ways and in ways that I think are gonna let them revolutionize things in so many ways and other ways that.
That make me kind of sad that they didn't have a pre-social media life.
Right? Yeah.
Well, we still have purpose then we still have purpose because we have to share with them like, you know, yes.
What, what that is, that's what, yeah.
So yeah, it is, it can be discouraging.
I think it's great as you see your kids grow, like, like I said, I have two that are about to graduate from college.
They're 21.
So they really did grow up with social media you know, with it being part of their norm with phones.
They've had phones since they were, Hmm.
12 maybe.
Yeah.
My youngest one, maybe even probably about that same age, probably about 12.
You know, so they've had phones this kind of, this entire time.
But they're eager to learn too, right? Yeah, they, they do see that we have some relational skills that are different from what they know, and they've seen us use them in the workplace and they know that they're important, but they also can recognize that like.
They're not super great at it, you know? Yeah.
And that's where I love being involved.
My daughter does theater in addition to dance, and I, I, you know, like I said, I'm in this community dance program, and so I, I love watching them work in that space.
Right.
I love watching them come together.
I love watching them mentor each other.
Because again, I also think that the beautiful thing about this new generation is so many of them are so compassionate and they're not afraid of their feelings, and they're not afraid to share their feelings.
And that's such a beautiful thing to watch.
Right.
And I, yeah, like I said, I think I, I.
I like seeing nonprofits open up more space for young people to get involved because I think, I mean, we're in an industry where there's a lot of burnout.
We need, we need young people aspiring to work in our sector.
Right.
And, and I think this generation of kids, at least the high schoolers that I work with in my dance program.
Yeah.
They just, they have such beautiful spirits and they're gonna change the world if we let 'em.
Right.
And like, yeah, I just, I wanna see more nonprofits harnessing the energy that that young people have today because they're, they're ready and they're.
Yeah, I, I don't know.
I don't know how to ex, I, I am, I, I'm overflowing with love for my, for, for these kids that I work with.
But yeah, I think it's so important that we invite them into our organizations and in ways that are mentoring them, but also in ways that harness.
The passion that I see in this generation, right? Because 'cause they're ready to do stuff.
They are.
And that fresh energy, you know, kind of even, even doing bringing in new fundraising techniques like you do for organizations and, and bringing in fresh energy with new people from your community, from young people that fresh energy revitalizes.
Passion in your nonprofit, both within you as the leadership or the professionals, and within the whole body of fundraisers.
Yes.
It's contagious, right? And so we really need to, like, for me, it's part of the, it's part of the fundraising strategy is to bring in the energy, you know, find opportunities.
I think when I think of fundraising strategy, and you can tell me you know, kind of your thoughts on this.
I think of all of those community building activities that don't have anything to do with money, but really have everything to do with.
Building that energy of our community about the exciting thing that we're doing, right? Yes.
Yes.
I think one, one of the things I, I was really, really lucky.
I think my first fundraising job was so different than so many other people's fundraising jobs.
I had a really great executive director who really wanted me to succeed.
And I, I can't count the number of times I went to her and was like, I wanna try this.
And she, she was like, I don't know that that'll work.
And I, I would tell her all my reasons and she'd be like, okay, try it.
Let's see what happens.
Right.
And that level of trust from somebody here, I mean, she retired within my tenure at the organization.
Right.
And like, I, I was fresh outta college and.
That, that trust that she placed in me one to try absolutely ridiculous things, they felt really ridiculous.
Like now that I'm looking back, I was like, that, that, wow, the level of trust she had in me was, I didn't appreciate enough when I was young.
But, but also what we ended up building at that organization was just based on my instincts and my background as a community organizer.
Right.
And, and.
So I, I like to say I fundraise like a community organizer.
So I, that's how I inherently think about fundraising strategy is, is how do we build community with this? How do we achieve mission while getting money? All of that, it works together for me.
And, and I, I love to tell this story about, this is how I knew I'd made it building a donor base that was also deeply, deeply invested in our organization was this is an advocacy organization.
We were in Washington DC and we, we were fighting an advocacy campaign and we, we were just not getting anywhere.
We, we were losing the campaign.
Right.
And.
And we, it was kind of coming time to talk to donors about what we'd accomplished and, and my executive directors Kelly, how we can't tell the donors about how bad this is going.
Like this, you know? And that instinct, right? That so many nonprofit leaders are like, oh, this is bad.
We cannot tell our donors this.
I said, why not? She's like, 'cause they're never gonna fund us again because we can.
I'm like, no.
If we tell them what's really happening, what we've tried, why it's not working, if we actually break it down to them, they'll understand this is bigger than something we can change right now.
And, and.
I don't can, can we just trust them to have our backs? And she was like, okay, let's do it right Again, that blind faith in a 23-year-old was shocking.
But but yeah, we gathered our donors together and we did, we laid out, this is the campaign, this is the strategy, this is what we've tried this, this is why we're not getting where we wanna get to.
These are the doors that we're not able to open this, that, and the other, and the donors.
Gave extra and we didn't even ask for money.
Mm-hmm.
But one of our donors immediately in the meeting, what, what more do you need? What I got my checkbook? What do you need? Right.
And, and.
I think the, even the most beautiful thing, there was this older guy who gave us, you know, I don't know, a residual from his, you know, his Yeah.
His, his monthly retirement income and whatnot.
And he was like, I can't give you any more money, but I will provide moral support.
And every week for a year, that man clipped his favorite comic strip from the newspaper and sent it to me in an envelope.
Aw.
And we had a wall of his comic strips outside my office.
That's awesome.
But that was what was so beautiful is we, we just came to the community and we were honest about what was going on.
But because we had built such a strong relationship with our donors, 'cause again, like I approach fundraising as a community organizer, so it was like, I want your money, but I also want, I want you, I want you mobilized.
Yeah.
I want you ready to activate.
I want you to care about the mission.
I want you to understand what we're doing.
Because we had built a donor base that was so.
Well-informed on our work and so invested in the outcomes and everything that even when we were losing, right, losing this campaign, it, it, the donors rallied with finances, moral support, all of it, right? And and the boost that that gave to our advocacy staff was incredible.
Right.
And.
I, it was a really interesting moment because, you know, I think a lot of fundraisers experienced this.
It's like, there's your office.
Go fundraise.
Don't talk to me until you have money.
Right? Yeah.
I, that was the moment.
I think most of my advocacy staff looked at me very differently and we're like, whoa.
Like, that's in like.
She's getting our mission done and, and a few of our donors were donors to the politicians we weren't getting in the rooms with.
Yeah.
And were able to open those doors.
And so that was the other thing that was incredible was they were like, oh, if I just come to you, I was like, yeah, you just come to me.
And that was what was so interesting about that moment to me, was just like.
That's when I was like, oh, this is not a donor centered program.
This is not what I'm doing.
What am I doing here? Which I, I've more recently started naming as like mission centered fundraising, right? Is that that's what I was doing there.
It was mission centered fundraising was like rallying my donors around the mission so that they cared.
So deeply about the mission that it didn't, you know, they were ready to be there with the resources, with the support, with the calling members of Congress as soon as we needed them to, because they were, they were so invested in what we were doing and so informed on what we were doing.
Right.
So that was, yes, those needed.
Yeah.
Commitment is so much more than just a dollar figure, right? Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
It is.
Yes.
So, yeah, that's a great story and I'm so grateful that you, you shared that, because I think that's so true.
And I think every, every fundraiser and every nonprofit needs to understand that because that's really how we have to build our communities if we wanna have sustainable funding.
Mm-hmm.
The sustainable funding is.
What is kind of a byproduct of building our community, right? Like that? Kelly, can you tell our listeners where they can find you? Yes, I am from scratch fundraising.com.
That's kind of our primary place.
We've got links out to LinkedIn.
I'm fairly active on LinkedIn.
My staff is really trying to get me to do Instagram reels and TikTok videos.
We're experimenting with that, so you, you might find me on Instagram and TikTok more in the future.
But primarily I'm on LinkedIn and.
And of course on from scratch fundraising.com,
and we work with organizations just starting out.
The organizations who are looking at, I, I wanna start an individual giving program.
I have no idea.
I.
Where to start.
We, we have a program where we train you to do it yourself.
We have a program where we can do it for you.
Yeah, so we've got kind of everything, everything in between, whether you wanna DIY it or you wanna offload it, we, we can do it.
So that's, that's what we do.
That's great.
Yes.
And the website is super cute.
For all of you listeners who might go check it out, it's.
Recipe, like themed and focused.
A lot of it's so, it's so cute.
Yes.
We, we like the baking puns.
We like the baking puns a lot.
So yeah.
And then the last question that I always ask our guests before we exit is what is one piece of advice every nonprofit needs to hear? I, I wrote this in a LinkedIn post recently that I got really good feedback from, but I, I would say like your donors wanna know who you are, so go show 'em who you are.
Yeah.
Oh, I like that.
Yeah.
Go show them who you are.
So, yeah, that's great.
Yeah.
Thank you for being on the show today, Kelly.
It was such a great conversation and I'm so glad that you were able to share with our listeners.
To all of our listeners out there, I wanna thank you for listening and for tuning in, and I hope to see you for conversation.
That's a wrap for today's episode of Nonprofit411.
I hope our discussion with nonprofit professionals and experts gave you actionable ideas to take your fundraising efforts to the next level.
At Nonprofit411, I partner with leaders like you to develop strategies and guide you through implementation.
Visit www.nonprofit411.org
to learn more, and let's take the first step together.
See you next time.
Bye.