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Holistic Approaches to Thriving Nonprofits with Jason Lewis| Nonprofit 411 Podcast · Nonprofit411 Podcast

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Hello and welcome to Nonprofit 411, where we dive into resources and strategies that help nonprofits not just survive, but truly thrive.
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I'm Sarah Barton, your host and fundraising advocate.
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Welcome to this week's episode of Nonprofit 411, where we explore resources and strategies to help nonprofit organizations thrive.
I'm your host, Sarah Barton, and today I'm excited to welcome Jason Lewis, founder of Responsive Fundraising.
How are you today? I am great, Sarah.
I am delighted to be here.
I've got my I've got a, I've only got about a third of my cup of coffee here that I've had this morning.
So I'm, I'm nice and warmed up.
And I had a double shot this morning.
So, and you and I, before we hit the record button, sound like we're on the same page with a lot of things.
So I'm kind of excited about that.
Warming up my day.
This is going to be fun.
Awesome.
I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
So before you introduce yourself fully, I like to start with a random question.
That's not so random right now.
I've been focusing on learning about people's favorite hobbies because it happens to be something I'm really passionate about.
So what's your favorite hobby? Messes with me about that, but I have not developed any hobby hobbies because I've spent 25 years doing this fundraising stuff and but reading is probably the hobby that I've picked up the most.
What my wife, Erica would tell you is, is that I need to get out of reading, you know, Nonprofit sector fundraising sort of specific stuff.
Stuff that I teach over at the college.
For example, I need to find more casual reading to, to really capitalize on what has become my, my wife told me, you know, my wife was a re Erica was a reader when, when we got married and I've developed over over the years.
You're welcome.
You know, 25 years that we've been married.
I've developed a great appreciation for reading.
And so that's, that's what I probably even need to get a little better at is reading something that's a little less Well, less, less focused on our less focused on my work or trying to figure out all of our challenges and problems in the sector.
If it's your passion and you really enjoy thinking about it.
So I come from a really long line of readers.
Yeah.
In fact I remember the day one day in my youth and I was, I was probably in my 20s.
It was the first day I did not see my dad reading.
So my dad's a really avid reader.
And so I grew up around that.
He had a bookstore.
And, you know, so I was surrounded by books.
And then, as a young parent, I talked to the librarian once and he was like, Listen, it doesn't really matter what you read as long as you're reading.
It's really good for the brain.
And so he encouraged kids to read whatever they loved.
He's like, if they still love the little books, let them read the little books.
even if they are capable of reading a chapter book, let them be.
So I love that you're reading.
This is a really healthy behavior.
Maybe you can diversify, but I like to think and I like to learn so I can get become guilty of that too.
Do you read? Consistently with your eyes or do you do audio books too? With my eyes.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not a, I'm not an audio book reader.
I'm not a yeah, yeah.
And I liked it, you know, the hard copy in my hand.
I love that I can buy old used copies.
Oftentimes that have been read by other folks.
I can buy those on Amazon pretty pretty easily.
I don't honestly you know, we're going to have a fundraising related conversation here today.
I really don't like reading fundraising specific books.
So, that's one of the things I figured out a number of years ago.
There's not a lot of authors in our space in the, within the confines of the sector or within the professional fundraising community that has written anything that's all that compelling to me.
And so most of what I'm reading while it's, On the periphery of what we're talking about today.
I'm not into the tips and tricks and the, and the mechanics and fundraising sort of stuff.
There's way overdone and too many too.
Have you read, have you read Lynch With's Soul of Money? Oh yeah.
Yeah.
I did read, I did enjoy that.
And I, I, in fact in, in my book, whatever.
We cited that probably a couple of times.
And I appreciated that she was writing from because, you know, she, she kind of unpacks that right in the later what third of the book that she was a fundraiser herself.
She really gets into that.
But which I think is an interesting angle to come at a lot of what she's talking about there.
But it's I think it's, I think that's one of the books that we include in on our website.
We include in the library.
We recommend it to our consulting team members, that sort of stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's one that I really did enjoy and I did read with my eyes.
I, I do audio books more often than not.
And so it's very difficult to do technical books.
With audio, you know, so it does, I do a lot of nonfiction, but I don't do really technical books because that's hard to follow and it's just because my eyes are so tired from being on the computer all the time.
So I have, I have trouble focusing on even the printed page when I'm not on the computer.
Yeah, I mean, you and I are certainly not the first ones to say and, and Lynn's book is a great one to do this, to suggest that fundraisers really need to work out their relationship with money.
Having come up most of my career in the church and parachurch space, that was something that was certainly a pretty consistent theme.
And and Lynn Twist's book really helps with that.
That you've got to work out your relationship with money before you can be really good at this.
Yeah, yes.
So, all right, well that was a great, that was a great little intro and now can you tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and about your work at Responsive Fundraising? Yeah, so Sarah, I started Responsive Fundraising In 2014 we have been consulting with clients, primarily small community based, lots of faith based organizations around the country since 2014.
I I have over the duration, over the, Over that, I think that's now 11 years I took some frameworks that I had developed back in graduate school and began using them as consulting tools and and we have incorporated those, what we call our frameworks and our consulting relationships and those have become very central to what we do.
So, we are Kind of a messy startup consultancy that's still working, working itself out.
I have a managing partner in Chicago who's really helping me figure out the, the business model.
But I also spend in addition to the consulting work that we do Sarah, I also spend about half my time over at the local college teaching.
There's lots of baby boomers that are retiring right now there and perhaps in a lot of other places.
And somebody who's excited about teaching like myself is usually a great asset to have and adjuncts are always cheap.
And so they keep giving me classes.
Yeah, well, that's interesting.
So I started my career in higher ed, I, I did grant writing work my way up through development was you know, director of advancement, but I've always loved the academic space.
And really I was listening to something that said, you know, we're what we wanted to be when we were youngest is a very true picture often of the passions in our heart.
You know, I don't know if that's always true, but I, I wanted to be a teacher when I was very young.
And the first time I was actually a consultant, I did some type of.
You know, self evaluation.
And I recognize that what I love to do is I love to gather information.
I'm a researcher at heart.
And I love to share it.
Like my purpose is in sharing these things in ways that are really meaningful for other people.
So I like the teaching space I've actually been considering because my consultancy provides training.
So it provides.
Fundraising and grant writing training.
So, you know, the goal is to help others become proficient at it, especially in the grant writing space, it's a learnable skill.
And if you, you know, follow processes kind of frameworks, like you were talking about, it doesn't have to be the overwhelming chaos that I've experienced.
At a lot of organizations when a grant is due, I believe in the grants being part of the fundraising strategy, not the entire fundraising strategy, and that if you take your time to Think about what your organization needs, have a fundraising strategy for each of those areas, then you can go back in and you can pull pieces of that out and include it in a grant project that is really meaningful, makes sense, and doesn't absolutely burn out your staff.
So just a little bit about that.
Yeah, I think, I mean, if you go back and look at some of that stuff I was working out about my thinking in graduate school, and you look at these, The theory that I was developing around these particular frameworks.
A lot of it was around the idea, as we're talking about teaching was about the idea, it was largely centered on sort of a critique about the way that I had seen a lot of the experts that You know the gurus in our space sort of posturing themselves and I and I have said to our consulting team a number of times we need a teach first or a train first use your word, we need a train first type mentality and so one of the things that we do it responsive is we deliver on about two days.
We will be called a two day will deliver on a two day training where we'll put one of these particular frameworks in front of as many people as they can pack into a room.
And we'll basically, for example, we'll teach them how to do a capital campaign and all of the, you know, all of the intricacies and different challenges and opportunities that come with a capital campaign and why the.
Myriad of things that we do when it comes to a capital campaign play out the way they do.
And, and what we're doing there is we're saying, look, if you guys can fit, if you can learn this, like a student would in my classroom, right? If you can learn this, then me being your guru, your, your, your borrowed expertise, as I sometimes call it, rather than me sort of lending you my expertise, How about we teach you the way that, you know, my.
juniors and seniors in my college class, college classroom are learning some of this stuff.
And that's just, I think, one of those progressions as we think about the fundraising profession that we haven't necessarily worked out.
There's not a lot of things being taught in the classroom and so therefore we rely on some of these extra, you know, these different ways of professional development to achieve these things.
And which, which in many cases makes the case for the, the guru that I'm typically, typically most critical.
Yeah, but I do, I just think that we, you're right.
We don't provide a lot of structure.
I actually was, I found this sticker.
A picture of a sticker on Facebook, and I took a picture of it because I loved it.
It said, I didn't realize I was supposed to know everything by my second rodeo.
Seems like a very low amount of rodeos, you know, right? We throw nonprofit leaders.
Well, and I think some of it's self imposed that the idea that the nonprofit leader should be able to do it all and figure it all out.
And we're not all created equal in that, you know, I love learning and my capacity for learning is very high.
I can learn quickly and I can apply like I can bridge my learning from one topic to another really easily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
As I've, I've interacted with people, I find that that's not always so.
You know, the case.
And so, so I think that nonprofit leaders need to understand the value of bringing in an expert and just learning, you know, help learning from them.
They can help you set up some of the processes and it's a much easier transition for you to be able to do that thing rather than trying to figure out it all out on your own, because that takes so much energy and effort.
And and actually in the grant space.
I think that those are great projects to propose to funders, bringing in these consultants and experts so that you can really become more sustainable.
So yeah, the oh, go ahead.
Yeah, I, this is your show, so I want to make sure I follow the rules.
So where, where, yes, please do.
Yes.
The, the, the, the one that got the attention.
I appreciate that.
Well, yeah.
So actually, yeah, you sent it to me and then I read over it and was like, Oh yeah, I really want to have a conversation about this.
So you recently wrote an article called the generosity commission and you shared it with me and I want to make sure that I share it.
I'll share it in the show notes so that our readers or our listeners can read it.
Tell me a little bit about the article.
Yeah.
So, the generosity commission has been around for a number of years and they're a large, what we, what has been referred to as a blue ribbon commission of What I referred to in the article as the power brokers within the fundraising and philanthropic space.
And, and Sarah what their, what the commission was charged with or they charged themselves with was sort of asking this question, why are we seeing this rapid decline in in generosity within our sector, etc, etc.
And, and I was It's genuinely enthusiastic about about what the outcomes might be, but their report that came out in early September was just as I was reading through it, it was less than satisfying.
And so, I had written the article on Substack it has subsequently, as I shared with you earlier, has been subsequently picked up by the Chronicle of Philanthropy and published there and it certainly Garnered some attention from folks probably in the style that I want to be writing more and more on Substack.
So I kind of appreciate the the affirmation.
But the my whole argument.
Sarah, in the, in the article is that it's very what I call Putnam esque, which is to, which is referring back to Robert Putnam's book Bowling Alone, and the, the emphasis on very macro level trends societal trends that don't give us a lot of practical insights into what kind of decisions organizations are making that are translating into these to declining donor participation and other things.
And if you understand the history of Putnam's work at Harvard and you're familiar with Scotch Bowl's work, so Theda Scotch ball is one of his colleagues there.
She works over in the political science department and she has been looking at the same data sets.
She's a peer of they're about the same age.
They've been, they've been at Harvard, perhaps for the same length of time.
They spend a lot of time together and they write and refer to a lot of each, you know, to each other's work.
But what the difference between Scotch Bowl's work and Putnam's work is that she zeros in on the role of the civic organization, the nonprofit organization, and the role that our institutions at both, you know, very large institutions and very local organizations play in communities and the posture that we've chosen to take.
And she describes the evolution of our organization's Since the civil rights movement is sort of evolving from these federated grassroots organizations that had a very local presence to the very top down expert driven organizations of today.
Okay.
Yeah, so I'm gonna I'm gonna have to bring it down a lot.
Yeah, I gotta bring it down.
Yeah.
So the finding indicated that, you know, the finding from the Generosity Commission indicated that so within our arc, I would say, we're seeing a cultural shift is what they kind of ascribe changes to.
Would you agree with that? Yeah.
And neither of these authors would disagree with that.
Right.
Right.
There's no, there's no refuting.
It's the understand, it's the ability for us to understand that.
Yeah.
And to, to discuss why.
And, and so when I read the article, it, it makes me think about some observations that I've had in our space.
I noticed that a lot of.
Organizations are apprehensive to ask for money.
And so if we don't ask for money, generosity is going to go down because people don't give what they don't know is needed, right? I actually, this, this really surprised me.
I worked with a nonprofit or I met with a nonprofit a couple of months ago and they said, we just figured out that we deserve to ask for money.
And I was like, Oh, wow.
Right.
So.
I've seen that.
The other thing is, I think that we have a lot, there's been a lot of shifts.
in how we ask for money.
We have definitely gone to a more electronic route of it instead of the person to person interactions for asking for money.
And that is definitely a cultural shift.
I am a terrible phone caller.
So, you know, I know that as a generation, people my age and under me, like they don't like making those phone calls.
personal interaction, phone calls, which is one of the ways that we've previously raised money.
And so your argument is, okay, well, what, you know, has generosity really changed? Or have we changed? The way that we're engaging with people, right, to perhaps to perhaps make this very you know, to perhaps really sort of bring this to a very succinct sort of way of sort of, so if you if you look at the changes that have happened over the last half century since the civil rights movement sort of what we would call the neoliberal.
era.
And you look at the world of non profit organizations and the world of professional fundraising through the lens of Putnam's critique versus Scotch Bowl's critique.
What you can begin to make sense of better with Scotch Bowl, and this is the critique I was making with the Generosity Commission's Report is that they're not allowing us to see That we have essentially changed the way we relate to donors We essentially have changed the nature of our relationship And the donors not respond.
That's not a choice that the donor made That's a choice that the non profit organizations and their experts made we decided to treat our donors like consumers rather than, rather than citizens.
And this is something I've been saying for quite some time.
I've been writing about it.
I've been finding authors that sort of help, but these two authors I'm referencing in the, in the article and, and as this report is what, what the generosity commission is not interested in doing.
And I understand why they're not interested in doing this.
This is what I'm suggesting in the article is they don't want to, sort of turn back the clock.
They don't want to go back to an understanding of our relationships with citizens.
They like the idea and they benefit their, their companies that are, that they represent benefit from this consumer oriented take on, on fundraising.
And so, you know, 95 percent of our donors for the last half century have had relationships with nonprofit organizations that were almost completely indistinguishable from those relationships that they have with the marketplace.
It's very consistent of neoliberalism.
That's very consistent with the telling of history for the last half century by through any lens.
And what I'm saying in that article is that this that they is this commission who's supposed to be you know, giving us really great things to think about.
They need to contend with that very simple concept that we changed the nature of our relationship.
That was largely done on our part.
The donor didn't ask to be treated like a passive consumer.
And here we are.
And then we say, okay, there's 20 million donors that haven't given in the last couple of decades.
Well, Some of us get tired of being treated like passive consumers, and that's what you got.
It's not, in my mind, it's not all that complicated.
Yeah.
Well, and it's not even about being tired of being treated like a consumer, but you know, if you're not really part of the community, you forget, right.
You just forget about the impact that the nonprofit is making in the world.
And but I think people want to, you know, I think people want to, so.
What are your recommendations for a nonprofit? Okay.
So I have said, so let me answer that question real quick and, and pay kudos to the, just the idea of podcasting.
For example, I've said to a number of my clients, you have to learn how to produce.
And I referenced podcasting is a very practical, on the ground example of facilitating a conversation rather than this very You know, commoditized marketable product that shows up in our mailboxes, for example, which is just a one directional sort of form of communication.
And so we're going to have to move away from, you know, the What has been called sort of the, the industrial interruption, the idea of interrupting our donors.
And we're going to have to actually have conversations just of the sort like you and I are.
And we're also going to have to be comfortable with the idea that this is not going to be a highly professional produced broadcast.
You're going to put this out as quickly as you, as you, as you so desire.
And I think our relationships with our donors need to look more like what you and I are doing here today.
It's just a conversation.
The other thing, the other thing you and I don't know, Sarah, about this conversation is we don't know where it's going to go.
We don't, it's not predictable.
So we're not sitting here trying to analyze and anticipate and and sort of forecast with a bunch of data on you and me and try to anticipate where this is going to go.
So we're not we don't know where this is going to go.
We may never talk again, or we might find ways to collaborate in a myriad of other ways going forward.
But for the time being, we're just going to engage in a meaningful conversation for 45 minutes.
Yes.
We need to do that with our donors.
Yeah.
And so I've been I'm a, I love community.
I really practice very practical habits.
That helped me engage with people.
And, and I've worked in the church sector.
I've done women's classes for years.
And I I've always said, it's a practice, right? We practice it.
And I think in the conversation, you know, having conversations and having coffee, the nice thing is it is.
a self a self perpetuating practice once we start it.
Like, it's so joyful and wonderful to actually have a conversation with a donor and hear that they love what you do and why they love what you do, right? When you do that, you're like, oh, I need to have more of those coffees.
You know, this is really a good thing.
I might want to have another coffee with this person.
I might want to have another coffee with someone else on my list, right? So it's, I think, It is really a practical approach to recognizing that we have forgotten some of these skills and I think COVID definitely.
COVID highlighted both sides of it, right? In some ways, COVID has perpetuated our four face to face interactions or, or line to line or whatever that is, because, you know, we, we've become more comfortable in Zoom, but it also opened up opportunities to be able to have conversations like we're having on the regular without having to travel.
So now when we think about interacting with our donors.
We actually have so many opportunities.
We could jump on a zoom with them.
They're familiar with it.
We're familiar with it and it could be beneficial.
So, you know, I think that there's just a lot of opportunity on both sides.
Oh yeah.
I think, I think the thing that we in the nonprofit sector are not thinking about when it comes to COVID is that it's in those very unsettling, unpredictable times like COVID when some of the most disruptive innovations really happen.
So there were people, there were people in communities that experienced things in the midst of COVID.
It's kind of like what we call the silver lining, right? There were people that experienced things in the midst of COVID that were not characteristic of the traditional way that nonprofit organization and fundraising works.
And those types of experiences are going to translate into new and innovative ways that our sector is going to go about serving communities.
And raising funds and we haven't seen how all that's yet going to manifest But I think that's the thing that we have to be thinking about is and this is again, this is what i'm getting at in that article is we've got to The idea that mutual aid for example has continuously been talked about time and time again since the pandemic the idea that giving circles Are such a popular way of giving all of these things the idea that the pandemic You surfaced for a lot of us the loneliness pandemic, you know, the epidemic that we're in the midst of All of this is interrelated.
There's an interconnected to this whole conversation And when someone like the generosity commission writes a report that's 90 pages long And doesn't touch on any of these things You have to wonder what their motives are because they didn't touch on any of this stuff.
They didn't touch on any of it in a way that actually allows the nonprofit organization to actually change their habits, to go about their work differently, to perhaps contend with the fact that direct mail is not actually delivering on the quality of relationships that they need, et cetera, et cetera.
It just sort of gave you this, like I said, this Puskum Putnamess, sort of the scan across the you know, District distressed, just, you know, depressing sort of state of affairs that we're in.
Well, thank you.
I can read that and I can read that all over the place.
Yeah.
So I'm an optimist, obviously, if you interact with me very long, you'll know.
So I'll assume, you know, the best of them and that they missed the opportunity, but it just means that there are so many more opportunities for us to fight back that that globalization of the condition of the nonprofit.
Sector and explore new ways.
And so I really applaud that you spoke up and said, Wait, this doesn't consider all of these things.
And that's what the rest of us need to do.
We need to bring awareness to the fact that it's not, it's not all about.
You can't depend on any one report, right? Those all have biases and they all have limitations.
And we need to, as a sector, really unite and have conversations.
Have these conversations about other things that we can do and other perspectives.
Because, Those are true also, you know, the power of, and it can be, yes, that, that may be true.
And this is also true.
And so, so, you know, being able to do that, well, thank you so much for sharing that.
I want to get well, tell everyone how they can find you if they are wanting to interact with you more and learn more about the work that you do.
Yeah.
So, thank you, Sarah.
I've really enjoyed this conversation and And I welcome the opportunity to continue any part of it that, that you're so inclined.
We can be our, our our consultancy is found at responsivefundraising.
com.
You can certainly put the, the link to the company there in your show notes.
Several of the books that we've referenced in this conversation, they're included in our library, which is one of the pages there on the website.
So you can certainly do that.
I write on Substack, the article that we've been discussing was was originally published at the Butterfly Effect is the name of our we have a, our logo has a little butterfly in it and so, we we refer to our Substack as the Butterfly Effect and, and this article also has been picked up, like I said, by the Chronicle and you can perhaps find the article there so you, by the time this goes by the time you publish this, you might be able to just put the link there.
as well.
Yeah, it's so exciting.
Okay.
So thank you for sharing that, but you're not done yet.
Okay.
You get to, you get to give your best piece of advice for our nonprofit listeners.
What do you think they need to consider or do as we move forward, knowing that, you know, there are a lot of opportunities for them to engage in communities in new ways and in different ways.
What's the best piece of advice or the final piece of advice that you have to give today? Yeah and this isn't like heady.
This isn't coming out of any books or anything.
Just I'm a big baseball guy.
And so one of the things that I've recently begun writing about and it's certainly a piece of advice that I give to to fundraisers when they, you know, I'll be doing a speaking engagement or something and they'll come up to me afterwards and they'll ask a similar question.
And I'll oftentimes say to them, Sarah, get out in the field.
And what I mean by that is, is that we as fundraisers have got to get out from behind our desks and get out into the field.
We have to get in front of our donors.
So if a young fundraiser, for example, comes to me and they say, I've been in this work for a couple of years.
I appreciate what you just said on the platform.
I want to be a leader, et cetera, et cetera, whatever they might share with me.
I say, spend as much of your time in front of the donor at the lunch table out in the field.
And, and not, Using the baseball analogy baseball when you're not out in the field when activities not actually out in the field becomes a very boring baseball game when all we're doing is hitting home runs.
It's not an enjoyable baseball game.
Well, the same is true for for fundraising.
If we're not actually out into the community.
interacting with our donors.
And when I'm saying this to a young fundraiser, for example, somebody who's aspiring to raise extraordinary gifts, I'm saying, I don't care about the size of the check that this individual can write either.
Because actually, Sarah, it's kind of like the point you made a few minutes ago.
It's the idea that sort of this, this, this momentum will sort of build on top of itself.
So your ability to have a conversation with any individual who's writing.
Any contribution to your organization will enhance your ability to have a conversation with the individual who perhaps can write you that million dollar check.
So stop worrying yourself over whether or not the donor across the lunch table can actually write that six figure, seven figure gift.
Just have lunch with somebody.
And, and just like, again, like you and I are doing, just learn how to do this.
And.
Because I think there's so much automation and so there's so much about technology that's going to do a lot of the things that we think we can do and what's actually going to happen in your space and in my space and a lot of them is we're going to rely on the ability to have those very meaningful conversations.
You know this in your grant writing work.
The ability for you to be able to have a meaningful conversation with the funder is one of the most valuable assets in the writing process.
I say the same, I'll say the same thing to a major gifts officer, the ability for you to have a meaningful conversation that you then, I mean, it's the same shit.
It's the same process.
And then for you to be able to carry that back and put it in a written proposal, like you would in a grant.
I mean, you and I know that that's gold, right? Yes, because then you're not wasting your time and spending your wheels.
You know, you know, in, in aligning with our donors is 90 percent of the challenge, right? So knowing what they want, We have what they want to like, we are able to offer what they want hands down.
There's rarely a case where you can't offer what your donor wants.
Even if it's just a referral to a different organization that actually aligns with their heart.
That is also an option, but you know, generally They've already aligned with our mission by the time we're having a conversation with them, or they align with something, like, right, we sat down with a conversation, and once you align with it, you can easily fit in.
You can figure it out.
It is so easy once you actually do it, to say, oh, wait, Oh, well, I get that you're not interested in that, but let me tell you what we do over here.
Right.
And when you do that automatically, you create relationship and, you know, relationship matters and it lasts for a long time.
And when you can remember and care about what they care about too, even better.
That's one of the gifts that like, you know, I have it, I just remember people.
I remember people's stories.
I actually wrote in my Bible, like, I am so thankful for the stories and the people that have been given to me.
I don't often remember people's names.
I'm, I'm trying to learn to be better about that.
Yeah, I get that.
Yeah.
Remember their story, man.
And I can, every single time, recall what was really important to them.
And that matters.
And then, a lot of times, I can, I can make that bridge to on what our organization does that aligns with that too.
So, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's you listen, you're listening to language.
I mean, you're capturing language.
And so if you can incorporate their language, use their words, even just simple terms, you know, you pick up on the idea that they use one term versus your use of another.
Yeah.
And we can't do that electronically.
It just, you have to know, you have to actually get to know the person.
So I love that advice.
Get out there in the field.
Get out there and have some conversations.
And like I say, once you start practicing it, you'll find out that like, Hey, this is fun.
That's where the fun of fundraising happens.
So thank you for the conversation today.
I've really, really enjoyed it.
I hope our listeners enjoy listening to it.
Tune in next week and we will have another great conversation.
Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Nonprofit 411.
I hope you found today's conversation as insightful and inspiring as I did.
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