Just as importantly, the shift gives agency to that individual to tell her own story in her own voice. Such advocacy should not be conducted as a “show-and-tell,” but rather to empower those most directly impacted to help shape policy decisions.

To support such advocacy, you will often need to provide advocacy training, use your relationships and networks, and bring community members to conferences and other events where they can directly access officials, funders, and other powerholders. You will need to make space and release control. And cede power.

The most important relationship your organization will have is with those it serves. They are central to your organization’s purpose. But to effectively serve that community, you also need resources, particularly funding. This makes your funders another critically important partner for your organization, and we’ll explore that relationship in the next chapter.

PEOPLE AND COMMUNITIES ACTION POINTS

Ensure Those You Serve Are at the Center

Put the people and the community your organization serves at the center of your work.

In so doing, recognize the very real differences in power between your organization and those it serves, and identify ways to help shift power to them.

Continuously seek community feedback on your work and act on it.

Promote those you serve by supporting them to advocate on their own behalf and helping them get access to those in power.

^* Perhaps the most problematic raid-and-rescue nonprofit is Operation Underground Railroad (O.U.R.), a US anti-trafficking organization that received a lot of publicity in 2023 with the release of the film The Sound of Freedom, based on the story of its founder and former CEO, Tim Ballard. For a critique of the film from the perspective of survivors and anti-trafficking experts, see Aubrey Lloyd and Erin Albright, “Sound of Freedom Is Everything an Anti-trafficking Film Shouldn’t Be,” openDemocracy, August 10, 2023, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/sound-of-freedom-tim-ballard-operation-underground-railroad-trafficking-film-review/. For more in-depth coverage of O.U.R.’s problematic raid-and-rescue model, see Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman, “Inside a Massive Anti-Trafficking Charity’s Blundering Overseas Missions,” Vice, March 8, 2021, www.vice.com/en/article/bvxev5/inside-a-massive-anti-trafficking-charitys-blundering-overseas-missions; Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman, “A Famed Anti-Sex Trafficking Group Has a Problem With the Truth,” Vice, December 10, 2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7a3qw/a-famed-anti-sex-trafficking-group-has-a-problem-with-the-truth; Meg Conley, “Called by God,” Slate, May 11, 2021, slate.com/human-interest/2021/05/sex-trafficking-raid-operation-underground-railroad.html; Thomas Stackpole, “The New Abolitionists,” Foreign Policy, accessed December 10, 2022, foreignpolicy.com/2015/07/22/the-new-abolitionists-mexico-dominican-republic-human-trafficking-mormon-our/; Anna Merlan and Tim Marchman, “Tim Ballard Left Operation Underground Railroad After Investigation into Claims Made by Employees,” Vice, July 18, 2023, https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7b3ex/tim-ballard-left-operation-underground-railroad-after-investigation-into-claims-made-by-employees.

^* For more details of these results, see Dan Vexler, “Are We Staying True to Our DNA?” Freedom Fund website, January 12, 2023, www.freedomfund.org/blog/true-to-our-dna/.

CHAPTER 9

Funders

Build Resonant Relationships to Encourage Giving

The hope you feed with your gift is likely to feed your own.

—MacKenzie Scott¹

One of the more joyful experiences in my nonprofit career started with an enigmatic email, from someone I’d never heard of, with an obscure email address and domain. It read:

I support the efforts of donors who are interested in giving to Freedom Fund after learning about your work through a wide range of sources . . . I was hoping to schedule a quick ~20-minute follow-up call to discuss next steps . . . Given donor confidentiality, which I’ll explain further on the call, this conversation should be just the two of us.

A hazard of being a nonprofit CEO is that I regularly receive pitches from fundraising consultants, often framed to imply donor interest in the Freedom Fund. This email was sufficiently ambiguous that I thought it might be one of those. I couldn’t find any information about the sender on the internet to enlighten me one way or the other. But I was also aware that one of the world’s most generous philanthropists, MacKenzie Scott, was in the process of making a round of big grants to impactful nonprofits, and that she operated with a high degree of confidentiality. So part of me hoped that this email was a prelude to a grant from her. But given how many other organizations deserved her support, I largely discounted that possibility.

I scheduled a call as requested. A week later, my heart jumped when the woman who had emailed me started our call with, “I represent MacKenzie Scott and she wants to make a significant gift to the Freedom Fund.” I waited with bated breath to hear what was meant by “significant.” Hearing “$35 million,” I was sufficiently stunned that I asked her to repeat the amount, slowly, as I suspected I may have misheard. I hadn’t. Our annual budget at this stage was $18 million. What’s more, the proposed funding was completely unrestricted, meaning it was entirely up to the Freedom Fund to decide how to spend the funds. We could spend them in one year, over multiple years, or put them into an endowment. We could spend them on programs or fundraising or on our own infrastructure—such as purchasing an office building—or a mix of these. Our sole obligations were to (a) keep the news confidential until it was publicly announced by Ms. Scott, and (b) provide her team with a three- or four-page summary each year for three years on the work of our organization. That was it. The $35 million was deposited in our bank account a week later, and a public announcement was made a few weeks after that.

I hesitate to open this chapter with this story, which clearly falls at the far end of the fundraising spectrum. As such, can it hold any useful lessons for other organizations? For most small nonprofits, a $5,000 donation is a big deal, and rightly so. But I do think this experience, even though it’s an outlier, is still illustrative of important elements of the fundraising process. For a start, it’s not a unique experience—as of early 2023, Ms. Scott has now given away over $14 billion to over 1,600 nonprofits.² But the larger point is that big gifts don’t just fall out of the sky. Not even this one.

Several months before this call, we had been approached by the Bridgespan Group, the world’s largest philanthropic consultancy firm, operating on behalf of an anonymous donor, who had asked it to carry out due diligence on the Freedom Fund. We went through an exhaustive process with them: sharing several years’ worth of accounts, board papers, detailed documentation of our impact and monitoring processes, strategic plan and operating plans, and participating in a couple of probing meetings. Again, I was conscious that Bridgespan had acted for Ms. Scott in the past, but they also acted for hundreds of other donors, so I had no way of knowing if this process would lead to any specific commitment by Ms. Scott or any other donor. After hearing nothing from the company for a couple of months after the due diligence, I’d largely given up whatever faint hope I had that this could be the prelude to a big gift.

And arguably, the process didn’t even start with Bridgespan outreach. We were only in a position to attract the attention of Ms. Scott and Bridgespan, and to pass the scrutiny of such an exhaustive process, because of the quality of the organization and the impact of our work. And those were many years in the making.

THE COMPONENTS OF SUCCESSFUL FUNDRAISING

There are no shortcuts to fundraising. There are many components that go into effective fundraising, and the more of these you can draw upon, the more successful your fundraising will be. They include:

A compelling cause

A clear strategy

Commitment by the leadership to fundraising efforts

A powerful story of what you have done, and plan to do

Demonstrated impact

A credible team, starting with the CEO

An ability to build relationships with potential donors

An ability to maintain relationships with existing donors

A record of delivering on your commitments

The mix will differ for each organization and will change during the life of a nonprofit. A start-up nonprofit won’t have demonstrated impact, so its fundraising efforts will rely more on strategy and story. A well-established nonprofit will have a demonstrated history of impact, so its fundraising will likely highlight delivery, relationships, and future plans.

At the heart of all successful fundraising efforts are relationships. You need resonant relationships with your funders, particularly when raising from foundations and philanthropists. You also need a strong relationship with members of the public, or governments, if you are seeking contributions from them—though in those cases the relationships will be different, and other factors may have added weight. And the starting point for relationships is the attitude you bring to fundraising. If you don’t have the right mindset, you will struggle to build the relationships you need.

LEADERS MUST EMBRACE FUNDRAISING

Your organization may have a compelling mission and strategy, outstanding staff, a track record of impact, and exciting opportunities ahead of it to drive powerful change, but if it can’t mobilize the necessary funding, then it will struggle to achieve its objectives. The case for the importance of fundraising is as straightforward as that. As the leader, you are responsible for ensuring your organization gets that funding. You can do that yourself or via colleagues, but however you do it, you are ultimately responsible. You will be a much more successful fundraiser if you embrace that truth instead of having to be dragged kicking and screaming to the fundraising table.

Many CEOs feel deeply uncomfortable about fundraising, and I understand that. Some think that, given they are working on a powerful cause, the best use of their time is to focus on the issues and delivery and not on asking donors for money. But there will be no delivery if you don’t have the funding you need.

Others think that asking for money is beneath them, or somehow tawdry. But until you come up with a different funding model, then to the extent that you require donors to give to your organization you will need to accept that almost all nonprofits have to ask donors for funding. Very few nonprofits generate substantial funding of their own, so most need to rely on others to provide financial support. The sooner you accept that reality, the better placed your organization will be.

For myself, I’ve enthusiastically embraced my fundraising role, as I see myself, as CEO, strongly placed to make the case for the impact and change that donors can support by funding the Freedom Fund. And, in turn, the more successful we are at mobilizing funding, the more ambitious we can be. I find that highly motivating.

THE IMPORTANCE OF RELATIONSHIPS

When you are asking people to give to your organization, you need to persuade them that they should support your cause and organization over others (or in addition to them). To do this effectively, you need to tell a compelling story, and you need to build a resonant relationship. Donors give to organizations that align with their values and interests, and in response to perceived needs.³

Then, when they become donors, you need to maintain that relationship—both to honor the giving, and to encourage their ongoing investment. The research shows that connections and a relationship with nonprofit organizations are key drivers of charitable giving.⁴ As I repeatedly remind my staff, every existing donor is a potential future donor; you want them to renew their funding when their current grant expires and to stay involved with your organization.

I take donor relationships a step further, and generally try to stay in touch with funders even when they have stopped funding our organization. I do this first because they have already provided funding to the cause I believe in, for which I remain thankful. And secondly, a former donor can always become a future donor or, if not, they can still be a powerful advocate for your work and help persuade others to support your organization.

There is no secret to building a strong relationship with a donor. It’s much the same as building any resonant relationship. You need to engage them in the cause, the organization, and the change they can contribute to. You need to do your research and ensure that you understand their priorities and can make a compelling case for why they align with those of your organization. Nothing is more frustrating to a funder than someone pitching them for something completely unrelated to their known interests, without any effort to build a meaningful connection. Wearing my other hat, as a funder (as the Freedom Fund has provided financial support to some 150 grassroots organizations around the world), I often get unsolicited appeals for funding from organizations. Too often, they haven’t taken the time to find out which countries or regions we work in or, sometimes, the issues we work on. This is a waste of everyone’s time.

A common mistake that fundraisers make with donors, particularly with those making large gifts, is to make the relationship overtly transactional. Donors become understandably irritated being treated primarily as a checkbook and subjected to aggressive pitches on why they should donate. Of course, the relationship has a transactional element— you are asking someone to give your organization money, after all—but being treated solely in terms of their ability to give is problematic for most donors. This is why you and your organization must invest in the relationship before making any pitch. Build the relationship, engage on the cause, and then you can talk about how the funder can contribute to advancing the mission.

INTERVIEW

The Challenge of Raising Funds for a Start-Up Nonprofit