#189 | Perhaps consumerism is not the right framework for fundraising?
Why do we always banter over the question of whether fundraising is like sales, or insist that it’s more akin to marketing and PR? Regardless of what side of this senseless debate we’re on, the donor is always in the seat we’ve assigned them: the consumer. My conversation today with Audra and Kelly really got our wheels turning and evolved quickly into an all-out assault on those who are content with fundraising as merely a consumer science. This frame of thinking leads us to form a very dysfunctional relationship with the “no” and prevents us from affording our donors the patience that can ensure genuine and meaningful relationships before we attempt to get into their wallets.
The consequence of all this is that a large majority of fundraising professionals are not having meaningful conversations with their donors; because they are not encouraged to do so, they don’t really know how. This absence of meaningful conversations forbids us from creating places where fundraising can thrive. As Audra and Kelly aptly point out, all this dysfunction hinges on our boards’ and bosses‘ fixations with short-sighted metrics that deliver on efficiency, predictability and control.
As always, we are grateful to the support we receive from OneCause. As mentioned during the break, if you’d like to talk to Theresa Lee or Heather Klein Olson, MBA, CFRE about our training, please reach out to one of them to start a conversation.
Podcast Transcript
Audra: Hi. I'm Audra Pinkerton. I am a new team member to CU Boulder Leeds School of Business. I spent seven years at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, the last five as a major gift officer covering the southwest US which is how I fell in love with Colorado and ended up out here. Kelly?
Kelly: I'm Kelly Hall. I am also a director of development at the Leeds School of Business at CU Boulder. I've been with the team for two years. And prior to that spent somewhere between three and five years with a variety of non-profits in the Denver metro area all in a fundraising capacity. I'm delighted to be here.
Jason: Yeah, I'm delighted to be talking to you too. I told both of you before I hit the record button that I've got a client out there that I haven't seen and I have a client in the Denver metro area, that I haven't seen in four or five months. So what's it like out there? I mean, how has Covid 19 sort of affected the great State of Colorado and what's it mean out there?
Kelly: Well, I think largely we have been lucky from the perspective that we live in a state with a fairly mild climate. We have some hot days, but for the most part we can be outside as much as or a little as we want even in the winter months. So we have really tried to take advantage of that.
The challenge of course has been that we've had recently an influx of people from Sun Belt States who are trying to escape their heat and coming to Colorado, so that has been a little bit more of a challenge in that a lot of our front range, what we call kind of the Denver side of the mountain's hiking areas and outdoor areas have been really busy. So I think we're all looking forward to some cooler weather and folks kind of heading back to their home states so we can have our mountains back. But, otherwise, I think we've been mostly good. Audra, would you disagree?
Audra: No, I wouldn't disagree at all. And I think we got, lucky perhaps not being the right word, but when they shut the mountains down in March that really, really saved us in my opinion from a lot ... it could have been a lot worse here. When they shut the ski resorts down and didn't allow tourism that really saved our numbers.
Jason: Yeah, I would not have even thought about that, but yeah, I have to imagine that was probably particularly strategic. I mean, it's one thing to be social distancing on the ski slope, but there's a lot of time that people spend indoors while they're at the ski resorts and large dining rooms and those sorts of things. So I can certainly appreciate that.
Kelly: But I think for the most part Colorado ends are ... this is the wild west, you have to be kind of hail and hearty to live here in a lot of ways, and so we tend to be a fairly resilient bunch and also a fairly entrepreneurial bunch, so finding ways to continue to do all the things that we do in a remote capacity and use it as a learning opportunity. I think we all had our grief in the early days for what life used to be like and I think a lot of folks have come out the other side with new ideas and new ways of doing things that are probably in the long run going to enrich our experiences in Colorado more than and more quickly than we would have seen maybe without Covid.
Jason: Yeah, so the two of you compared notes and reached out and said you have a topic to discuss, so what is that topic? And I'm going to totally follow your lead. I've got a sense of where we're going, but ... and I think, honestly, I don't think it's a topic or a mindset that we have talked in the 170 plus episodes. So I think it's pretty cool that we're going to go there.
Audra: Absolutely. Kelly and I brainstormed about it and I think it's neat coming from different institutions. Like I said, I was seven years with the University of Rochester, but truly having abundance, an abundance mentality, and how that can impact your culture, impact your fundraisers and really changing the way you look at philanthropy from an institutional standpoint. Kelly?
Kelly: Yeah, we both have spent a lot of time talking about what aspects of fundraising do we feel like suffer as a function of the frenetic pace that we operate at. And the upside to the fact that we're all working from home and can't travel and really have to have more strategic conversations is that it's enabled us to kind of bring to the surface some of the ways that we've done business that harm us in the long run and ways that we can maybe start to dismantle those ideas and start working together to do business better. So one of the things that we felt like kind of was a theme throughout all of the challenges when we really looked at the way we fundraise as major gift officers is this mindset that we have to say to yes everyone who offers, who wants to give, we have to say yeah regardless of whether or not that's good for our organization.
And that having this mindset of scarcity that there's never enough, we're never going to have enough, whatever, fundraised enough, that we never have enough major gift officers, that we never have enough donors is starting to really damage the institutions that we work for as well as the fundraiser. So we wanted to flip that on its head and talk about what it would be like if everyone was trained in the opposite which is that there is more than enough and that we could approach every aspect of our work from that place.
Jason: So I am a very big fan, I suspect most, a lot of people in the fundraising space have read Lynne Twist's book, The Soul of Money.
Kelly: Yes.
Jason: And she talks about the idea of sufficiency, which I have to imagine is sort of somewhere along the lines in what you're both thinking, and it's the idea, and she's spent a lot of her career in fundraising and it's sort of built around that idea that that scarcity mindset puts us in this constant, what I tend to be critiquing with a lot of my listeners and people who sit in my trainings and read my stuff hear me talking about, is this constant accumulation of more and more donors. And then it gets in the way of us being able to develop meaningful relationships with the donors we already have and in discovering some of that abundance, which I suspect is somewhat the two of you are going to get at.
Kelly: That's right. One of the things that came up early on in our Covid times was our colleagues were asking the question, "What do I say to somebody who says, 'I'm shifting my philanthropy to focus on PPE or climate change or Black Lives Matter,' like how do I approach a conversation like that?" And we realize that that fear around what do I say to a donor who wants to prioritize a different aspect of their philanthropy comes from this idea that we're constantly having to shoehorn donors into our priorities as opposed to meeting them where they're at and helping them to achieve the kind of transformational change they want to achieve through philanthropy.
And so instead if the conversation was more, "Okay, tell me more about that. Tell me more about why you're prioritizing PPE or Black Lives Matter. And what is it that you hope to achieve with your philanthropy?" And engaging in dialogue, we probably would accomplish the same ends or we would be able to disqualify someone and not "waste our time", but not devote a lot of energy and time to someone who no longer wants to prioritize fundraising or giving to your organization.
Audra: Well, and I'll layer on to that too, I think, Kelly, you and I had talked about when we were discussing this podcast, using that no as two things in my head, (a) now I know you're philanthropic, that's half the battle as a fundraiser, right, is, is this person philanthropic? I don't care if you're Bill Gates, if you're not philanthropic it doesn't matter. And then the second thing is using that no to, like Kelly said, understand where you are in their philanthropy. Because odds are whatever your institution is, you're one of many areas that they support. And understanding where your rank and file is there is huge. But I think getting that information that they're philanthropic is such a beautiful thing, and how you can better understand your donor and how that can lead your navigation of your conversations going forward if they're needed, right? If you disqualify them that's also fabulous. I think that's just a beautiful start.
Jason: Audra, it makes me think about ... this is the fascinating thing about having these podcast conversations because it creates this enlightening ... I get to contemplate the way that people are talking. And so I'm listening to the word no, for example, and I almost wonder if fundraising has gotten this sort of ... we've got this dysfunctional, I'll call it dysfunctional, this dysfunctional definition of what the word no means. And I think we've gotten to the place where or we've got to get to the place where the word no doesn't mean no, we don't want to have a relationship with you.
If you think about it, we all have meaningful relationships in all sorts of context. My wife and I, for example, there's all sorts of times where no place a very necessary and meaningful and purposeful part in our relationship. And I think in fundraising and perhaps in other parts of our world we've allowed no to mean nothing, it becomes that poverty mindset, it's sort of rooted in that poverty mindset. But then it also, on the flip side, it becomes that if we have to run from the no then do we have to exploit everyone who says is yes?
Kelly: That's right.
Jason: It's kind of what it is. And so it actually creates this dysfunctional relationship both with the people who say no but also with the people who say yes.
Kelly: Well, and often I do ... Oh, go ahead, Audra.
Audra: Go ahead, Kelly, you're on a roll.
Kelly: Okay, I was going to say that the pieces that are attached to that no are also we have taught fundraisers largely to be afraid of the no, to always be working towards a yes. And so we do a couple of things, the one is that we don't ask good follow-up questions about that no instead we're just still kind of trying to pivot somebody towards a yes as opposed to just really digging in and building empathy with them. And then we also, to your point about dysfunction, we fixate so much on this false dichotomy, the no and the yes to giving, that we miss an opportunity to have a conversation about actually solving one of the world's most intractable problems, right?
So if as a university we are the marketplace of ideas, really whatever it is that folks want to try to accomplish with their philanthropy there is likely a tether to what we do at the university. And so there's an opportunity to still engage with that person even if they're prioritizing giving to an elected representative in a presidential election year, there's still an opportunity to steward and engage with that person so that they know that you're there and thinking about them and want them to be a part of your community long after the presidential election is over. But we think about it in such binary terms, yes or no, that then we just turn off after somebody says no. Whereas, if we had an abundance mentality that no would mean, "I got to know more about what's behind that. What does this person really care about? Is there more there that I just haven't bothered to ask about, that I haven't bothered to build relationship with, that there actually might be things that they don't know about my organization that they should know?"
Audra: And I think, Kelly, that ties in really well to your point about letting the donor lead the conversation. In my previous role I came from a regional perspective, so I was fundraising for everything that the university had to offer. And now Kelly and I both represent the Leeds School of Business, but we are responsible for raising money for the Leeds
School of Business, and I think from an abundance mentality standpoint if we can approach the conversation to really resonate with what's important to the donor that can lead to a culture of change, right? We're doing a really cool project now at Leeds where we're combining the business and engineering building, that is the perfect example of, "Wow, I might not be super passionate about business, but if I take the time to ask the right questions of this donor and learn - holy cow, they're really interested in aerospace and entrepreneurship." That's a perfect marriage.
And I think that culture can be systemic, right? If all of our fundraisers go in and think, "I have to fundraise for this specific thing or it's a failure." Well, no, you're never going to get to that really big, meaningful, sexy gift if you're not putting that idea out there in front of your donors. I think that's a challenge that we have culturally, right? You're raising money for one specific thing instead of, "Tell me your dream, donor. Tell me what you want to see the world be," right?
Jason: So I had a guest on here at the conversation broadcast very recently and he was sharing, he's a development officer with the Catholic schools in Philadelphia, and he was talking about ... sort of the essence of what he was basically talking about is the failure that we make in the way that we train up fundraisers to sort of know how to have these conversations to which would be the place where you would both get comfortable, you would begin to discern what the yes and the no mean and the timeliness and the situation that sort of surrounds that donor. But you would also ... you'd be able to ... It's the importance of context. So I think a lot of what he was sharing, and this is certainly along the lines of some of the stuff that I'm working on a writing project right now, it's the idea that some of the non-verbal communication that comes with very meaningful interaction like a lunch table conversation where you can see expression and so forth, whereas a lot of our fundraising is so explicit, relying primarily on what we can write in words and put on a screen and put in a letter or in a proposal.
And I think to get back to the notion of abundance, I don't think you're going to find that abundance if we're not having meaningful conversations like two-way communication with these people. You're not going to be able to find abundance and see that and really grasp it if all we're doing is just putting mail out to these people.
Kelly: That's right. And we also, to your point about how we train fundraisers, we as a profession, and Audra and I are really passionate about lifting up our work very much as professionals, but this is not work that just anybody can do. And it's also not the same as sales, and really what we're talking about when we talk about being philanthropic advisors and doing this kind of work is that we don't go out and just vomit up a menu of options for people to give to and hope something sticks. Instead, we do exactly that kind of nuanced communication where we're looking for changes in body language and tone. And I mean, it's part of what makes this work right now so hard, you can't physically see people. But we're looking for all of those things.
Which also means that when you're training up new fundraisers they have to see you do that, they have to experience it very viscerally in their bodies as they go through it themselves and then have an opportunity for feedback. But because we have a scarcity mentality we bring new fundraisers on and immediately send them out into the world to go chill whatever product we're selling, as opposed to an abundance mentality would enable you as an institution to slow down and be confident that if I do a good job bringing that person up and training them and teaching them that kind of nuance to really be able to see and smell and feel, that then when they go out they'll raise so much more money because they're able to navigate that nuance than they would if we just sent them out immediately and were scrounging up $5,000 at a time.
Audra: Exactly. And it goes into as well what you measure, right? Especially as a new fundraiser you're going to go out and tick all the boxes, because this we're all type A people in this field, most of us. And if I'm measured on visits and asks and (closes?), well, what am I going to achieve? I'm going to hit those numbers whether I raise money or not, so I think looking at your culture and looking at the way you measure fundraisers, yes, it can be a soft metric and it can be hard, but I think the benefit of being in this industry for a while frankly I don't really pay attention to my metrics anymore because I understand that if I do my job well and I do it properly then I will raise money. And at the end of the day that's the metric I measured on, and the rest of them can fall by the wayside.
But as a new fundraiser you can't think that way, it's too intimidating. So what is your institution measuring that is going to create that culture to allow new fundraisers to thrive and be successful?
Jason: Are we going to have to get to the place ... so I oftentimes hear ... we oftentimes hear this sort of this resistance to the idea that fundraising is not sales, but on the flip side of it, and I agree wholeheartedly - I don't think it's sales, I don't think we need a private sector view of what we do at all. But at the same time I see plenty of us being okay that it resembles PR and marketing, for example, which are all just it's just basically the idea that our donors are consumers. And I think when we look at our donors like their consumers buying a product, whether it's advertising or marketing or PR or sales that gets them to do that, that's where ... Walmart and Target rely on a scarcity mindset because if you don't spend money at Walmart you're going to spend it at Target and vice versa, and they only stay open if they get a yes. Their profit, their shareholder value is not going up if you say no.
And I think we've got to ... anytime I have these types of conversations I tend to push it back to the fact that fundraising's in its messy adolescence and we've got to cut the cord with PR, marketing, sales, private sector. They're not consumers, they're not buying anything from you. And we've got to define the relationship between our donors and the exchange of value and money as something other than the fact that they're buying a widget from you.
Kelly: That's right.
Audra: I came from sales. I came from commercial sales so I think this conversation is always a little bit funny, and I 100% agree. I think while there are skills that are transferable, obviously we believe that.
Jason: Yes, totally.
Audra: It's like you said, it's the relationship you build with your donor. And I think it depends, right? And so there's things that work in PR and marketing that are always going to work, but you can't do that in a fundraising strategy ... to be strategic, right? That's the worst part of our job, I think there's never just a clear straight path, it's always what do I do with this donor? Oh, well, it depends, right? It depends on what they want their relationship to be, it depends on what the history is, it depends on where you are as an institution in your philanthropic journey, right? Are you like Dartmouth where you walk on campus and the first thing you hear is you're going to give back to this institution? Well, that's a lot different than a school that's just starting to educate their constituents on how to be engaged with the university.
Kelly: The fundamental difference between sales and philanthropy is that in sales we want you to keep buying whatever product it is that we're making, whereas in philanthropy, at least theoretically, we would like to be done at some point. We would like you to give us enough money that we could stop asking you for money, right? Like, let's solve poverty together, let's give the University of Colorado enough money so that it's in perpetuity financially set and can provide a high quality education and all the research it wants to do forever. That's a completely different value proposition than a Target or Walmart. Target or Walmart don't want to be done ever. They want to exist in perpetuity.
Jason: And the other thing about Target and Walmart, to kind of ... and I love that, I love the way you sort of phrase that. Again, this is where I get content to think through. I love the idea that if you think about it, and the other thing about Target and Walmart is they want to sell to you now, so they don't care what they sell you but they want to sell something now. So if I go over to my local Target right now, they don't want me to walk out without something. And they don't really care what it is as long as I bought something and I paid a margin above what they paid for it.
But if our goal like Kelly said is to eventually sort of get to the point where we don't have to ask anymore, we also have to get to the place where we also recognize the timeliness of that ask, and so we don't have to ask today. Because I learned this lesson when I was a gift officer for a large health charity in Washington, I've told this story a number of times here on the podcast, and it's probably the most ... one of the more profound lessons I learned. I hopped off that train, I was north of New York City, hopped off that train to meet with a major donor prospect with a current donor but we were upgrading, or you know how the mantra works.
And I asked for that gift so quickly she said yes so quickly that she got me back on the southbound train before ... I mean, I didn't even miss the next southbound train. And it's because I didn't have any of the layering and the context and there was nothing in that relationship other than the pure transaction and she knew, she showed up knowing, "This guy's going to ask me for money, and as long as it's a number that I'm comfortable with." And I went back with a $25,000 commitment, but I also in hindsight learned that there was nothing there other than that transaction. I was behaving and she behaved just like Walmart or Target would have wanted us to. And that $25,000 is never going to get that health charity to the place where they're never going to have to ask again. And so we're just getting this cyclical ... there was no abundance mindset for either of us in that case.
Audra: I'm just going to say I will never forget there was a similar example. I was with a peer and we were having first dinner with a donor and we were standing in his parking lot of his business, and he tried to hand us a check for $2500 and we gave it back to him. And we said, "Dr. so-and-so, we want you to think bigger, we want you to think beyond your checkbook."
Jason: Yes.
Audra: "We appreciate it, right? Thank you," right? We always say thank you. And he really appreciated that, and in years later we were still working on what he wanted to give. And yes, it took years but it's worth that effort, right? Kelly, go ahead, sorry. I keep doing that.
Audra: So I'm going to layer on top of that. That if we have an abundance mentality then as fundraisers we will take the time to educate our donors about how we do this work, and we will dismantle this perceived idea about what good fundraising and what good charity work looks like. We have done so many philanthropists a disservice by having them focus on stuff like 10% overhead as a litmus test for whether a non-profit is a good one and how long they've been in existence and who's on their board.
And instead, if we actually took the time to build a relationship with someone and help them to see that what good philanthropy and what good charity work looks like - it requires experts at the table, you have to pay them well, you have to have a plan for when you're done, for when you put yourself out of business because theoretically non-profits are in that business, then that ... The reason you have to have an abundance mentality is that because we have decided as non-profits to be afraid of our donors, to be afraid that if they could see under the hood and see how we do business that we would be called on the carpet for that.
And it's true, we have been. There are non-profits who have said for every dollar you give us 90 cents goes to the program, and then that turns out not to be true. And it's because they're having the wrong conversation. Instead of talking about how much your money that you give to my organization goes to either paid people to do the actual work or the actual work, then why don't we have a conversation about how we're actually solving the problem that we purport to solve? And by doing it ...
Jason: But, Kelly, they're not. Kelly, they're not having that. They're not having a conversation.
Kelly: So true.
Jason: I feel like the way you just described that you're giving credit to someone for actually having a conversation. I mean, let's not, the three of us be guilty of saying to the fundraising community that when you can explicitly say in an appeal letter that 90 cents of your dollar goes to that, that's just a one directional commute, that's like a billboard on the side that there's no conversation happening.
Kelly: Right.
Jason: And I think that's part of where fundraising finds itself now is that without the conversation I don't know that we're living up to what we can be really, I call it recognized and admired for. If fundraisers are not actually having two-way conversations with that generous individual on the other side of the table, we're never going to be appreciated for what it is. We can do better than something else or someone else.
Kelly: Absolutely. And so then begs the question - how do you have that conversation, right? How do you first build an abundance mentality into your organization so that you can even have that conversation? Because if we're like as Audra said, type A people who are driven by metrics, then that would purportedly be a good place to start, right? Blow up the metric, stop trying to measure people on how many visits they have, and instead do the hard work of actually making sure that those visits are in fact two-way conversations.
Jason: Yeah.
Audra: And that's a hard thing to do, right? Because from a management standpoint metrics are easy to measure, so taking away that metric I would argue I 100% agree. And also it forces your team to really hire the right people that are going to be driven and that are going to do the right thing, and frankly, pump the brakes when it's appropriate which is a hard, hard thing to do when you're a new fundraiser. We're all competitive, we all want to solve the problem and saying no to that $2500 check when you're first starting out seems like the worst idea, but it's hard.
And I think Kelly's point too of giving your new fundraisers time to fail and learn from that failure and come back to a safe environment to say, "Let's dissect this visit that I just had. And here's where I think I need help. Help me. Help me understand the institution, help me understand the language that I can use going forward," right? And making sure you're hiring those people that are open and willing to learn and be challenged by that.
Jason: Audra, is the challenge ... okay, so I pay ... we all pay attention to social media, for example, and we're all sort of linked in with connections within the fundraising space. And to kind of link back this conversation to this notion that fundraising is not sales, there is a cadre of what I would call ... most of them that I know and see are up in the northeast, for example, a lot of them tied to directly or indirectly to some of these higher Ivy league schools, for example. There is a cadre of major gift types that are so sales-oriented where in the language that they sort of ... the celebration that they have sort of on social media it's just closing the deal. I mean, are those the wrong people? They tend to be male too. So they're white male, you both know who these people are.
And there's companies, and I got to say too - there are companies or consulting shops and technology firms and stuff that sort of all appeal to this, and they're really just closing deals and they're raising a whole hell of a lot of money at the same time, but I don't think that when we talk about contributing both to the sort of the maturing of a profession that is young and sort of like I say messy adolescence, but also when we talk about philanthropy sort of coming alive and playing a meaningful role in society I don't think these fellows are going to cut it.
Audra: I 100% agree. I've had the fortune to work with ... U or R was a very male-dominated team, and at CU it's a very female-dominated team. And frankly, I've seen the best of both. There were some gentlemen at U of R that I strongly admire that were leaders in their field and I think frankly beyond their time. And at CU, the same, just very, very different styles. And I 100% agree, I don't think that in the long term those closers if you will are going to be the ones that make it, because it's short-sighted. I mean, the people that I've seen be the most successful are the ones that care about the donor, that remember to send a birthday card and a thank you note and all of those little things that us as humans were raised properly to do, right? Those are basic human functions.
Jason: Yes.
Kelly: Well, I think the other piece that's on top of that too is there's this idea in philanthropy that we can only count, again, back to the metrics - we can only count what came in today, right? And so we're only measuring these short-term aggregates as opposed to really talking about, "Okay, if we look at all of the most enormous gifts that have come in philanthropically in the US, in the last 10 years, I would guess that the vast majority of them were multi-year deals that took a really long time, a lot of conversations with donors and non-profits to try to understand how to mesh together both what the donor wanted to accomplish but also what the non-profit wanted to accomplish and how they could do that in a transformational kind of way."
And that short term deal making where you're just churning and bringing in all this money can at times cannibalize those much bigger and complex conversations that often require people at different parts of your institution, require those folks to collaborate and work together, which, again, going back to how we're measured at least at CU, we are not incentivized to work across units, to work together. We do it anyway if we're good at our job, but for the most part we kind of operate in a silo. So then you start to get people who like that sales mentality, me and mine, I want to take credit for this, I want to ring the bell, and not people who ...
Audra: And no, you can never talk to my donor.
Jason: Right, like you own them, like you can own a relationship, you can own another human being, it sounds a little ... not supposed to be there.
Audra: Well, and Kelly, I was always taught like the more people they know, your donor, excuse me, that's who they is, like if a donor knows Kelly and myself at CU, why is that not better? Do we not bring both different values and strengths to the table a 100%? Does that person now know two different people they can call if they need something? Yes, also true. Why wouldn't I want them to know more people at my university? And then if I leave which is completely plausible in this career, they know someone. And hopefully that relationship doesn't have to take a backward step for another year or six months or however long, right?
Kelly: But you have to decide as an institution that what you want to prioritize is that what is good for the institution and good for the donor, that venn diagram, in a longer time frame. So you don't want your donor to know anyone else at that institution because you don't think that there is going to be enough money, enough donors, enough credit for everybody to be lifted up.
Jason: I think ... so I've been reading about the ... so any enterprise basically sort of exists for-profit, government, non-profit, whatever - sort of exists between sort of exploiting sort of their existing opportunities and exploring new opportunities. And there's been a lot of conversation in the last couple decades in management talk about the idea of being sort of these ambidextrous sort of corp companies that can sort of exist in both the exploratory space and in the exploiting space.
And I think some of the conclusions I've come to, and also some of this stuff's coming out of sort of this very, very present understanding of sort of what globalization and the internet and all this connection that we have in our current society sort of means, I think fundraising at its best will always be in that exploratory zone which is like the explorer in the jungle who knows that he or she can find something and find something of extraordinary value, but he doesn't, he or she doesn't necessarily know where that treasure is. And I think we've gotten so stuck in ... and so therefore, you're afraid of the no when you assume if I don't get to the treasure ... if you're in that exploiting mindset you assume that only I can find something and if he finds it before I do somebody lost.
And I tend to think that we have so tried to design these highly efficient exploiting machines and higher ed's getting a lot of ... will get a lot of slaps on the hand for sort of being the driver of that. And I don't think that's redeemable. I think we're going to have to be more like explorers.
Kelly: And there's the element too of if we would like that treasure that we find, we're going to go with the metaphor, in the jungle and we find this great treasure that we can't carry it out of the jungle by ourselves, that we need to be doing this in partnership and with collaboration and figure out what the highest and best use for that treasure is when we do get it out of the jungle and bring it back. And the idea that maybe my particular unit, the Leeds School, like I may find some great treasure, but the Leeds School of Business wouldn't necessarily benefit, that it would be the college of arts and sciences or the college of engineering, but that my unit's budget wouldn't benefit from this enormous treasure then also disincentivizes me from wanting to share the wealth. So that's the other thing that we need to be dismantling.
It is definitely in higher ed, I've seen this in other non-profits as well. Any aspect of me and mine or this belongs to me is just feeding into that scarcity mindset that we need to unpack and undo.
Audra: But I think that goes back to your metrics, right? Why wouldn't you share credit, right? If that's how we're going to measure, if that's the universal standard - I close a gift and I get credit for that hundred thousand dollars or that million dollars, but Kelly was influential on opening the door, right? She was the one that made the first phone call and provided the introduction because my donor knew her donor, right? Why wouldn't we just say, "You know what? Kelly and Audra, great job, high five. And here's 100% credit." Because then what are Kelly and I going to react to? We're going to go, "Wow, that worked really well. Let's do it again." It just makes sense, right?
Jason: There's an author, I can't recall his name I've got his book probably somewhere over my head here, I'm looking at all this stuff on my desk. The author talks about how most of the metrics language is essentially language that came out of the industrial revolution and it's all basically top-down management speak. And that metrics, he's basically talking about metrics is not really human, human beings are qualitative beings, we gravitate towards inefficiency, there's nothing we don't want to be measured for our output.
And I think what we're missing when it comes to that very wealthy philanthropist who we're sitting across the lunch table from is that here who's perhaps going to give you another million dollar check, I think what we're missing is, is that oftentimes their willingness to come to that lunch table is because they've accumulated all the ... to get back to the original point - those people have accumulated so much abundance that the only thing that they can now do, we all know this, this is a time of life reality, the reason they're sitting at that table with you is because they want to give away that abundance. They can't measure it anymore, there's nothing more to measure.
The machines, the widgets, whatever they sold for most of their career has sort of been exhausted. And even if they're younger, I know a 42 year old in Philadelphia who's giving away extraordinarily, because he accumulated that abundance really early in life. And I think they get to the place where they realize, "I've got more than I need and I want to do something other than just keep measuring this stuff."
Kelly: And asking the question as the fundraiser - how can I help you do that, right? Not immediately going, "Well, here's our menu of giving opportunities."
Jason: Right. Yeah. Audra and Kelly, I've kept you for 40 minutes, you've really gotten me stirred up. You're both more than welcome to come back and keep the conversation going. But if there's somebody out there who's listening to our conversation, maybe we hurt their feelings by talking about the fellas in the northeast or something and they want to tell you that we've got that all wrong, how would you suggest that they find you?
Audra: I'm on LinkedIn or my email is audra.pinkerton@colorado.edu.
Kelly: Also I'm on LinkedIn, kelly.haul@colorado.edu. And I think we both would really love to engage in additional conversation, both with you Jason and anyone who listens to this who is stirred up as well.
Jason: Thank you.