Navigating Fundraising Failure - A Petrus Development Show Episode with Statistics and Strategies

14:44.83 Host All you gotta do is send them a letter.

14:45.23 AROB Yeah.

14:47.00 Host So this one, numbers, I guess when you compare them to what we've been talking about, look better.

14:47.16 AROB Yeah. 91.

14:51.86 Host It's 91% of grant applications will fail, right?

14:55.69 AROB Okay.

14:55.76 Host So yeah, so 10 out of 11 will fail.

14:56.52 AROB Hey.

15:00.02 Host The real bummer with grants is each of those 10 might cost you 20, 30, 40 hours of work resulting in zero results.

15:05.89 AROB Right.

15:08.50 Host And even when other things are failing, like appeal letters, like emails to your audience, your audience is just still seeing those things, right? They're reading your appeal letter, even if they're not acting on it. They're seeing your email come in and reading the subject line, even if they delete it without opening it.

15:23.77 Host And there's still kind of something happening there in their mind. With the grants, you may not be making any progress toward actually getting a grant from that foundation from your failed grant application that took you a week of work to write.

15:36.88 Host So that's a bummer.

15:37.76 AROB Yep. So I tell people all the time because every fundraiser I've ever talked to who's new to this at some point has a board member or somebody on their staff that says, why can't we write, just write some grants, get some money that way.

15:49.08 AROB And so what I tell them is grants are a great part of your fundraising strategy.

15:54.65 Host Thank you.

15:54.82 AROB You have to start the process of writing grants, of forming those narratives, building those relationships, reaching out to board members and getting those rejection letters and responding and all of that.

16:07.61 AROB But do not expect money to come right away when you start that because you're right. Nine out of a hundred will be funded.

16:18.24 AROB And so that number is even smaller for those first times. So it's a part of your strategy, but it's a long-term part of your strategy. So, plan to do it, but do it when the time is right for you, that you can spend that time knowing that the chances of you getting a reward back for that time spent are pretty slim, at least initially.

16:32.27 Host Thank—

16:37.78 Host And do it in a limited way. Do two or three a year. I personally tend to rail on grants pretty hard because we work with so many clients for whom they see grants as kind of the easy way out of doing the hard things like calling donors and asking for meetings. Like, oh, we'll just write these grants and get the money instead of going out and having lunch with 100 people.

16:56.37 Host But experience and the numbers show that you should do a little bit of time with grants, do a lot more time sitting in front of donors.

17:03.62 AROB So speaking about sitting in front of donors, every person you ever call to ask for an appointment is going to agree to meet with you, right?

17:11.49 Host And if they don't answer, they're gonna call you back right away. That's the lovely thing about people.

17:15.25 AROB That's right. Yes. False. 70% of prospects you call will not agree to take a meeting with you.

17:25.27 Host Yep, that's a bummer. And if you ever can get a hold of them in the first place, right? When you call 10 people, you're probably leaving a message to nine of them the first time, at least, maybe 10 out of 10.

17:33.22 AROB Yep. Yep.

17:36.38 Host And you probably got to call the rest of them, those nine back two or three times to get two or three of them to agree to meet with you. And even then, you'll never get a hold of some of them. And they'll never respond to your emails, your voicemails, your text messages.

17:52.73 Host They just, they're out there and they don't want to talk to you.

17:56.05 AROB Yep. So I love working with a new fundraiser who says, yeah, I left ten—I called 10 people. I left 10 voicemails and all 10 are going to call me back.

18:07.83 AROB And I want to be like, bro, like, no, they're not going to call you back. Like, I love the hope. I love it. And I don't want to discourage you, but they are in your rotation for you to call back again in a couple of days. They are not going to return your call based on a voicemail.

18:23.08 AROB But this is the way it is, right? You know what to expect. You know that if you want to get 10 appointments, that three of them—three of your 10 calls are not going to take a meeting. So if you want 10, you're going to have to bump that number of calls up at least three times, three to four times, to where you're calling 30 to 40 to 50 people in order to get those 10 appointments, right?

18:48.68 Host Exactly.

18:49.66 AROB And then of those 10 appointments, the next statistic we have is that two-thirds to three-quarters of them will not give you the gift that you ask for whenever you do finally get that meeting.

18:49.73 Host And...

19:02.58 AROB And so if you want to get one gift, that means you're going to need to be seeing three or four people. And so we do the numbers backwards. And to get one gift, you're calling effectively about 100, 120 people. Does that sound about right?

19:17.71 Host Yep. And so it's when we talk to fundraisers about setting up a power hour in their day where they're just calling people to ask for meetings, they oftentimes—the kind of first thing they think of is I don't have like enough people, you know, hot prospects to call for an hour every day.

19:34.42 AROB Right.

19:35.13 Host It is a lot of calling the same people, trying to get those meetings with them, and then get in front of people and you just got to keep trying.

19:38.24 AROB Hmm.

19:40.64 Host It doesn't have to be just your top hottest prospects. You get in front of people you're going to find some of those folks who can make the gift. Sometimes you're going to say no and they're going to come back and make the gift later. Oftentimes it's going to happen, right? The no isn't just a solid no. Oftentimes it's a slow yes, which sounds like a platitude to make fundraisers feel better.

19:58.83 Host But the longer you're in fundraising, the more times you see that happen. Like, oh, there was a gift that I asked for—a million dollars in 2018. And he said, nope, no chance. And then in 2023, he came back and made the gift. So those things happen more often than you would expect. But you got to expect a lot of no's up front.

20:16.04 AROB Yep. So I like to tell people, you're not being rejected, you're being redirected, right?

20:20.85 Host I—

20:21.28 AROB It's not that they're saying no, and you're done, and that road is closed. Sometimes that road is open, you have to find a different path. Sometimes it means that that direction is not going to work, and you have to go talk to other people. So it's not—it's not a no, give up. It's: You're not being rejected, you're being redirected.

20:38.65 Host I like that. I'm gonna remember that.

20:40.86 AROB Yeah, good. So what about whenever going back to—we're mailing people, everybody that gets our letter loves us and is appreciate and appreciates hearing from us and would never ask to be removed, correct? Correct.

20:56.73 Host I wish, right? You wish. It's sadly true that basically every mailing that you send is gonna—somebody's going to ask to be removed from your list, probably a number, but a handful of people from every mailing you send.

21:12.54 AROB Yep.

21:12.73 Host And same with email. Every time you send an email, you expect some people to unsubscribe. Sometimes it's kind of malicious, like, oh, can't stand them. And other times it's man, my inbox is so full.

21:24.43 Host I just, or whatever it is, I just need to clear it out. And I'm unsubscribing from everything. I definitely go on those purges like once every year or so, where I just unsubscribe from almost everything because it's just too much.

21:32.03 AROB Yep.

21:35.39 Host Right. So I've even had donors who are regular donors unsubscribe from email. So you can't really read too much into it, but just know that it's going to happen.

21:41.58 AROB Yeah. And so there's a fear then, right, of, "Well, I can't send these emails or I can't send these letters because every time I do, people unsubscribe." And the thing to remember is you don't want to build your strategy around your critics.

21:52.30 Host Yeah.

21:57.98 AROB You want to build it around your champions, right?

22:00.13 Host That is so true.

22:00.32 AROB So if you're mailing or you're emailing to people and you mail 1,000 or you email 10,000 people and you get eight unsubscribes,

22:11.90 AROB That is not a reason to then say this strategy is flawed and we're giving up on it because when they unsubscribe, sometimes they don't want to hear from you anymore.

22:22.30 AROB Sometimes they want to clean out their inbox, whatever it is. But those are not the people, those, whether they're our critics or whether they're just sort of ambivalent to us, we don't build our strategy around our critics. We build our strategy around our champions.

22:34.61 AROB And so when you send those letters or when you send those emails, you're going to get some unsubscribes. You're going to get some people that say, take me off your list. You're also going to get people that say, "I love hearing from you."

22:45.87 AROB "I love hearing about the impact that your organization is doing. Here is a gift to support you in your work." And so we build our strategy around them.

22:53.83 Host Exactly. That's maybe one of my favorite examples of this is when you're doing an electronic appeal, especially, as I can think of multiple times, this happened to me doing matching gift challenges. Say, where you go into the last 48 hours of a matching gift challenge, $10,000 challenge gift, and we've only got $6,000 raised.

23:13.90 Host We're going to send one or two emails on the second-last day, and two to three or four emails on the last day of the challenge, and people are going to unsubscribe. Like a decent, definitely higher than average number, right?

23:21.32 AROB Right.

23:24.06 Host Because you send so many emails. But we also would raise $6,000, $8,000, $10,000 in those two days.

23:28.76 AROB Right.

23:29.83 Host So some people clearly were following along, wanted to see the updates and it inspired them to give big amounts of money. Others weren't probably ever going to give anyway. And they were annoyed by all the frequency of the emails.

23:43.94 Host That's fine. Let them go. Maybe they'll come back later. Maybe they'll still keep getting their mailings. Who knows? But you got to build it around, like you said, those champions, not the critics.

23:53.41 AROB Yeah, the goal isn't to avoid "no." The goal of every fundraiser should be to outgrow your fear of it.

24:00.24 Host Yeah, and to know, yeah, there are going to be people. I remember talking to my bishop some years ago, and he was telling us, "I've never made a decision that didn't make somebody angry." I think there's a lot of truth in that in a lot of parts of life, right.

24:14.29 AROB Yeah.

24:14.30 Host But you got to know, like no matter what you do, you oftentimes you even know who's going to be loud and angry about a certain decision or a certain activity. You just got to go ahead and try it and go for the champions, not the critics.

24:26.47 AROB Yeah. I mean, I remember when I was at Ohio State, everything that I did, I knew this person was going to call me and complain, call me or call my priest and complain.

24:33.90 Host Yeah. Yeah.

24:36.35 AROB It didn't matter what, to your point of the bishop.

24:38.21 Host Yeah.

24:39.03 AROB And if I had built every fundraising strategy around, "Well, I don't want to hear from Steve because Steve is going to complain." Steve complained about everything, like literally everything. And so he would have been one of those critics that I can't build my strategy around.

24:53.26 AROB I want to build my strategy around Ed and Cheryl, who love what I'm doing, love what we're doing, love the impact, and love hearing about it. They were our champions.

25:02.26 Host So we've kind of worked in some of the strategies for dealing with failure, planning around it. You talked about, you know, obviously like we just said, plan for your champions, not your critics.

25:13.69 Host Um...

25:19.40 Host Man, I lost where I am here. Sorry, Eddie.

25:28.17 Host Well, whatever. Yeah.

25:32.02 Host Okay, so we've kind of talked, kind of mixed in some of these tips for dealing with failure as we've been going here.

25:37.42 AROB Right.

25:38.25 Host Any other kind of thoughts or tips you would give for handling this failure or for dealing with it and building off of it?

25:44.97 AROB Yep. So here's a couple that you can remember that have gotten me through 20 years of doing this. Number one, it's not personal, right?

25:55.51 AROB When you ask somebody for a gift or when you mail a letter to somebody or when you invite somebody to attend an event and they say no, or they just ghost you or they find another way to avoid you and tell you no,

25:55.94 Host Definitely.

26:13.86 AROB 99 times out of 100, 999 times out of 1000, it's not personal.

26:19.23 Host Right.

26:19.49 AROB Right? And so don't take it personally. And you'll make it a lot further in this career of fundraising if you know that people have a million reasons why they're saying no to your event, to your gift, to your invitation, and very few, next to none of those reasons have to do with you personally.

26:41.52 Host Right. It's not because your sales pitch, so to speak, wasn't good. It's not they don't like you. It's because their wife is...

26:46.63 AROB Your grant letter was too weak, right? It's...

26:48.50 Host Right, yeah. There's just other factors in their life that are leading to them saying no at the time, and maybe they'll come back and say yes later on.

26:56.46 AROB Yeah, my dad was the director of a private foundation for many years, and he would tell me—and it's grown even since then—but he would tell me that they make 75 grants a year and they get over 750 applications a year for those grants.

27:12.70 Host That's...

27:13.65 AROB And so he said those were the board meetings. You know it sounds fun because you just sit there and, you know, the board members, they vote on who they want to give money to. The reality is, it's much more difficult because what they're doing is they're voting on who they want to say no to.