Olympic Mindset for Nonprofits: Change Your Habits Like an Athlete
Fun fact about me: before I worked in nonprofit management and fundraising, I was a fitness trainer. I’m still an avid fitness freak and nutrition nerd.
When I work with nonprofit clients, I draw not only on my years as a frontline fundraiser and nonprofit professional who has been around the block in the nonprofit sphere, but also a lot of knowledge and expertise on behavior change management that I gained as a fitness trainer.
Often with nonprofit clients, like my fitness clients before them, I see a desire to make huge, important changes to fundraising programs. The problem is, they want to get it done overnight.
Most of what I do the first few months of working with a new client is help them to understand how long it will actually take to make and implement changes if they want to see long term sustainability.
Sure, we could just start knocking on doors, calling everyone, and pushing out the Meta ads to bring in the cash, but that’s a temporary influx of capital if you don’t change anything else about your fundraising operation. To have a sustainable fundraising program, you have to be thinking about the long term, the nurturing of donors, the relationship building of partners. You can’t do one thing all out and change your entire fundraising future.
There’s a reason sudden huge changes don’t stick (see James Clear’s Atomic Habits for a whole book on why and what to do differently). But you’ve probably experienced it for yourself. We’ve all made those New Years resolutions to get 10,000 steps a day, then accomplished it for a week or two, only to average 5,000 a day by February.
I’ve seen nonprofits do the same thing.
We’re going to hustle hard on this fundraising event that will bring us tons of money, but change nothing else about our fundraising program or investment in systems or operations or staffing…and dang if that event brings in the only money we’re going to see all year.
It’s easier to see the problem with these all-in efforts when you put it in terms of health and fitness. Let me use an example:
One of my fitness clients led a very sedentary lifestyle. She came to me because she wanted to run a half-marathon in three months. She was ready to lace up her sneakers and hit the pavement! The only problem: she was still working up to walking for twenty minutes continuously without getting out of breath.
YIKES! A huge goal like that can be a strong motivator, and some people need that push to make a big change. But it’s a long road from an uncomfortable twenty minutes of walking to running an entire half-marathon.
We set to work creating a marathon plan, but within a few weeks she was discouraged. The easiest plan I could design was increasing mileage and pacing too quickly for her to handle. She was ready to give up on exercise completely. (Go big or go home, right?)
But then I got her to see what she really wanted: to feel healthier, stronger, and more fit. I adjusted her timeline with this in mind, adding a 5k to start; then a 10k; and finally the half-marathon. Here’s what was interesting: once we created a fun running routine that she loved, she decided she didn’t need to run the half-marathon. She felt great running a 5k every other day as a long-term, sustainable habit. And when a tough mudder competition came around, her improved baseline fitness made it easy to pivot to that type of training. (She did it and loved it!)
Does this sound familiar? Probably!
It’s the same with so many of my nonprofit clients—organizations set audacious goals and expect to accomplish them at breakneck speed. This type of plan can backfire: One client came to me after raising $100,000 the year prior. In the current year, she was struggling to raise $20k. What happened? By my assessment, she had utterly fatigued her very small donor base to reach a pie-in-the-sky target too soon.
She’d asked donors to give until it hurt, and the donors wanted nothing to do with her after that. She would’ve done better to pace growth—raising $20k, then $50k, then eventually working up to a $100k goal as her donor base and organization’s impact grew, hand in hand.
Angering your donors is just one pitfall. When nonprofits don’t pace themselves –trading long-term planning and sustainable habits for quick, flashy impact– there’s a much worse human impact: staff burnout. Staff members with a passion for the cause become hollow shells and leave to pursue other goals. Founders who have huge dreams for their nonprofits give up before they have barely begun.
In the nonprofit world, we know that change isn’t easy. Many organizations exist to solve major problems facing our communities, regions, and planet. As hard as we wish, there’s no magic wand—solutions to homelessness, poverty, injustice, and more happen slowly and with great planning and sacrifice.
But somehow, we don’t apply that knowledge to our planning. I see nonprofits setting goals to increase individual donor revenue by 25% (industry average: a measly 3%) and they’ve struggled to maintain even a 2% growth rate. I’ve coached nonprofits that want to launch nationwide while they can barely sustain programs in a single city.
When I work with nonprofits to build better fundraising programs, we prepare for long-term habit change. We trade the all-out, hustle-based goals for efficient stewardship programs that keep the donors they’ve earned. We trade the glitzy gala for a series of community-embedded events. We trade the goal that will decimate our resources for the series of milestones that will help us grow long-term.
YOUR HOMEWORK
What’s a goal you’ve stalled out on? Examine it. Be honest about where you are now, what resources you have available, and what support you need. Have you considered the small steps that will train you to accomplish that goal, or are you hustling toward an elusive finish line out of shape and exhausted?
Take a minute to think about each tiny step that will allow you to accomplish that goal, and then think again about a reasonable timeline for each of those steps. Even if it moves your goal into the future, do you have more confidence that you can accomplish your goal?
