GOOD NEWS: Spearfishing Outdoor Cats
Good News: An enewsletter for donors and nonprofits
on strategic planning, governance, fundraising, and executive leadership.
Spearfishing Outdoor Cats
While attending a client’s campaign committee meeting, I was reminded that my donor and nonprofit clients are brilliant people with keen insights. As we wrestled with how best to make progress toward a remaining ten million dollar goal, one seasoned board member stated, “We need more spearfishing outdoor cats.” As I said, brilliant! Let me explain, please.
When hiring chief executives and assigning lead fundraisers (staff and Board members), too many organizations fail to consider whether a candidate has an established track record of successfully building relationships with individual donors. They mistake a person's prior professional association with a wealthy fundraising entity with their ability to actively engage donors. At the organization's peril, hiring teams fail to ask relevant questions aimed at discerning whether a candidate is able or even inclined to develop and manage a portfolio of relationships with donors and other necessary external partners.
More perspective on my client's brilliant metaphor:
1. Outdoor Cats vs Indoor Cats
Outdoor cats leave the house in search of adventure. They relish the opportunity to explore new environments and are accustomed to the risk of navigating the unknown. They are good at encountering new creatures and places. They know when to go out and come back.
Indoor cats, rather, hardly go anywhere. They are content to lie on the couch, waiting for others to come to them in safe, familiar surroundings. New people and places for them? Not so much.
Effective fundraising staff, board members, and volunteers are outdoor cats. You hardly ever see them in their offices. Their calendars are not dominated by internal meetings and they work at odd hours around other's routines. They enjoy new people and places, approaching their work with curiosity and possibility. They are fearless and willing to learn from the occasional bruising encounter.
2. Spearfishing vs Trawling
Spearfishing is a targeted, highly concentrated and discriminating practice. It is a plodding, high energy, high intensity activity. It can take a long time to make progress. Each target is unique and precious. As opposed to trawling which is basically passive and undiscriminating. Anything and everything can be caught in a trawler net but the harvest isn't always what is sought after. Damage can be done.
In fundraising terms, mass email, direct mail, social media blasts, and even large events are the equivalent of trawling. Productive, perhaps, but only when complemented by 1-1 relationship building. Too many development teams are full of trawlers and have a dearth of spearfishers. Despite everyone's best intentions, too many would-be fundraisers with trawling backgrounds at big institutions with fancy names are hired or allowed to step into volunteer roles while lacking a 1-1 relationship building mindset and acumen.
So before you hire, assign volunteers or make philanthropic investments in people who need to financially sustain their enterprise by advancing relationships and raising money, consider identifying and cultivating a stable of spearfishing outdoor cats. Or at least equip and ask your indoor cat trawlers to evolve.
Stuff Steve Is Watching, Listening To, and Reading
Cam Newton, Shannon Sharpe and Truth Telling (4 minute watch)
“Tony Romo was made the highest paid quarterback in football with no Super Bowls, no NFC Championship games, and no first or second team All Pros. He ain't never had to worry about a contract. And when he's done playing, he gets a deal that nobody else gets. So you want Cam Newton to shut up and sit back when I'm telling y'all that there's different rules for different people? Don't get mad when I'm just reporting what is obviously true.”
Watch Here
Speaking Truth to Power (1 hour listen)
"This is Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People, a fable of truth and lies, politics and power, and the challenge and costs of pursuing an unpopular crusade to speak truth to power. It's a story of 'fake news,' manipulation of the media, the dangers of populism, and the environmental costs of capitalism. There are two major productions of An Enemy of the People on the world stage. In London, German director Thomas Ostermeier brings his striking contemporary adaptation to the West End, with Matt Smith starring as the crusading Doctor; and in New York, Jeremy Strong, famous as Kendall Roy in the TV series Succession, takes on the role in a version by American playwright Amy Herzog."
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Professor Daniel Dennett (5 minute read)
“Mr. Dennett combined a wide range of knowledge with an easy, often playful writing style to reach a lay public, avoiding the impenetrable concepts and turgid prose of many other contemporary philosophers. Beyond his more than 20 books and scores of essays, his writings even made their way into the theater and onto the concert stage.”
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