Hi {{first_name}},

Are you watching the Olympics? Have you noticed the heart rate monitors? Not on the athletes themselves, but on their spouses and parents, tracking every spike during intense moments of competition years in the making.

As fundraisers, we know that feeling. Board meetings, gift solicitations, conference presentations– it doesn’t matter whether you are five or twenty-five years into your career, there are moments when your heart thinks you’re skiing for gold. 

As my friend Lucas Hunt, leader of HUNT Auctioneers, says, being nervous is not a bad thing, it’s a sign that you care deeply about the outcome. He would know– auctions and in-the-room asks are supremely high-pressure affairs, where nerves and purpose go hand in hand.

And remember: in fundraising, you aren’t asking for you. You’re asking for your organization, and for your community.

So in a way fundraisers are not that different from Olympic parents and spouses, deeply invested in dreams that live beyond themselves.

To inspire your next quadruple axel, successful campaign, we have some great stuff in this issue:

Let the games begin!

Mike

Over the weekend, a stubborn piece of exercise equipment from my childhood home turned into an unexpected lesson in nonprofit fundraising. What finally worked was not pushing harder, but making a structural change we had been avoiding. The experience mirrored a challenge I see organizations face all the time when growth feels stuck.

Read the full article on my website here.

For our second Mentor Wisdom segment, I asked former colleague and friend Mia Becze to share a piece of insight from her career in nonprofit fundraising.

Mia, now Director of Operations at U.S. Ski & Snowboard, shared this great piece of advice from the incomparable Shannon Gibbons, whose leadership we both had the opportunity to work under during our time at Echoing Green:

Mike inspired this one. He had a really good post on LinkedIn a couple weeks ago about evaluating bright ideas to decide if they are helpful, or just distractions. He noted that AI can be unhelpful because of its tendency to praise and validate. 

AI jargon for this is “sycophancy.” 

The good news is, there are some things you can do to mitigate sycophancy. My article shares six things you can easily try if you want just a little bit more criticism from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Any of these will help you make your work better– but you should still keep a trusted human in the loop. After all, they actually do care, and if they agree, or disagree, it won’t be because you told them to. 

Read the full article here.

Upcoming Events:

LinkedIn Posts Missed: