How To Raise: For Love’s Sake: How Stories, Staff and Strategy Change as Your Nonprofit Grows.

You’d ride three trains and two buses to save $72 on a ride to the airport. You’d drive across the county at midnight for a family in crisis. Love makes you do hard things…until it’s time to raise money. Then the powerful story doesn’t get told because telling it feels like bragging. The staff member who hasn’t hit a goal in three years keeps a job because letting them go feels cruel. The $50,000 ask becomes a $5,000 ask. It feels like love. It isn’t. And it costs your organization revenue every year. This session examines how the very virtues that build nonprofits (humility, compassion, restraint) become the ceiling that caps revenue, and why the problem intensifies as organizations grow. Using a three-stage growth model (the Plot, the Garden, and the Farm) participants will diagnose where their organization sits today and identify which fundraising practices their stage now requires. Relevant to executive directors, development leaders, and senior staff at organizations of any size, faith-based or secular. Learning Objectives After this session, participants will be able to: • Assess which of three organizational growth stages (Plot, Garden, Farm) their organization currently occupies, and identify the storytelling, staffing, and solicitation practices that stage requires. • Recognize the leadership instincts that suppress fundraising performance, and apply a diagnostic test to distinguish a staff member who needs a season of support from one that requires a change. • Apply specific practices for sourcing and telling impact stories with dignity, and for structuring asks that match the magnitude of the need rather than the leader’s comfort level.