Find Your People
Fundraising can sometimes be lonely, right?
Especially if you’re a team of one, or two, where the other person is the executive director who is also running programs. You hold the donor data, the deadlines and the pressure, and when something goes sideways, there's often no one down the hall who really understands what it feels like. In that same study, missing a single day didn't reduce the chance of forming a habit.
So here's our unsolicited advice: find your people.
There is a study that was started in 1938 from a Harvard psychiatrist, Robert Waldinger, who studies adult happiness. The summary of this study is this: good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Along the way, researchers also found that relationship quality matters more than quantity, and that good relationships may even help protect memory.
That research isn't about work, or fundraising specifically. But think about how much of your life you spend there - doing that.
Gallup has been asking employees a specific question for decades: Do you have a best friend at work? Its research found that having one can help turn a moderately engaged worker into a highly engaged one. In one Gallup analysis, 75 percent of people with a best friend at work planned to stay with their company at least another year, compared with 51 percent of those without.
Gallup is careful to add a caveat we love: the takeaway is not to manufacture friendships, they need to be authentic friendships built on trust and mutual respect.
All of this to say, why does this matter in the work that we do?
Remember the conversation we like to have - and you’ve seen it before - that there is hard data showing that half of chief development officers planned to leave their jobs within two years, and that a lack of help from executives, boards and other staff was a big reason.
Support is a structural issue, and your organization should take it on. But you don't have to wait for a policy change to start building your own.
If you’re feeling disconnected, alone and unsupported, let’s consider a few ideas:
Your professional community. Local AFP chapters, state nonprofit associations and regional fundraising groups exist so that you can sit in a room with people who “get it.”
Peers outside your org. A fundraiser at a different nonprofit can say "me too" without the politics.
A standing coffee or call. Monthly beats "we should catch up sometime." Put it on the calendar.
Someone a few steps ahead. A mentor who can say, "I remember that year, here's what helped."
But also, be someone else’s person!
Support goes both ways. Answer the new fundraiser's question in the group chat. Share the template that took you three tries to get right. Introduce two people who should know each other.
That's what we mean by holding the door: you go through, and you hold it for the next
person.
You're doing important work. You deserve people who make it lighter.
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