It’s funny, but the key to consistently making your numbers is to care more about people than you do about numbers.
Care about your donors and your colleagues, and the numbers will come.
Care more about your numbers, and your donors and colleagues go, in spirit if not in body.
Sure, you can hit rough patches even when you care deeply about people, but the numbers will come back because good people will stay with you. But the clearer it becomes that you care more about numbers, the more certain it is that the people you work with will go and never come back.
When you care more about people, you listen, learn, adjust, apologize, and align.
When you care more about numbers, you push and leave people feeling unheard, unvalued, and disrespected.
In fundraising, nothing is more important than intention and orientation. The troubling decline in philanthropic participation can be traced to a single overarching cause. Organizations came to care more about numbers than people. People were taken for granted. Goals and metrics failed to account for their point of view.
How does your organization show that it cares about people more? How does it play out in day-to-day practice?
Jim Langley is the president of Langley Innovations. Langley Innovations provides a range of services to its clients to help them understand the cultural underpinnings of philanthropy and the psychology of donors and, with that knowledge, to develop the most effective strategies and tactics to build broader and more lasting communities of support. Jim has authored numerous books, including his most recent book, The Future of Fundraising: Adapting to New Philanthropic Realities, published by Academic Impressions in 2020.
