A: I have a friend who posted a quote on her facebook wall recently, and I've been chewing on it such that it made me fish your email out of the ol' mailbag. Here it is:
"Are you paralyzed with fear? That’s a good sign. Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do. Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.
Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates the strength of Resistance. Therefore, the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul.” --Steven Pressfield
I want to like this quote. I really do. But the more I think about it, it's hooey. The only thing I actually agree with is that fear is good.
Fear is an alarm system for when you've got some instinct and insight cooking in your brain, but it hasn't figured out how to form comprehensible thoughts yet. That means you should always pay attention to fear - it's an alert that you need to figure something out, that you need to examine why your emotions are aflame. WHY are you afraid?
Mr. Pressfield would have you run full speed towards whatever makes you afraid. And I think that popular sentiment, that fear is something you must conquer by force, is coloring your question.
Why are you afraid of calling your donors?
You must figure that out before truly addressing how to move forward, past your problem. But maybe you're new to fundraising, and that makes it a little tricky to self-analyze...so here are some possible reasons that might be underneath your fear. It's obviously far from a complete list of the possibilities!
1) You're afraid of rejection, in all its glorious forms. The person on the other end of the line might yell at you for being a glorified telemarketer. The person on the other end of the line might unload all their grievances about the organization in general, by the screaming bucketload. The person on the other end might tell you they're offended that lowly you would dare to call high and mighty them. The person on the other end might tell you that they're not interested in supporting your organization any more. The person on the other end might tell you they know why you're calling, but they'll call you if they want to make a gift. The person on the other end might rudely but simply say "oh, Susie from Org. X? Not interested, thanks," and hang up.
Rejection isn't any fun. But it's something you can and must live through as a fundraiser, without taking it personally. Figure out how YOU can get your mojo back after a nasty rejection (I tend to use it as an excuse for a latte instead of the cheapest coffee I can find; remind me and I'll do a whole post on other ideas some day), and then force yourself to call.
2) You can't envision the conversation. Do you know why you're calling this person, or did you read a bit of fundraising advice that says "call your biggest donors at least once every two months" or some such nonsense? I say nonsense because it's not bad advice, it's just utterly useless without understanding WHY it's something you should be doing. No one picks up the phone just to say hi anymore, not even with their closest friends. Figure out why you're calling. If you're still nervous after you decide that you're calling to update them on the success of your summer programs, or want to set up a time for them to come see the gardens their donations supported, or want to take them to lunch to talk about planned giving, or want to know if they would give some feedback on a mailing you're planning for next month, go ahead and script a few lines. Really. Write them down like you're writing a play. The only caveat there is that you're not allowed to keep reading what you've written word for word if the conversation goes somewhere else. You have to listen to the conversation that's actually happening once you get there...but scripting can tamp down some fear when you're afraid of not being prepared.
3) If planning out the conversation and accepting that rejection is not failure still leave you panicked, perhaps you don't know your donor well enough. Some people deeply fear the unknown, and unknown donors are just so unpredictable that it's hard to use the above crutches to get through an encounter. Plan a get to know you meeting. Tell your donor that you want to make sure you really understand them, so that you can better serve both them and your organization. Have a lunch or coffee date where you truly get to know them (as donors, please...keep it professional!) Plan to ask them about their connection to your organization. Their childhood. Their philosophy about life. THEN their philosophy about giving away money. Their own fears (you can share yours - the fear of letting down your organization). Their own dreams. See if that level of humanizing and understanding puts your fears to rest (and greatly strengthens the donor's institutional connections, to boot.)
4) Is phone the right way to connect with this donor? Maybe you're getting the wiggins from the telephone because this donor has never ever had a phone conversation with you. You've put in your development plan that you're going to call 3 donors a week, but you didn't really think about the fact that the next 5 donors on your list are all senior executives in the prime of their career who have no interest in getting on the phone with you in the middle of their day. But they'd love an email. Or a random handwritten note with whatever you were planning on saying to them. Here's a perfect example of why you don't simply run roughshod over your fears as if they were beacons shining on the best path forward. Your instincts here are giving you valuable information about a better way forward.
For every set of fears, there's a different set of questions to ask yourself as you figure out what's sending up the bubbles of anxiety and apprehension. When it's something that is internal - you are afraid of rejection or failure, and there's great risk of feeling those things if you press forward - sometimes you have to figure out how to simply get past that fear, conquer it and keep conquering it until exposure therapy tames that particular fear. But when it's born of something that you should be fixing before moving forward, listen to that, too.
Our own fear can give great advice.
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