What It Means to Win in Fundraising: Lessons from the Olympic Games

If I told you, “You’re a winner!” How would that sit with you? Would it make you feel uncomfortable? Like a fraud? Unsure if you deserved it?

So many of us have a messy relationship with success and celebrating our wins. But why is that?

Let’s take a moment to reframe our thinking about winning. This 2012 Harvard Business Review article provides a great perspective:

“What winners recognize, above all, is that the ultimate goal is never to vanquish an opponent or to prove something to others, but rather to more fully realize their own potential, whatever that may be.”

What does success and winning look like as a fundraiser?

Too many times, our measurements of success and what establishes a “winner” is focused on getting the money, landing the gift, and asking for more.

So, how do we broaden our view of success and winning as fundraisers and include celebrating the courage, tenacity, and plain stubbornness required to keep going that is required of you in your work?

Here are some examples of being a winner…

• Winners are fundraisers who consistently invest effort, persevere, and keep getting better at building authentic relationships with donors. Doing so may lead to a significant gift, or it may not, but you do it anyway because it is the right thing to do and it does impact donor and giving retention.
• Winners have a goal for each donor and for their whole portfolio but know that ongoing satisfaction and value comes from being in the present moment and taking the steps that will result in that goal. It is a journey and you take it one step at a time. If you only celebrate the end result, that is in some ways missing the point. Celebrate and have gratitude for it is in those steps along the way where trust is built.
• Winners are people who aren’t afraid to lose. You try new things – sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. Your focus isn’t on what didn’t work or how a donor didn’t choose to respond; your focus is on what you learned and what you might try next.
• Winners learn from and own their mistakes. Being able to own and learn from a time you didn’t manage a donor relationship well is just as impactful and valuable as the time you did do well and it resulted in a gift from a donor.
• Winners have the courage to ask a donor if they would be open to a conversation about giving more significantly. You step up and open the door for donors to have more impact and experience more joy.
• Winners use their skills not just to build their own value, but also to add value in the world – to give back and pay it forward. You mentor new fundraisers, you celebrate your teammates’ success, you share your templates and emails that worked, and support everyone’s success. You express gratitude for the wins and all who supported that success.

Let’s think about this another way: why do we love watching the Olympics and the stories of our favorite athletes? Not because they do everything perfectly and always win the gold medal. It’s because their story resonates with us. They face obstacles and hardship and keep working hard, striving and learning. Their story is our story, and they bring us inspiration.

So, why do we love stories from the Olympics, but struggle so much to celebrate our own successes?

If you pride yourself on being a perfectionist, then celebrating wins may be challenging. Striving to do better is admirable but not at the expense of never feeling satisfied or content with achievement. Because in reality, you will never be perfect or do it perfectly.  Never being enough or feeling you have done enough isn’t kind to yourself. It can also limit your potential because who wants to set bold audacious goals if there is no room for failure along the way?

Or maybe you were taught as a kid not to brag, so celebrating wins feels arrogant. We have all been in a fundraising meeting at some point with someone who was arrogant and braggadocious about success with a donor, and it’s not a pretty sight. That person was looking for praise rather than celebrating a win. And most likely they overstated their role, or diminished and overlooked the role that others played. That is not what celebrating a win looks, sounds, or feels like. Celebrating a win means an opportunity to share a success with the intent to bring hope, joy and uplift all who contributed.

To stay grounded in gratitude and embrace celebration, let’s walk through an exercise to reframe a recent win you had:

1. Start by being clear with your purpose. What is your reason for sharing this win? Is it to share a learning that others could use, encourage others to keep going, or uplift the team who worked hard collaboratively? Or maybe you are working toward a promotion and want to make sure your leadership is aware of your skill set?
2. Identify your learnings along the way. When did you get stuck and what did you do? Was there a strategy or approach that supported success you can share? How do you plan to use your learnings in the future? If we only share the success without also sharing the struggle along the way, we miss out on an opportunity for growth for everyone. And it makes you more human and trustworthy to be honest about those learnings.
3. With gratitude, share how it took a community to make this work and identify people by name and their contribution. That builds trust, it builds a strong team, and encourages even more collaborative efforts.
4. Watch your language and the way you respond to others giving you positive feedback. Don’t say things like, “I’m not trying to brag,” because that just says you are. And when you get a compliment, don’t downplay it; just warmly say thank you. Putting someone down for wanting to lift you up is counterproductive.

As I, and the rest of the world, enjoy the Paris Olympics this summer, I encourage you to use this time to reflect on your own wins and your own story of overcoming. Maybe, you’ll start to see that you are a winner after all.

Karen