April 16, 2015 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Imagine the scene: You’re in a solicitation meeting with a prospective donor and you need to ask him for a $50,000 gift. You’ve been working up to it for 20 minutes. The time is right, so here it goes.
You: John, from our conversation, I think you’ll agree that the house renewal project on campus is an important initiative.
Prospect: It really is!
Fundraiser: Would you and your wife consider supporting the dean and the house renewal project with a gift of $50,000?
Prospect: (silence for a moment) Hmmmm … I don’t think so.
Oh, no. You spent most of your prep time psyching yourself up to ask the question. What now?
Most fundraisers have been in this position, and many were not prepared for it. If your shop has four or more frontline fundraisers, you can avoid this ‘askus interruptus’ syndrome by holding trainings in which you film a role-play solicitation like this one, but preferably with a more successful conclusion.
How it works: Set up a training session with three to seven fundraisers — we’ll call them students — and one or two experienced fundraisers, or coaches. To prepare for the training, the coaches write several solicitation scenarios, and each student picks one to practice in advance.
The filming class itself will take from from one-and-a-half to three hours, depending on the number of students. When the group gathers, each student role-plays raising money from a “prospect,” played by one of the coaches. The fundraiser has seven minutes to conduct a mini-visit with the coach, who acts out scenarios that mimic real-life encounters. They may throw out objections, interrupt the fundraiser’s carefully crafted pitch, raise sometimes bizarre questions, or lapse into inscrutable silence. The entire exercise is filmed, and afterwards the other fundraisers give the student feedback.
This sounds like your worst nightmare, right? You’re being scrutinized, you’re being filmed, and to cap it off, your colleagues may see you make a professional fool of yourself.
Truth be told, there is always a fair amount of resistance when we come around to our yearly filming sessions.
But when it’s over, the participants are glowing. They give what we call our “Filming 1.0” class rave reviews. When given the choice, 75 percent of participants ask to do the filming class again.
How is this possible? Several factors lead to this being one of the most successful trainings we do.
Positive feedback
We developed this course in conjunction with the instructional design experts at our university, who taught us that adult learners are less flexible than younger learners.
It takes a lot for us adults to fix our weaknesses, but we can accomplish more by working on our natural strengths. Accordingly, the filming class allows no negative feedback. All feedback is what the student did well and should do more of. When participants hear from four to six other people commenting on all of the good things they’re doing, they feel fantastic, and a vibe of positive reinforcement starts making its way around the room.
Open-ended coaching
The coach’s goal is to help students open up their thinking during the feedback with questions like “If X is your goal, what other options do you think could get you there?” or “What about Y made you feel confident, and how can you carry that through to other parts of the meeting?”
Not only will the fundraiser in the hot seat start thinking creatively but other participants in the room start offering different approaches, allowing all the students to come away with new arrows in their fundraising quivers.
What happens in Vegas….
Once during a filming, one of the role-playing solicitors turned bright red: There was no avoiding her discomfort. During the feedback, her fellow fundraisers rushed to her defense, claiming she had been in a tough position and that they too felt on the spot.
The secret is that everyone is vulnerable, and we make it clear from the get-go that we operate under “Vegas rules”: What happens in filming stays in filming. This creates a powerful camaraderie among the fundraisers.
Comments are specific
Instead of telling a fundraiser “Cindy, that was really good,” we encourage feedback that names a specific behavior: “Cindy, when you leaned in right before the solicitation …” — and pairs it with the impact that behavior had — “… I felt you were really connecting with the prospect, which made your solicitation even more powerful.”
This granular level of detail helps the fundraiser hone in on specifics that she can repeat to increase her success.
What you say is less important than how you say it
In a one-on-one interaction with another person, this is the breakdown of what accounts for trust and believability:
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55 percent is how you appear to the other person
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38 percent is what you sound like
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7 percent is what you say
We film the role-plays so fundraisers can see all the nonverbal aspects of the ask, given that they account for 93 percent of a fundraiser’s effectiveness.
After the first day of filming class, we ask students to watch their own film three times with three purposes in mind:
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First, replay the film with the sound off to see physical gestures, body language, and emotional connection or disconnection.
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Second, replay with the sound on to hear what was said and have a chance to be appalled, embarrassed, pleased, or surprised.
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Finally, replay again with sound on so you can put all the elements together, verbal and nonverbal, and begin to see your strengths coming through.
One weakness
We reconvene a day or so after the filming class.
By then, the sense of camaraderie has settled in, and the fundraisers have seen their own performances three times. At that point, we allow each student to give the others one thing to work on.
Why just one thing? You can only focus on one thing at a time: You can’t change five things in your golf swing all at once.
Often there is consensus that there’s just one tweak the person needs to make to improve his “solicitation swing.” Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?
Filming is a powerful tool to break through fundraisers’ often inaccurate picture of what they’re doing well or poorly.
Once when I was role-playing the prospect, one of my students was confident and clear in her presentation, got through a smooth and flawless ask, and then dropped her eyes to the floor the minute it was on the table. In one fell swoop, all the air went out of the room. Her anxiety and discomfort with asking for money was palpable. She didn’t feel it, but I did.
When I noted that nonverbal nuance, she got it right away. It was much better for her to make this mistake with a caring colleague than to do it during a $100,000 solicitation. She’s now developed into a cracker-jack solicitor, in part because she was able to gain confidence by learning all the things she did wonderfully and could focus on one tweak to amp up her effectiveness.
No matter the size of your shop, if you have three to seven fundraisers who can gather around a table with a camera or an iPhone to make videos, practice makes a pretty good fundraiser!
