The Science Of Fundraiser Feelings

Tony Martignetti
Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I'm your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdomadal podcast. Oh, I'm glad you're with us. I'd suffer the effects of schwanomatosis if you unnerved me with the idea that you missed this week's show. Here's our associate producer Kate with what's coming.

Kate Martignetti
Hey Tony, we've got The Science of Fundraiser Feelings. We take a scientific look at fundraiser behavior and behavior design. with Mallory Erickson. What does the science say about what happens in the fundraiser's body at stressful moments like a solicitation or problem confrontation? Are you or your fundraisers performing tasks that make them feel productive but avoid the true work of fundraising? Mallory is CEO of Practivated, and she talks us through. On Tony's Take 2.

Tony Martignetti
I love in-person audiences.

Kate Martignetti
Here is The Science of Fundraiser Feelings.

Tony Martignetti
It's a genuine pleasure to welcome the founder and CEO of Practivated, Mallory Erickson. Mallory is also host and author of What the Fundraising, the podcast and the book. She's a certified executive coach trained in behavior science, neuroscience, and behavior design. She has trained over 100,000 fundraisers to fundamentally change the way they lead and fundraise. The company is at practivated.com, and you'll find Mallory on LinkedIn. Mallory Erickson, welcome to Nonprofit Radio. Thank you.

Mallory Erickson
Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited for this conversation.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you. I'm glad you're with us. We don't take too many scientific looks at fundraising, which is to say never, I think. Maybe once in 16 years or so, but it's usually data-driven or some niche. But we're going to talk some about science, including neuroscience. Could you flesh out behavior design for me? That sounds very Orwellian. Yes. So I'm concerned. What is behavior?

Mallory Erickson
Yeah, no, no. So I, um, so my background in this is through kind of 2 different bodies of work. One was being trained by Dr. BJ Fogg. He is, um, he has— he created the Behavior Lab at Stanford, and he wrote the book Tiny Habits, and he's created the Fogg Behavior Model. And so he— I took a course, a certification course with him many years ago around how you design habits and behavior for behavior change. And then I also was trained by folks at IDEO on design thinking. And, you know, design thinking is a little bit more like macro level, but it's still, it's really that like human-centered design.

Tony Martignetti
What's IDEO?

Mallory Erickson
Oh, IDEO, they're here in San Francisco. They are also, I think, one of the original sort of like design thinking I think technically they're like a product design company, but really they look at behavior change on a macro level and they use design thinking to build for— I don't want to say outliers, but like the hardest case situations. So I got trained with them when I was leading a diabetes education and advocacy organization, and we were thinking about how to design products, but also interventions and education to address the prediabetes and type 2 diabetes epidemic. So design thinking helps you think about, okay, what are all the things that are currently happening, the behaviors that are currently happening? What are the challenges and problems that, that, that is creating? What are the desired behaviors that we want people to take? And then you, you try to take like the hardest circumstance and build for that. And then, and then when you do that, it actually includes a lot of other people. So I'll give you an example of a, of a, of a product or something that, that IDEO worked on. So many years ago, I think they're responsible for this. There was a Bank of America or some bank was trying to increase savings accounts. And they were trying to get people to put more money into saving accounts and they really couldn't get to folks to incentivize that. So they worked with design thinkers and they ended up after, you know, lots of interviews and testing and iteration, having a roundup feature at the bank where anytime you were, you were writing a check and there was anything left over from your checking account, it would start to go into your savings account. It was this roundup for savings kind of mechanism. And it built this habit in people to sort of recognize the importance of saving. saving accounts and this money consistently going into a savings account and started to build, um, much more investment in the bank's, like, saving account mechanism.

Tony Martignetti
Okay, okay, good example. So you're designing for a behavior outcome.

Mallory Erickson
Yes, in a large group of people.

Tony Martignetti
Right, right. And so, so how does that, uh, apply to what we want to talk about— fundraising? Make the connection.

Mallory Erickson
Yeah, so I mean, maybe I'll give you like a tiny bit of background on how I— how this led me here. So, so basically, I became an accidental fundraiser getting promoted up through nonprofits and managing director, executive director roles. I was really uncomfortable fundraising when I first started out, and I was sure that I was a bad fundraiser because I wanted to throw up before every major donor meeting, and I, and I completely burnt out. And I got to this moment in my career where I was like, gosh, like I can't keep doing this, I can't keep burning out, I have to figure out another way to fundraise that feels better to me. At the same time as I was sort of having that moment in my personal and professional life, I was learning habit and behavior design from BJ Fogg, I was learning design thinking from IDEO, and I was getting executive coach certified. And I started, you know, a lot of those different frameworks at the core underneath them is, how the body responds when we feel vulnerable or a threat or scared or fear, whether that fear is conscious or subconscious, how that sabotages our desired behavior. And, um, and that habit and behavior design and executive coaching and design thinking, all through these different frameworks and mechanisms, they all help us get over the action line Despite resistance or fear, either by making an action tinier so there's less fear involved, breaking it down into microsteps, or maybe analyzing where the fear is coming from in your brain and acknowledging and validating it and helping you move forward. So I sort of had this moment where I was like, wow, I, I remember coaching somebody on a call once, and as part of my certification, and I got off the call and I asked myself, what's the most vulnerable thing that I do in my life? Like, I was coaching this woman around this incredibly vulnerable moment in her life. And I was like, what's the most vulnerable thing I do in my life? And I was like, fundraising. And I was like, wow, like, what if I took all these frameworks that I'm learning in all these other— in all these other spaces? What if I applied them to my fundraising? Like, what if I started to notice what was happening in my body before a donor meeting? What if I started to notice where I was experiencing resistance with my to-do list, you know, just not taking action on that 2 to 5 minute task, that maybe underneath that was some fear or some discomfort or some worry that the person might not like what I do. And so I started to take all these frameworks and I started to design habits for myself around fundraising, around the parts of fundraising that I felt the most fear around. I started to think about like, what were other sort of like ways I could design my days or my behaviors to take into account the things that didn't come naturally to me? How could I, you know, recognize when I felt discomfort in fundraising and acknowledge and validate how I feel, but shift some of my thoughts and beliefs that might be leading to that discomfort. And as I was doing this, it completely changed how I fundraised. And not only did I start to raise a lot more money, like I moved an organization from $1 million to $3.8 million in like 24 months. And actually, almost more importantly than that, or I don't know, more importantly, was that I started to be able to raise that amount of in half the time because what I wasn't doing was spiraling in my head or, you know, dealing with all this resistance or doing all these like random tasks that actually weren't driving my fundraising outcomes, but were, you know, making me feel productive while avoiding vulnerability. And so I started, and then most importantly, I started to love fundraising. And I was like, oh my gosh, if I can love fundraising, anyone can love fundraising. And so then I just wanted to share these tools with my peers. And that's really how all of this started. I started to kind of become obsessed with the relationship between how we feel and what we do and what really gets in our way as fundraisers. And then I started to just wanna share these frameworks with anyone who was experiencing fundraising the way that I was. And when I started my podcast in 2021, everybody I was inviting on the podcast were neuroscientists and behavioral scientists and therapists and psychologists, because to your point, there's a lot of science around donor behavior, but I could find nothing around fundraiser behavior. And I was like, if we are the biggest predictor of a donor— donor's behavior, right? Like, we drive the primary prompts and invitations to donors. We need to better understand our behavior, like when it's happening, when it's not happening, and what might be happening in our brain and body That is most impacting then our donor's response. And so that's really what set me off on this journey to try to connect the dots between the way I had been learning about habit and behavior design and design thinking, but thinking about it in this fundraising context. And yeah, so it's been a really, really interesting— I mean, I said before we hit record, like, I call myself a wannabe behavioral scientist. But really, like, I think what, what all of these interviews with these incredible scientists and researchers has illuminated for me is that, you know, fundraising can't just be like a strategy or a template or a to-do list because it is so vulnerable. It involves our nervous system. We are taking risks. We are putting ourselves out there. And because of that, our, like, our body's reaction, our stress response, all those things is a really critical part of how we need to design

Tony Martignetti
Excellent. Okay, I'm taking this in. There are some threads I want to pull on a little bit. We are going to definitely— I want to get to the science. I'm very interested in the neuroscience or whatever physiologically what's happening, even whether it's brain or otherwise. But first, what are— you mentioned that you were doing tasks that made you feel productive, but you were actually avoiding fundraising. That sounds like symptoms of a deeper problem. Yeah. that maybe we wanna make listeners conscious of. What kinds of tasks are you talking about that feel good but don't move the needle on revenue?

Mallory Erickson
Yeah, so, okay, so maybe, and I'll sort of frame this up also related to some of the neuroscience. So our stress response, right? When our back brain or our amygdala gets activated, it activates our nervous system. We go into a variety of different types of stress responses, right? Most people are familiar with fight, flight, or freeze as like the primary stress responses. When a lot of what I see in fundraising, what I was experiencing myself, but also what I've seen now with, you know, thousands of fundraisers, is this oscillation in stress response between flight and freeze that presents itself in how we fundraise. So flight, a flight response is when you have 82 tabs open on your computer with a bunch of different fundraising ideas, or you're like, oh, we're gonna do a Chipotle dinner night over here, and then we're gonna— I'm gonna help this person do a bake sale over here, and maybe we'll start selling coffee with our student participants over here. And I was doing all those things, right? I was doing lots of like, like scattered spray fire fundraising activities that were really— what they were doing is they were looking busy and productive, but what they were helping me avoid was one-on-one conversations with donors. Right. Like, if I had had one sit-down meeting with one of our donors, I would've raised the amount of money that 15 activities were trying to raise. But those activities felt safer, they felt less vulnerable, they felt less risky. And so I was always defaulting to way too many fundraising activities, none of which were driving deeper fundraising results, but were making me feel like I was really busy. So that was like my flight response. Then the oscillation to freeze that we often see in fundraising is perfectionism. We're like, I'll be ready. So perfectionism— perfect is an illusion, right? I mean, excellence and perfection are not the same thing. And perfectionism is a freeze response. It's really just designed to hold us back from taking the action. It tells us we'll be ready when, right? You— I'll be ready to meet with this donor when this document is perfect. I'll be ready to launch this campaign when this happens. And when we are editing something 52 times, like, that is not about excellence. That is about fear of clicking submit. And so I— we see this in fundraising, and I was definitely experiencing this, this oscillation between a million scattered spray fire fundraising activities and then perfectionism and paralysis and just sort of oscillating back and forth between those 2 stress responses. And again, it was making me feel productive. No, I'm just making this proposal really, really, really good, or I'm just making this one-pager really, really, really good. But it was actually just my way of dealing with the discomfort of what might happen when I sent it.

Tony Martignetti
And say a little more about the way that felt for you and the impact it had on your team too.

Mallory Erickson
Yeah, you know, I mean, I think one thing I'll say is that I think different cultures, like different organizational cultures, normalize some of these things in different ways, right? Like, I don't even know that my team felt weird about what I was doing. I think we were all doing it in different ways. Like, we were all oscillating back and forth between those 2 stressors, and we just didn't have the consciousness to know what that was, right, at the time. Especially, I worked in small grassroots organizations. I think had I been, you know, a higher ed fundraiser, with a portfolio, it might have illuminated itself differently to me then, you know, when I was sort of held to more rigid metrics. Maybe I would've even noticed it earlier, but because we were a scrappy, you know, grassroots nonprofit, it seemed more normal that I was sort of doing all of these random things just to figure out fundraising. How it felt to me was just I mean, I think it's such a good— you know, nobody has ever asked me that question.

Tony Martignetti
Oh, good.

Mallory Erickson
I think, I think if you had asked me then what it felt like before I had the awareness and consciousness to really understand what was happening, I would have said, oh yeah, I'm just really, really busy and I'm overwhelmed. Right? I just like don't have time for everything. I'm really, really busy. I'm overwhelmed, but I'm just trying to do all these fundraising things. Like, I wasn't— and so how I felt was anxious, right? How I felt was anxious. How I felt was worried. How I felt was, was just like constantly on edge. Like, that was like what that feeling was like in my body, or sometimes dread opening my eyes in the morning and just feeling like I was under quicksand. Yeah. You know, like, oh, like I don't want to do this again. I don't know how to do this again. Like what? You know, just that sort of paralysis freeze state. Like that was really that was really like how it like felt in my body. And then once I started to realize, oh, you know, maybe this is coming from fear, and I started to get curious about that. Honestly, the first the way it felt when I started to say those things out loud, I don't know if you've ever had an experience like this where you. You say something either in your head or out loud and like your whole body just like knows it's true, you know? And like sometimes like all my goosebumps will stand up or I'll just like feel it in every cell. We are just like, oh no, yeah, that's true. And I think once I started to be like, maybe I'm scared, or like maybe I'm afraid that person won't like me, or maybe I'm worried that if they say no, I won't hit my fundraising goals. And then like, what does that say about me? Yeah. Like the moments, like maybe I'm not good enough for this. Maybe I'm not, maybe I can't do this. Like, I think once I started to like say my fears, I started to realize that like, that's what it was, that it wasn't about, oh, I'm just overwhelmed and have so many things to do. I'd sort of realized pretty fast like, oh, I'm creating all these things to do because I'm scared. Yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Thanks for sharing that. And, and then I think at the same time you were, you were doing this learning and certification, and this is when you had sort of an aha moment. Well, eventually you had this moment where you realized what you were feeling is, is related to what you're studying.

Mallory Erickson
Yeah.

Kate Martignetti
It's time for Tony's Take 2.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you, Kate. I love in-person audiences. I just met with one last week. We were hosted by the Grunin Foundation in New Jersey. We were meeting in Freehold, New Jersey, and there were about 70 or 80 people there. I was talking about planned giving for the whole morning. So it was 3 sessions with breaks in between. Wow. On launching planned giving at your small or mid-sized nonprofit. My favorite topic. And it's just the, the spontaneity and the immediate feedback and the full group feedback. You can see everybody. You don't have to look at people 12 at a time and, and have to click to see the other 12. Everybody's there in front of you. You just have to turn your head It's so simple. And the, just the fun of it. I love to walk through. Everybody was in round tables, so it wasn't set up like a theater. It was round. I love walking through the tables. I like talking from the back of the room. I like to use the full space, you know, the fun. I mean, the immediate feedback for joking and humor. Yeah. It's— there's just nothing like it. There is no virtual tool that has, has any, any claim to anything near live and in-person audiences. I, I just loved it. And being back in my, my home state, New Jersey, was very special, helping all those nonprofits, uh, in my— in the state where I grew up. Yeah. So that made it extra special. But, but it was mostly just being with people in person. No substitute. So if you can go to conferences in person, I urge you to. It makes, it makes a world of difference. I've got another one coming up. By the time you listen, it will have passed. The Bridge, of course, we've been— we— they were sponsors. It was last week. Yeah. And I'm between right now talking when it's coming up, and when you listen, it'll be over. So I can't say how it went, but it'll be in person, and that'll make it very, very special. That is Tony's Take 2. Kate?

Kate Martignetti
I mean, Zoom and, you know, WebEx and Google Meets and all these, you know, websites have made meeting more accessible. But I think it's great that now, you know, pandemic over, we're all getting back on our feet still, that we're able to now meet in person and meet face, uh, people one-on-one. I think that's a great thing.

Tony Martignetti
Yep, yep, absolutely. I, I, I'm, I'm so glad we're, we're over that where it has to be virtual. Uh, yeah, it's more accessible, but it's not as much fun. It's not as spontaneous. You just, you know, you You don't see everybody. You don't get to see— I hate that click. Oh, I can't see 3 quarters of the people because there's more than one screen. You know that I'm glad, you know, we're long past that. We're years past that. I just hope folks are taking advantage of in-person, whether it's even as a one-on-one meeting, you know, meeting with donors and prospects. I hope folks are not defaulting to, let's just do it. Let's just do it remote.

Kate Martignetti
As a viewer, were you more of like a gallery mode kind of person, or would you do like the speaker mode so you could see who was speaking in the moment?

Tony Martignetti
No, I choose gallery. At least you can see them. You can see 12 or whatever it is, whatever fits on a screen, 12 or 18. I don't remember what I was in one this morning. I don't really— whatever. I don't remember how many it is. But yeah, no, I'd rather see as many people as possible, but I'd rather see everybody instead of 12 or 18 at a time. So which one would you choose? Would you— do you choose gallery or speaker view?

Kate Martignetti
Oh, I think if it was more of like a team building or an icebreaker, I would do a gallery. But if I'm learning something, like I'm taking a class or a workshop, then I would put it on speaker, uh, the speaker view.

Tony Martignetti
Well, that makes sense for a class. Yeah, because it's pretty much one person talking.

Kate Martignetti
Yeah,

Tony Martignetti
right. Unless somebody has a question.

Kate Martignetti
We've got beaucoup buttloads more time. Here's the rest of The Science of Fundraiser Feelings with Mallory Erickson.

Tony Martignetti
So let's talk about the science. So what is happening in our, in our bodies when we're— I mean, I think what your work is mostly is preparing fundraisers for One-on-one meetings, right? Either face— I happen to like face-to-face, and I happen to like over meals. It's a preference for me. My Italian background, I like the shared space of the table. I like the cadence. Everybody knows the cadence from the greeting to the take the drink order, to come back for the entree order, to check on the entrees, to see if there's dessert, whether it's a lunch or dinner. Mm-hmm. Everybody at the table knows the cadence. Everybody, it's usually me and 1 or 2 other people. It's a person or a couple typically. So there's the shared space, there's the understanding of the cadence of the meal. There's the no interruptions. We're not in her office, so she's not going to get blindsided by a call or something. And yeah, just that cadence helps me kind of time my conversation. Anyway, all right, that— but we're not— okay, anyway, uh, share that for what it's worth because I happen to like meetings over meals. But whatever, your work is preparing fundraisers for meetings, right? Okay. So what's going on physiologically, uh, I don't know, the hour before, uh, the day before? I mean, you know the— you know the science better. Yeah. What's going on? We got this meeting on We got this meeting Thursday at 12:30, and let's make it a lunch meeting. So, okay, that week or that month, I don't know, you take the time span you need. What's going on for our bodies?

Mallory Erickson
Yeah, so, and one thing I'll say is, first of all, thank you for sharing what you shared. And that actually makes perfect sense because, um, you know, I, I interviewed this, uh, guy on What the Fundraising, Arash Yankovic, uh, who's the head of the Fear Research Lab at Wayne State, and he wrote a book called Afraid. And he talks about 2 ways to decrease fear are knowledge and control. And so that lunch meeting is a great example of control, right? You're reducing the amount of uncertainty. You know the cadence, what's gonna happen. It makes you feel a great— like, that's a perfect example actually of like how to leverage kind of what is in our control to reduce the amount of uncertainty that can dysregulate us.

Tony Martignetti
All right. So I'm a control freak is what you just said. Very tactful.

Mallory Erickson
No, no, no, no, no. What I'm saying is that what you've done is you've hacked away, you've hacked a lever of decreasing fear in a, in a totally appropriate way. Like, because, so here's one of the things that, that's really interesting about this question. One of the things that we've realized, uh, that I've realized over the years and that we've been able to sort of prove through Practivated is that our fear of what could happen in a meeting, even a meeting that is not on your calendar yet, even a meeting that is not in an hour or a week before. A fear of what could happen with a donor at a hypothetical meeting in the future actually changes your behavior for months, if not years, in advance. So one of the most interesting data points we saw with Practivated was that it increases donor— human-driven donor touch points by 280%. So fundraisers are reaching out to their donors so much more frequently, not even necessarily with meeting requests, with touchpoints, with showing them an article, with calling to check on them, with saying thank you, all because their fear— so much of what holds us back from even these behaviors that we don't think are that vulnerable, right? People always ask me, why is it so hard to make a thank you call? They'll be like, that should not be hard. Why am I scared to make a thank you call? Because it's still vulnerable. What if you get somebody on the phone who's in the middle of lunch and then they're upset that you called at that time? It's like the, the chance of that is so small, but the fear holds us back and gets projected into all of these other behaviors and all of this other resistance because of what might possibly happen one day if we ever have that conversation. So I just wanna like frame that up and then, and now I'll, I'll answer your, your actual question around what's happening in our body. So one of the things that I started to, so our stress response, I mentioned before, like When we're learning about something or we're in training or we're in a workshop, we're in our prefrontal cortex. We're in the logical part of our brain. When we go to implement something and take that action, especially if that action involves any level of vulnerability, our back brain comes online. Our amygdala, our lizard brain.

Tony Martignetti
Oh, where's the amygdala? Where's the amygdala? Can you point?

Mallory Erickson
Okay, back here.

Tony Martignetti
Yeah. Like nape of the neck.

Mallory Erickson
Yeah, yeah.

Tony Martignetti
Can you point to it?

Mallory Erickson
Okay. I don't know. I'm not, I don't have a 3D, but yeah, it's like known lovingly as our back brain. Okay. Sometimes. So, so our amygdala comes online, that's connected to our nervous system. And our back brain's job— our back brain essentially has 2 jobs: to keep you alive and to conserve as much energy as possible, right? Because it's like threat, potential threat. And so it's like survival, but then also conserve as much energy as possible because like you don't know if you're going to have to run really fast. from that lion in the woods, right? Our brain is this primitive— it's primitive in the way that it detects and responds to fear. So because its job is to keep us alive and conserve as much energy as possible, it actually turns off all these other functions in the brain in order to do that. So it turns off our prefrontal cortex in certain ways. It turns off our ability for collaboration, for curiosity. Hmm. For flexibility, for innovation, all these things that are required for deep relationship building with our donors, they actually go offline when our stress response is running the show, when our amygdala is running the show. The idea behind this, of course, is that when we're feeling under threat or we're feeling fear, we're essentially like tender, right? Like if we're in a stress response, we don't wanna do something that could make something— make us more vulnerable, right? Like, if I'm feeling really tender and afraid, the last thing I wanna do is share a part of myself with someone that they might not like or that they might reject. Or, you know, I wouldn't wanna lose my feeling of belonging 'cause I'm already feeling really tender, right? I'm already feeling like, oh my gosh, like, how am I gonna, you know, survive this lion eating me in the woods or whatever it is? So it turns off all of these, all of these things That add on to a stress response. And one of the things that I learned— so when I first started coaching fundraisers around burnout, I— the first thing I did was to try to get them to work less, right? I was like, everybody's overworked there. I'm gonna be able to help them with their burnout if I get them to work less. Then I found that even when I got folks to work 40 hours a week, or sometimes 35 hours a week, or sometimes even less, they were still burning out. And I was like, okay, what is happening here? And that, that started a body of research on what the fundraising around what causes stress, chronic stress, and then ultimately burnout and the progression between those states. And there were 5 areas of fundraising that are scientifically proven to increase stress, chronic stress, and burnout. Uncertainty. Pressure, power dynamics, isolation, and overwork, right? So, so those things coming together create additional stress, chronic stress, and burnout. Now, fundraising— oh, and rejection. Sorry, that was the other one, rejection. Overwork was my pre-one. So some of those components are going to be involved in fundraising no matter how great of a fundraiser we are. Rejection is always going to be a part of fundraising. Pressure is always going to be a part of fundraising, even if our organization isn't putting it on us. Like, we feel the pressure, right, to fund our programs, to, to meet our goals, all of those things. Isolation— fundraising can be incredibly isolating, even inside organizations, especially if you're the only fundraiser, right? And everybody else is like, well, I'm not a fundraiser. Like, that's a very isolating emotional experience. And then uncertainty. Like, fun— one of the things that I think is so hard about fundraising is the fact that relationships, human relationships, are dynamic and uncertain, and yet we are trying to operationalize them in a process that is super rigid, and those things feel in conflict, right? Like, I would never with mom friends be like, okay, I'm trying to become friends with 4 people at my— in my daughter's first grade class, so the first thing I'm gonna do is invite them all to the park. Right. And see how much I like them. Then if that goes well, I'll invite them over for a plate, right? Like, we do— that's just not how human relationships work. So we're trying to make this very human thing operationalized. And, and the reality is it still feels uncertain because human relationships are uncertain, and that is dysregulating for our nervous system. So when we're stressed and those things just come together and They layer onto each other and they create a really hard emotional environment to then go into a donor meeting and be open to connection because our brain has turned off so many of those pieces. And so a lot of my work, what my work has focused on is like, how do we decrease the stress response, right? How do we reduce overwhelm in order to open up and have access to all of those other parts of our brain that actually drive fundraising that feels good, connected relationships, revenue. Because we need curiosity, we need flexibility, we need to ask open-ended questions, but our brain doesn't want to do that if we're scared.

Tony Martignetti
So the next step is Thank you. That's a great overview of what's going on in our bodies and our minds. What can we do? You highlight, in passing, you mentioned a couple things I know we're going to flesh out, like coaching, repetition, you know, getting insights. How can we help our fundraisers overcome what's a perfectly natural— these things that you're describing are all All perfectly natural, ordinary, nothing to be ashamed of responses to the stressors of fundraising, like isolation and uncertainty.

Mallory Erickson
Yes, yes. Thank you for saying that, because I think that is so— you know, oftentimes people will say when I speak, like, they'll come up to me after, be like, thank you so much for talking about this, I thought I was the only one. And like, the thing I really want people to hear is everybody experiences these things because they're in our body. Even 20, 30-year fundraise— I talked to Chief I talk to philanthropy officers constantly who are still experiencing this. Now, the scenarios that create the discomfort or uncertainty might be different than a first-year annual gift officer, but everybody is dealing with situations that create this, this environment in our nervous system. The other thing I'll just say, and then we'll talk about solutions, is we only have one nervous system. We don't have like a work nervous system and then a personal life nervous system and then a world events nervous system. We have one nervous system, and stress compounds. So I just think it's also really important for people to understand that, like, you know, sometimes I'll hear people say, well, I used to not be nervous about that, or I used to be fine in a situation like that, and right now I'm like feeling frazzled when it happens. Yeah, well, maybe there are other stressors in your life or in the world that are— that have your kind of base nervous system regulation in a different place.

Tony Martignetti
Amped up.

Mallory Erickson
And, and so, and so those things that maybe didn't fully dysregulate you before are doing that now because your baseline has lifted. So I just also want to like normalize that for people, and that will lead me right into my first solution. The very first thing is to acknowledge and validate your feelings. There is literally nothing more important than acknowledging and validating your feelings. One of the things we try to tough love ourselves like, oh, I shouldn't be nervous about this. I should— I've walked into a million donor meetings, Mallory, like, get it together. You know, that, that doesn't work. It actually, it actually sabotages us, and it, and it gets our brains stuck in negotiation about whether we should feel something or we shouldn't feel something, or we deserve to be stressed, or we deserve to be tired. And we get trapped in this chatter. All I want people to do is to say to themselves, that makes sense. That makes sense. Like, it makes sense I feel nervous right now. I really want this to go well. It makes sense that I'm scared to press send on this email. Like, I really want this person to like me. You know, it makes sense that I am, you know, feeling anxious about X, Y, and Z. Like, I worked so hard on that grant. You know, like, all of those things, like, just saying to yourself, that makes sense, comes from some of the research of Britt Frank. She wrote a book called The Science of Stuck, and it is like a magic sentence. So that's that's the first thing. The second, the second and third. The second thing is around how we can downregulate our nervous system and like come back. So stress is not bad. We need stress. Stress is a very important part of life, and we would be like potatoes if we didn't have stress, right? We need stress, but our body has to go back and forth between stress and rest and digest, right? It has to go back and forth between like our parasympathetic. Parasympathetic nervous system and our sympathetic nervous system. And the problem often in fundraising is that we have so many stimuli that keep us in a stress state, right? We deal with rejection, then we have uncertainty and pressure, right? So we never— our stress cycle never ends. So we need different ways of ending our stress cycle. And there, I think about these in 2 camps: cognitive tools to downregulate our nervous system and somatic tools to downregulate our nervous system. So cognitive tools That makes sense is actually one example of that. Another might be getting curious around where a fear is coming from. Wow, I feel some tightness in my belly right now. I wonder where that's coming from. Like, what's underneath there? Or I'm noticing this thing that's been on my to-do list for 3 weeks, and it's just a 5-minute task. Like, am I scared about something related to it? What is it? Right? Just getting curious and sort of bringing that consciousness into your brain around the relationship between your body and what you're doing. That's great. That's like the beginning of some, you know, cognitive tools. Coaching is really around the idea that our thoughts and our beliefs inform how we feel and then ultimately how we act. And so sometimes through our feelings, we can get curious around the thoughts and the beliefs that are behind that and then provide a different option, right? Sometimes people will say, well, I know this donor is mad at me because they haven't responded in 72 hours, so I must have done something wrong in that email. Right. And I'm like, okay, what's an exact opposite story around why that donor might not have responded to you yet? Like, what's the exact opposite story? So those types of cognitive tools can be really helpful. Sometimes the stress is so big that we need to address it in our body. Like, our mind alone, we can't get out of the loop-de-loops. And so we need to address it in our body. That can be—

Tony Martignetti
This is the somatic?

Mallory Erickson
Yeah. So these are somatic tools. And somatic tools, I also think about in 2 camps, downregulation and upregulation. So downregulation are things like, you know, deep breathing exercises or grounding exercises where you're placing both feet on the floor and bringing your consciousness to each foot, making sure the whole foot is on the floor. Or there's something called butterfly hug or bilateral tapping. By kids, we call it butterfly hug, where you tap your arms, you give yourself kind of a little self-hug, and then you tap your hands side to side on your shoulders. Or box breathing, like folks can Google, there's so many, and I'll give you a link for the show. I have a 30-minute stress management course. It's totally free, and it goes through a number of different somatic tools and cognitive tools. But that's downregulation. Sometimes you might notice that you are so stressed or like kind of amped up that taking deep breaths makes you want to like crawl out of your skin. Like, I remember before I would speak, people would tell me, just take a few deep breaths before you go on stage. And I would be like trying to deep breathe and I'd be like, I'm gonna explode. Like, I can't do this. That's a great example of when we need upregulation. So to actually calm down. So upregulation can be listening to upbeat music. Yeah. It can be going for a walk or a run. It can be jumping on a mini trampoline, something that's kind of like gets that anxious energy out of you in order to help you calm down. So that, that's upregulation. And then, and then the last tool that I, that I always talk about is around practice and repetition. So one of the things that I think is really important for folks to understand is that But part of, part of reducing feelings of uncertainty is to give our body the muscle memory to know that we can handle whatever comes up. And I think, you know, it's funny to me that we think about practice like it's so interesting to me with Practivated. People will say, oh, that's a great tool for new fundraisers sometimes. Yeah. That's what they'll say. And I'll be like, new fundraisers? I'm like, we would never say LeBron James is such a good basketball player, he doesn't need to practice anymore. We would never, that would be like such a mind-boggling concept. There are so many professions that involve repetition and practice as a routine part of having, of being excellent in your craft. Yeah. And, you know, I think like Practivated aside, I want practice to become a much more common experience in our sector. I want repetition to be adopted, whether you have a tool like Practivated or not, because that is what it takes to actually integrate knowledge and skills into your body so that when a donor asks a random question or somebody says, hey, how'd you get my phone number? You don't lose access to all those other parts of your brain because your brain has navigated a number of different scenarios like that in the past. And, you know, one thing I want to say about practice, however you do it, that is really important is you want to do varied, diverse, varied situational practice. So the idea is not to role-play a 90-minute donor meeting over lunch over and over and over again for this upcoming meeting that you have with Seth next week. Because what happens when you do that, or we use scripts or things like that, Then we go into the meeting with Seth. The meeting does not go the same way as the role play because people are dynamic, and maybe Seth had a bad morning with his kids, you know, and so he's in a mood. And so then we go into the meeting with Seth. It's not exactly as the role play, but our brain tries to pattern match because it was trying to get perfect for this very scripted situation. And when it can't pattern match, it freaks out. Right. And so it actually sabotages our ability to stay present and embodied in the conversation. When we use varied situational practice, what it does to our brain is it creates that cognitive flexibility and that resilience. Just like LeBron, LeBron and his team are not practicing exactly how a game is going to go. They're practicing all the different situations, all the different scenarios that could come up based on the team that they're going up against, so that then when the game So when the game comes, they're present in the game and their body and their brain has the muscle memory to adapt in the moment and stay really present and not get all caught up in their head.

Tony Martignetti
What about coaching? That's also valuable, right?

Mallory Erickson
Yes. Yes. So coaching— yes, coaching is— I mean, I'm an executive coach. I always have a coach. I am a very big advocate of coaching. And obviously with Practivated, we've created an AI coach. And, and, you know, one thing I want to say is like, that's not to replace human coaching. But I think, you know, I believe that fundraisers deserve access to world-class coaching, whether a manager is available or not, or, and whether you can afford to hire a one-on-one coach. You know, like, I think that there are a lot of, um, there's a lot of inequity in who has access to coaching. Mm-hmm. And so I think as we start to see, um, you know, AI coaching come on the scene, um, I think it is important to recognize that, like, it's not about replacing human coaching, but there are things that AI coaching can do that even human coaching can't do. So again, coaching is really about— the difference between coaching and consulting is coaching is really about bringing out the best in you, right? It's about, it's about recognizing that inside of you is, is everything that you need to be an amazing fundraiser. And I really believe this about people. Like, I think that You know, every fundraiser already has most of what they need inside of them, but they have a bunch of junk in the way—self-doubt—and they're second-guessing themselves, and they are, you know, spiraling around this thing. And I really think about coaching as like removing the gunk to like get the clarity to help people tap into the things that are already inside of them and bring them out and and. Connect the dots and give them some feedback and insight into, into when things are coming through and when things aren't coming through so that they can be the best fundraiser that they can be. And this is, you know, the other thing that I really believe is, you know, so I always say this about Practivated, like the idea of that tool was not to create a bunch of Mallory fundraisers. It was to bring out the The best fundraisers in everybody, because the best fundraiser a fundraiser can be is the best fundraiser in them. And, and so like in, in Practivated, for example, we— when you do a donor scenario, after you do a practice scenario, you get feedback on 16 different indicators. All of those indicators are around what builds deeper human connection. There are a lot of different personalities or ways of saying things that can build deeper human connection, not just the way one person does it. Yeah. Does it. And so what we're able to do with surfacing those insights is show them, okay, of these 16 indicators, here are the things you did really well during that conversation, but here are the 3 places that really kind of— it fell apart, right? Or the dots didn't get connected to actually be able to move that donor relationship forward. And that type of insight, personalized, specific, immediate feedback is incredibly powerful, both in terms of how we grow and improve, but actually also for our nervous system. I, I was just talking to somebody who was telling me they always ask for the feedback reports when they speak on stage. Mm-hmm. And, and I was saying, okay, but you gotta be careful about that because feedback that gets delivered 2 weeks, 2 months later is actually not good for your nervous system because then for that period of time, your body's living in uncertainty. And it can't actually— it's not integrating feedback around that experience and improvement because there's a huge lag in when you're actually getting that feedback. So for anybody, if you're doing role play on your team, you wanna give feedback immediately. Like whatever feedback you can give, you wanna give it immediately. You don't wanna do a bunch of role play all day. Yeah. And then everybody goes back, writes things, and two weeks later they give everybody feedback on their role play two weeks ago. We're losing the ability to integrate that feedback for behavior change in that lag. So you know repetition, you know practice repetition, coaching and support around that skill development, and then insight and feedback that aligns with that coaching and support is a huge. Huge. Like, you know, we, we call Practivated the first-ever fundraiser readiness platform. And what we mean by readiness is the simultaneous building of skills, confidence, and muscle memory in the same moment. So however you're doing practice or repetition in your organization, you wanna make sure that you are building that skills, confidence, and muscle memory in the same moment. And that involves bringing repetition. Mm-hmm.

Tony Martignetti
Mallory, that's excellent. We brought in the science, we brought in the, the mind and the body, uh, and, uh, and practical, practical strategies for, uh, overcoming what is perfectly normal, natural response to the stressors of fundraising. Thank you. It's excellent.

Mallory Erickson
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me and for talking to me about all these things. Thank you.

Tony Martignetti
That's Mallory Erickson, founder and CEO of Practivated. The company is practivated.com. Connect with Mallory on LinkedIn, as I have done. Follow her there. Thank you, Mallory.

Mallory Erickson
Thank you so much.

Kate Martignetti
Next week, low-lift donor retention. If you missed any part of this week's show,

Tony Martignetti
I'd be seated.

Kate Martignetti
Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I'm your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show's social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein.

Tony Martignetti
Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.