Changing Fundraising’s Scarcity Mindset

I have said for years that traditional nonprofit fundraising is broken. So broken. Because if you think about it, nonprofit fundraising is very much steeped in the scarcity mindset. The underlying assumption in most nonprofit fundraising efforts is “not enough.” We’ve seen this very clearly in recent months when so many nonprofits were hesitant to fundraise during the pandemic because they feared there just wasn’t “enough money” to go around. But long before the pandemic, fundraising has been all about scarcity. So let’s change that.

Let’s move your money raising efforts from a broken fundraising approach to a much more effective, functional and (wait for it) abundant approach to attracting all the money you need.

The first step is to shift your organization’s fundamental question about money. In a traditional nonprofit fundraising approach, a board and staff ask the scarcity-based question:

“How much money can we raise?”

Instead, you want to move to an abundance-based question:

“How much money will it take to accomplish our goals?”

This abundance question puts you squarely in the driver’s seat. You are no longer beholden to money, afraid of it, or unsure whether it will show up. Instead you are confident in the value you are offering the world (your goals) and clear about how much money is required to achieve that value.

Read the full article about the move from nonprofit fundraising to social change financing by Nell Edgington at Welcome.