Ep. 214: The Slowest Path to Millions: 7 Signs You’re On It
EPISODE 214
The Slowest Path to Millions: 7 Signs You’re On It
About the Episode:
Most established nonprofits aren't stuck because they're not working hard enough. They're stuck because they run fundraising like separate projects, not one connected operation.
In this episode, I walk through seven signs your fundraising isn't compounding, why that disconnection is the slowest path to millions, and why it's also the fastest path to burnout. I also share what one client did differently that led to $50,000 more across their digital campaigns (no new channels, no additional budget). The only change was connecting their communications strategy to their fundraising. If you have the pieces and they're still not working together the way they should, this one is for you.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
Why fundraising runs like separate projects (not one connected operation) creates a revenue ceiling even for established organizations
How adding more channels, events, and campaigns without optimizing what already exists keeps organizations stuck at the same level
Why isolated wins don't compound, and what a repeatable, buildable result actually looks like
The hidden cost of hiring execution before shared strategy is in place
What the compounding path actually looks like, and how one client raised $50K more simply by connecting their communications to their fundraising
Why the slowest path to millions is also the fastest path to burnout, and how to break the cycle
It’s not your stories—it’s how you’re telling them. If your amazing work isn’t getting the attention (and donations) it deserves, it’s time for a messaging shift. The Brave Fundraiser’s Guide guide gives you 10 done-for-you donor prompts to make your message impossible to ignore. Get it for free here! https://christinaedwards.krtra.com/t/xKuLs6tOiPZa
Christina’s Favorite Takeaways:
“Every campaign teaches you something you can reuse for the next one.”
“If every channel ends up where it began, revenue has to keep starting over.”
“A win only compounds when you know why it worked and what happens next.”
“Hiring into an unclear strategy doesn't fix the strategy problem.”
“Data becomes valuable when it creates a decision.”
“You reach millions when the engine stops wasting what you already have; when the engine works stronger, faster, harder.”
“The slowest path to millions is a tremendous amount of fundraising that never compounds. It's also the fastest path to burnout.”
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Christina Edwards 0:57Is your nonprofit doing all of the fundraising things, campaigns, emails, events, major donors, mid-level donors, monthly giving, grants, foundations, comms, social media contractor, a board with a contact list, warm intros, sponsorships, fundraising activity everywhere, and yet revenue feels Inconsistent, growth is slower than you want it to be than it should be. This isn't your first, second, or third year, right? You've been doing this a while, and every dollar raised requires a brand new push. That is the slowest path to millions, and that's what we're going to dig into today. Now, this isn't because your mission isn't compelling. Your programs don't work, right? They're not valuable. This isn't because your staff isn't working hard. It's because fundraising is run like separate projects, not one connected operation. I want you to think about a relay race, right? That is a connected operation. There are four people running, right? And the first one goes and passes the baton. The second one goes, grabs that baton. The next one goes and hands that baton. That's what your fundraising strategy and plan should look like instead of picture a marathon and a big crowd of runners, and then they say on your merc, get set, go, and everyone just runs at the same time, right? Some people run longer, some people run faster, some people run shorter distances. That is a disconnected fundraising operation. So fundraising shouldn't be taught or run like separate projects. And yet, time and time again, this is what happens. This is something I see very often, And this is one of the biggest things we fix inside my coaching program, the club. So not just one little fundraiser, one campaign, one email, one major donor ask, but the entire fundraising and communications engine, the backbone. So let's think about that big million dollar goal you might have. Maybe you want to reach to a million in annual funding. Maybe you've hit a million, and you want to reach to the next million to hit $2 million in annual funding. You get there by making what you already do work together and work harder. That is the first, most foundational piece to raising more, to breaking through from half a million to a million, from a million to 1.5, from 1.5 to 2 million. That means campaign donors don't disappear after the campaign, right? Your retention rate is strong. It's not 20% like we see rampant in the sector. Event guests have somewhere to go next, something something to do next, something to connect them to your organization. Monthly giving, is it just a hope, a dream, an afterthought, or at worst that I see an option at the form on the little checkout page where it's like you could make your your donation monthly and people just opt in? It's an afterthought, right? Instead, it's part of your strategy. Major donors hear from you between asks regularly. Comms and marketing supports fundraising, not a separate universe. This is key. Every campaign teaches you something. You reuse, right? Is something you can replicate. It is not starting from scratch in every fundraising campaign. Every donor has a next step. I want you to think about a donor journey. You're putting your donor in the passenger seat of your car. Y'all have a destination. You are going somewhere together. Your team also-they're in the car with you. They're working towards the same priorities and goals. So what I'm seeing happen very commonly is not lack of ideas or ways to fundraise, but instead pieces and those little fundraising pieces are siloed out, and there is not an engine so that they can work together, so that you can have that one successful relay race year after year after year, and because your organization isn't new, you have active donors, right? You know people will give. You may already have a healthy donor list, a strong email list. You have strong campaigns. You have donors that are really engaged and connected. Maybe a handful that come back year after year after year.
Christina Edwards 6:18
You may have a signature or annual event, you have a development person or persons, you have some sort of communication support, maybe a social media person or a freelancer, you have a CEO or ED at the helm. Maybe that's you if you're listening. You're growing visibility slowly, but you're growing. You're known. You have some major donors. You have a couple, a dozen, maybe two dozen monthly givers. You have a board, and yet that is a lot of stuff I just mentioned. Fundraising isn't as predictable, profitable, and growing as it should be. Wins happen, but they don't really create the next win, and so what do organizations do when they're stuck here? Well, add another event, apply for another grant, see if we can go get some sponsorships. Add another platform. Where do we need to be on social? Let's add another platform. Add another board initiative, sponsorship idea, another campaign, more activity stacked into a disconnected operation. Again, that picture of us all just waiting separately to start the race is very different than us on a team waiting for our turn to grab the baton. Very different strategy.
So I'm going to share with you today these seven signs that your fundraising isn't compounding, and why that is leading to your growth hitting a ceiling.
Let's start with sign one. Every channel lives in its own silo. Event people focused on the event. Comms focused on newsletter or social development focused on the appeal. Executive director thinking major donors, Or maybe like a conversation I just had with a director of development who said their ED loves to live in programs. Uh huh. Yeah, I get it. That's fun. You don't have to ask anyone for money in programs, right? And bored, doing bored things on their time when they want it, a couple times a year. Good work, but is everyone building the same donor relationship? So I want you to think about the gala attendee, the guest. Did you learn why they came? Who brought them in? Did they hear a story before the next ask? Were they followed up with in that honeymoon period, that week after the event? Did anyone notice major gift potential? Is there a reason for them to hear from you again or support you again before next year? or with an online campaign are those donors giving getting that receipt a thank you and then just plunked back into your newsletter, the campaign made money, right? The donor didn't move, didn't become more connected. If every channel ends up where it began, revenue has to keep starting over. You with me? You are constantly filling a leaky bucket. So inside the club, we rarely look at just one tactic alone. I am looking at the connectivity of all of them. So the event strategy: what happens to these people after the event? The campaign: what happens to those first-time or repeat donors after? The communications: what do we want this audience to do next? What is that next best step? That is the difference between fixing a tactic and strengthening the entire engine. And you know the difference between getting in a car that has a well-tuned engine and one that you're like, I hope this makes it there, right? You're like, we got to take this one to the shop. You want your fundraising to have that well-tuned engine.
Sign number two: you keep adding instead of optimizing. This is a big one. Revenue is not growing fast enough, so what's something else we can do? Ends up being the question. Another fundraiser, another Giving Day, more social, definitely more social, right? Corporate sponsors, texting, some new tech tool, acquisition list, new event. The better question first is, what should already be working much harder than it is squeezing the juice, right? Squeezing the juice out of it. Year-end campaign. What if your year-end campaign raised 20 to 30% more? For some of you, it is a possibility. It is sitting as an opportunity. You have enough donors on your list.
Christina Edwards 12:52
You have a year-end campaign you usually do, and all you're doing is if you picture squeezing a lemon, you're like little, little, little drips are coming out. We can optimize that entire thing. You can see 20 to 30% more, just like our clients do in the club. Monthly giving. What if it converted more to existing donors instead of just sitting on webinars where people talk about monthly giving and you're like, "Oh, I want that, and instead you get a trickle. What if your event became your major donor pipeline. What if your emails, your regularly scheduled biweekly emails, became a major donor pipeline? This is happening for for both instances. Are happening for our clients in the club. What if your list generated more gifts? What if more first timers made a second gift? My favorite. What if your board knew exactly where to focus, and you had the tools to support them to do that. That's where the money is. Not one more thing. It's not going viral on TikTok. More out of what you've already built. So one of my clients came to me in this very common scenario that I'm outlining, and the fix was not just stuff another campaign in your calendar, ask again. The fix was move their communication strategy into a fundraising strategy. They were already communicating regularly, But it wasn't connected to their fundraising, so they were sitting on an untapped gold mine. They just weren't using it. They raised over $50,000 more across multiple digital online campaigns without "quote unquote" doing more, just optimizing what they were already doing, connecting those dots. They had more major donor meetings booked simply by fixing how they communicate. It's hard to see the forest for the trees when you're running a bunch of. Connected things-that is the power of building on a consultant and coach like me-is I can see it. You can't see it because you're in it, right? This is true. This is like human nature. So when you have a strategist on your side, I can say, "Ooh, stop doing that. Double down on this. I also see tons of clients and other organizations spending way too much time on social media or spending way too much money on hiring a freelancer for social media that doesn't convert. It looks pretty and it doesn't bring in anything. No awareness, no funding. That's why we teach the social street team method: how to borrow aligned audiences, highly engaged, highly valuable, mission-aligned audiences that build awareness, advocacy, and funds. Tapping into the creator and influencer economy. Nonprofits are using this to get their time and money back because they're not-they're not pouring hours and hours and hours and 1000s of dollars into social media content that doesn't convert.
Sign number three: the best results feel like isolated wins, right? A great campaign, amazing, but why did it work? You're not totally sure, or maybe one or two donors were the reason it worked. The word the the saving grace to it. It's not repeatable. Most organizations can tell me how much they raise, but few can tell me their engine, their their solution, why it worked. If you don't know why, it's hard to reproduce it, and then those results feel harder and harder each year to replicate. A strong campaign should actually leave you with message you can reuse again. Donor behavior worth studying, looking at major gift prospects, monthly giving prospects, partners worth activating. A win only compounds when you know why it worked and what happens next.
Sign number four: fundraising, comms, leadership solve different problems. They're all disconnected. Everyone has one goal, and they're all separate, right? It's a separate goal, but the donor sees one organization. They don't see your goals per department, so they don't know who wrote the email. They don't know or care who owns that. They're experiencing one relationship, and that relationship doesn't feel very cohesive.
Christina Edwards 18:41
That relationship doesn't feel symbiotic. You can't have a formal newsletter on Monday, 12 updates. Wednesday, you know, with 12 updates in the newsletter. Wednesday, an emotional appeal. Friday, a random awareness post. And then the ED tells a major donor a totally different story. You with me? None of them are working in harmony. There needs to be connective tissue. That doesn't mean I'm suggesting everybody has to be working on the same thing at the same time. I want ED with a major donor. I want communications working on awareness. That's okay, but that we're rowing in the same direction. That there's that connective tissue, so people know that you know. What do we want people to understand right now? What do we want them to remember? What do we want to start warming them up about? That's coming down the pipeline. What do we want them to do next? So that there is alignment in the same cohesive strategy that we are moving towards this on year end, and we are reverse engineering this big. Goal happening because we are working together on that. Now you can send more emails and still have weak year end results, right? You can do more. This isn't simply about volume. This is about strategy. This is about content. This is about messaging. This is about all of it. You can do mail and social and Giving Tuesday push, but if every channel tells a different story and every person owning that channel, whether it's face to face, whether it's phone call, whether it's text messages, whether it's social, they're telling a different story. More communication does not equal more giving. So this isn't oh should I send five emails instead of four? This is hang on before we make that decision. What stories are donors hearing across every touchpoint that is moving them somewhere? That is moving them forward.
Sign number five: hiring execution without shared strategy. Ooh, this is the big one. You're growing the team. Good. I want you to grow the team, even if your team, even if growth of the team is freelancers and contractors. Maybe you've got a comms contractor, an executive assistant or admin, a social media person, a grant writer, development coordinator, event planner, fundraising hire. But hiring into an unclear strategy doesn't fix the strategy problem. What I find so many times is that you think hiring somebody to offload this thing, whether it's email, whether it's social, whether it's day-to-day fundraising, whether it's something else, you think they're going to go take that and squeeze the juice from it, y'all. The call is coming inside the house. You have to set them up to succeed. You as the leader, you as the development director, whoever, whatever your role is, you have to tell them this is what I need for you to go execute. And here is the toolkit. Here is our our procedure or SOP for success. Just hiring a major gifts officer does nothing, right? When they you don't bring them in to the big strategy for your organization, because the social media person needs content, the VA needs tasks, the event planner needs approvals, the development person needs priorities and donors. Who do you want them to contact and why? The grant writer needs info. Otherwise, they everybody throws spaghetti at the wall. Who's the hub for every question? Usually, the ED. The ED still holding all these pieces, getting sucked more into day-to-day operations. Adding hands here does not actually solve the strategy problem. Does not solve the funding problem. It actually just adds more confusion. Right? You're executing faster, but with more confusion. This is why the club has multiple seats. So at one price for joining the club, my coaching program, you can bring in three people. Typically, fundraising, comms, and executive director will take those three seats. Not always. Sometimes we have a smaller organization where just the executive director who owns most of communication and fundraising will come. Sometimes we have a team where it will be just development and just comms. That's fine too. Sometimes we'll have a team where they say, you know, we're just going to put our comms person through it, or we're just going to put our director of development through it. But you have the opportunity to get everybody on board together.
Sign number six: Every decision depends on one person.
Christina Edwards 23:39
Ooh, you know I'm spicy about this. The ceiling gets real. One person knows which donors matter, what happened last year, which stories have been used. It's all in their brain. They're never allowed to take a vacation. What sponsorship was? What sponsor was promised in their sponsorship? What that board member said. Which board member to follow up with? Which donor needs to follow up with. Why the strategy chains? Nothing moves without them. They approve everything, every campaign, every email, every question. They are a bottleneck, and they're exhausted. They may be great at fundraising. They may be great at all of this, but none of their knowledge inside has been turned into a a piece that the organization can use day to day. Fundraising can't scale past the capacity of the person holding it all together. So I do want you to hire. I do want you to offload, but not before the strategy and the system is in place for those people to actually run with it, run with that baton. Because if I hand a baton to somebody who's not a sprinter, what are they going to do? How many times have you even seen the professional sprinters drop the baton? Right. So I want to pass that baton to somebody who's locked in and is like, I know exactly where I'm going, and I know exactly how far I got to sprint towards. That's what you want in your team.
Sign. Number seven, more data than decisions, right? Maybe your tech tool, your CRM, your database, whatever makes you feel mildly guilty every time you log in because you don't know what you're looking at. Your email service provider, open rates, clicks, gifts, average gift, retention, event attendance, monthly donors, web traffic. Okay, great. A lot of numbers. What are we doing differently because of it? What are we doing more of because of it? A 42% open rate isn't a strategy. $18,000 raise isn't enough information. And so, data becomes valuable when it creates a decision. Otherwise, it's a report you look at, feel overwhelmed for a few minutes, and then just keep doing what you did last year. We can fix that inside the club. I teach a process of evaluating the data fast, mining the right data quickly, not all of it. Mid campaign, we triage mid campaign while it's happening to triage and troubleshoot conversion issues while the campaign is still alive, so you can squeeze the juice from it. Post campaign, we do the same review to set you up for the next one to be stronger. This is how you build that engine, that fundraising engine. So the slowest path looks like run a campaign, raise money, move on, run an event, raise money, send some communications out, apply for some grants, move on. Don't have time to look at reports. Meet a major donor, meet with them, hope they give, move on, start all over. Don't follow up. The compounding path looks like campaign brings in major donors. Campaign brings in individual donors. Meaningful follow up, something that's scalable. Some people give again. Some people give monthly. Some people show lean in. I love that lean in moment. That major gift potential, the campaign teaches you what is our audience like, what do they most respond to, what are they excited about. Your campaign creates leads for your executive director, for your director of development. Suddenly, your comms person is like, you need to reach out to this person. They are liking every post. They are in our DMs. They're replying to every email. Every everywhere has somewhere next to go. That is how fundraising compounds-not one magical campaign, but an operation built to keep strengthening itself. So more effort is not the answer, right? I know y'all are working hard. The answer isn't just work harder, do more, send more, more pressure. It's how do we make all this work produce more? And sometimes we sunset some things, and sometimes we double down on some things, and we streamline. So the next level is connection and subtraction, strengthening what works, stopping what what doesn't work, connecting those pieces. That's what we do inside the Purpose and Profit Club, because you don't reach millions because your team learns to carry more. Right at some point, I'm picturing putting weight on your shoulders. You fall.
Christina Edwards 28:26
You reach millions when the engine stops wasting what you already have. When the engine works stronger, faster, harder. Not just piling more in it. So inside the club, I'm not just making one campaign better for you. I'm working with you to follow the fundraising problem wherever it goes: campaign strategy, major gifts, donor retention, monthly giving, email, direct mail, messaging, audience growth, team roles, board strategy, leadership discussions. This is what we do inside the club. It is a high-level fundraising communications and leadership accelerator, where your where your roles, anyone who's owning those world roles, work together. So this is for you. If you already are fundraising, you have active donors, you have campaigns you're running. Maybe you have some staff or contractors. You're doing a lot of what I've talked about, and yet you're thinking we have the pieces, and they are not working like they used to, or not working as well as they should. That's who I want to invite to apply to join the club, because you don't need another tactic, another shiny idea. You need someone to help you see what deserves your attention and where the money is leaking, we are opening applications now for a private training for organizations like this, who are already fundraising but need campaigns, comms, donors, team working together for predictable growth. If you go to splendidcourses.com forward slash apply, you'll see our short application and. Details on joining the Purpose and Profit Club. after your application, accepted applicant. will be invited to attend an advanced private training, and I, in that training, I will teach you how to create that fundraising growth engine. So go to splendidcourses.com/apply for details there. So I hope you heard today that you don't need quote unquote more activity. You need to look at what you've already been doing to have an engine that builds upon itself, that compounds, that takes people from the next campaign to strengthen the next one thereafter, that takes people from first time donor to the next step to monthly giver, that has a signature event that creates more than just one night, one little pop. Because the slowest path to millions is a tremendous amount of fundraising that never compounds. It's also the fastest path to burnout. So go to splendidcourses.com/apply. I cannot wait to hear from you. Let's build that engine. Let's do it now as we're heading into the most profitable, most important time of the year: year-end fundraising. I'll see you next time.