All right. Are you guys ready to get started? Jenna and Ty? You're good. All right. We're going to go ahead and get started. Hello. Welcome, everybody. I'm Claudia Taylor and I'm Director of Events and Stewardship for the Ryan College of Business at the University of North Texas in Denton. Also very involved with District 4 of CASE. I am on the cabinet and I also serve on the planning committee for the conference that's coming up in April in San Antonio. I want to welcome you all to our final CASE District 4 together. This has been a really fun series where we've brought our best rated sessions from our conference last year and offered them in an online forum so that folks who maybe didn't make it to the conference or didn't make it to this session, have a second opportunity to see them. Today, we are joined by Jenna Goodman, founding partner of Generous Change, and Dr. Ty Ropp, Associate Vice President of Central Development at the Oklahoma State Foundation. We are going to be talking about risk-taking that can help us supercharge our fundraising efforts. Before we get started, a few housekeeping items. First, I hope you'll ask a lot of questions. I will be taking questions in the chat, so just drop them there. I will collect them all and we can ask them at the end. Keep an eye on the comment section. I'll be dropping some useful links there throughout the presentation. If you experience any technical difficulty, you can message me directly. I will try to solve it. I promise nothing, but I will try. Now, I am thrilled to introduce our presenters today, Jenna Goodman and Ty Ropp. Jenna became an entrepreneur in college, as a college student, and after graduation, joined higher education fundraising, first at her alma mater, the University of Central Missouri, and then at the University of Kansas, where she contributed to fundraising during KU's $1.6 billion capital campaign. In 2017, she co-founded Generous Change, a company that gives higher education development professionals the tools, inspiration, and advice they need to amp up their fundraising. Ty has been in higher ed fundraising for nearly 20 years, working for the University of Kansas Endowment Association, and now the OSU Foundation, where he currently leads the central development units, including Planned Giving, Corporate and Foundation Relations, and more. Ty has an undergraduate degree from Lamar University, and a PhD from the University of Kansas in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies. Jenna and Ty, thank you so much for being here today, and take it away. Thank you, Claudia. Thanks for doing the hard work of our bios. I always feel like that's one of the hardest things to do, but really grateful to be here with you all, and as Claudia already said, I am Jenna Goodman, and I co-founded my company, Generous Change, in 2017, essentially to help fundraisers and fundraising managers to have all of the things I wished I'd had when I fell into fundraising. Like Claudia said, I had the opportunity to buy a drive-through coffee shop while I was still in college, was not my major, I was majoring in broadcasting. I thought I wanted to be on the radio, not a lot of opportunity for radio in Warrensburg, Missouri, but I had the opportunity to buy this little drive-through coffee shop, and when I had the chance to sell it five years later, I thought it would take a year to sell, and it actually took a month, and so I ended up having to find a job, and my customers were from the university, and a lot were from the foundation, and it was a building moment for the foundation, and they encouraged me to apply for a development position, and as you all know, the job description for development can be pretty vague, so I didn't really understand what I was applying for. I was calling the foundation, trying to get ahold of development officers to truly get to know what they did on a day-to-day basis, and I don't think it was until the interview that someone actually said to me, you will be fundraising or asking for money, and I was like, oh, okay, all right, I think I can do this, and luckily, they invested in me, saw transferable skills there, so I had the opportunity to start at my alma mater and was there for two years, and then I left and had the chance to go to KU, and I was at KU for 10 years, and I thought it would be like this massive, amazing experience where they would have so many more resources than my tiny alma mater, and they did, and it was wonderful, and still, I felt like I was kind of figuring it out as I went, and I think we all have those experiences, and so in becoming a manager, hiring my own team, I was determined to do it differently. I just wanted the people that I hired to have more tools, more practical applications from the moment they started in the role to really feel like they knew what to do and then that they didn't have to learn as they went as much as I did. I wanted them to feel really confident, and so I kind of created that manual when I was still at KU. I had the opportunity to present at a case conference with my co-founder and boss at the time in 2016, and it was a joint conference in Chicago, and there were about 200 people in the room, and I felt like half of them came up afterwards and asked me questions and took my crappy Word documents that I had printed as a part of my presentation, but it was really in that moment that I realized how much everybody was craving this, that really everybody was looking for more of those practical tools, and so that was the kind of moment of unlocking my understanding that I could make a bigger impact if I took the leap and started this business, so I left a year later. It was super scary. I got shingles. These are really stable, great jobs, so it was a hard thing to do, but it's been almost seven years, so it's been worth it. I've now had the opportunity to partner with, I just looked this number up the other day, 68 universities I've had the chance to partner with. It's been more than 2,000 fundraisers have gone through my training, so that is my background and kind of why I'm here today, and Ty and I had the chance to work at KU Endowment together, so Ty, sorry, I talked a lot there. You go. You're spot on. No, that's great. I feel like by this point, I feel like is it cliche to say we all fell into development in some way, shape, or form. I think that might be the intro of every conference, but I'll just give you a little bit of a background. For me, I started off, I'm a byproduct of a community college in Fort Scott, Kansas, and ended up at Lamar University, played basketball there, and went back to my hometown, started working in a community college. Was running one of the branch campuses, and I was writing grants. I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew I needed a biology lab at this site. However, I've had those, I had that kind of just pivotal moment where I had a conversation with a nontraditional student who came into my office because she just didn't think she could do it, and she was a rockstar. She was the best student at that campus, and she was awarded as the best student at the campus, and she wanted a nursing degree. She got it. There's no doubt in my mind that she went on, and what she was able to accomplish was transformational, I'm sure, changed the trajectory for her and her family, and probably generations to come, and that's where I was like, all right, I'm in the right business. This is what I wanna be about, and I wanna help advance this, and I'd started my graduate pursuit. Took me to Lawrence. I was commuting, and I'm like, oh, I gotta get this commute out of the way. I need to get to Lawrence, and as probably a lot of you know, development was just exploding, and there was just a high need for development officers. There was such a huge transfer of wealth that's going on in our country that we're starting to really start to see it now, and somehow I was able to parlay those grant writing experiences to start kind of my career in corporate foundation relations, but to coincide this kind of session here, I can remember transitioning after about two years in CFR into taking on the director role for the School of Education, and pretty much it was they opened my door, said, here's your computer. See you later. Go for it. Oh, by the way, get 150 visits, and raise at least a million dollars, and then it was, okay, how do I get there? There wasn't just those kind of resources available, and having been in the industry now, it is you want your team members to be successful, but you also want to accomplish these. You want to advance the mission of the institution and the people that are affected by that mission, and you want to connect to that, so that's, fortunately, where Jen and I combined here is when they launched Generous Change, we brought them down to OSU to help us with some of our goal setting, and it was great how it complimented, if you've ever heard the phrase, if you've been to one development shop, you've been to one development shop. You're as unique as your own institution that you're at, and so then it's incumbent upon, I think, all of us in development at those respective institutions to tailor some of those best practices that Jenna will outline, and what Generous Change does such a great job at doing, and then modifying and tailoring it to how does that work at your respective institution or organization, and so that's what we do here, and that's what we'll do without taking too much time on the bio side to work through this kind of, hey, what does it look like now with innovation, but at the same time still maintaining some structure with those metrics, but not letting metrics get in the way of really doing some transformational, you know, ideating, if you will, and integrating that into your development strategy. So Jenna, I will turn it back over to you, but that's just a little bit of an intro into my background, and then I'll stop. Thank you so much for your time and for taking the time to join us. Yeah, it's an honor just to be with you all, even virtually here. Yeah, you all, and Ty, I know that I said we would just like jump in, but I think that since it's a small group, I'd love to just hear from you all for a second and understand who here is a manager? So are you currently managing a team? Maybe you could raise your Zoom hand or just give me a notice in the chat if you are currently managing a team. Gregory. Great. And Casey. Awesome, okay. So for the rest of you, are you in development? Are you in frontline fundraisers? And maybe you could just raise your hand or give me a nod. Ulitha, am I saying your name right? Yes, you're a fundraiser. You're awesome. Okay, great. Yes, I'm in corporate. I'm the corporate and foundation relation officer. Okay, great, great. You and Ty have some things to talk about. Perfect, okay. And anybody else, do you wanna share just kind of why you're here today or something that the reason maybe why you wanted to attend this session specifically, what kind of called you to this session? Anybody wanna unmute themselves and share or type in the chat kind of what spoke to you about this? I'll share. When I saw the invite come through, I thought it was quite striking for me, especially the portion of being innovative as well as aspiring to the next level of fundraising. And I know Ty could probably speak to this when you are the fundraiser as it relate to corporate and foundation, right? Sometimes things become a little stagnant. And so having the insight to actually just pull my donors up to the next level. And so I would just kind of like some insight there on being innovative, right? To level them up to the next level while being excited about moving forward versus I'm doing it because you asked. Yes, oh, thank you. Thanks so much, Ulita, for saying that. And I'm so glad that you all are here to think about this. And I feel like the reason that Ty and I had been talking about this, and Ty, you can share too, just some of the work that you have done at OSU in like thinking through how do we go from, I think internally what we had envisioned and Ty, you touched on this a little bit is just that we're very metrics focused. And you all know this, we could have a week's worth of two gathers about metrics. We could talk about it forever and ever. And we're very future focused, but on kind of the same things over and over. Ulita, as you said, sometimes things are a little bit stagnant. Sometimes we're talking about the same initiatives again and again. We're thinking about the same projects over and over. And I think this is a real struggle in higher education, especially because we don't always have a super compelling obvious case for support. In small nonprofits, when if you're raising money for the animal shelter, you know that your goal is to find homes for animals. If you are a food pantry, you know you want people to come in and leave with food. In higher education, there's like 25,000 different things that we could be talking about. And it's not always super clear. And honestly, Ulita, to your point, it doesn't always feel innovative. It doesn't always feel like something that is transformational, that really will change the world. So I hope that we, I know we will talk about that a little bit in here, but we also wanted to talk about internally, how do we help fundraisers and ourselves to really feel like we are being innovative? We are looking toward growth instead of just obsessing about the bottom line numbers, which is tough because we get measured by the numbers and there's always gonna be more numbers. You know, we always, we're never gonna have a campaign that wasn't higher than the last campaign. And so it's tough, I think, to not be obsessed with achievement, but I feel like I'm so glad that you all are here today because that's exactly what we wanna talk about. And to that, I'm gonna jump into slides, Ty, if that's okay with you, and just share my screen really quickly. So I wanna just start with, how do you achieve in fundraising? How do you know that you achieve something in fundraising? And like I just mentioned, part of that is meeting metrics, right? Like, you know that you are succeeding when you are meeting the numbers that have been put out there for you. And sometimes that's great. I think for high achieving people, which many of us are in fundraising, high achievers, like we want to know that we are winning. We wanna know what the rules are and we wanna meet those goals and ideally exceed those goals. But we also know that sometimes metrics feel arbitrary. Sometimes they're, you know, based on like best practices and not just portfolios. So that's one way that we know we achieve in fundraising. If you're in a campaign, you're probably, if you're not in a campaign, maybe you're talking about being in a campaign. We all know that campaign goals, that is something that we need to achieve when we put out a public goal, especially. It is rare that we would not meet that goal. So that's another way that we know we're achieving. And then raising more money. I feel like that is the goal every year, year in, year out. Like I said before, it's not like we're gonna look backwards and say, we don't need to raise as much money as we did last year. We are constantly, you know, thinking about the next highest goal that we want to reach in fundraising. But as you know from the title, achievement does not always reflect innovation. So what we wanna talk about today is how do you actually innovate in fundraising? So it's not just meeting the goals. It is thinking about the next step, the next version of what fundraising looks like. And to do that, I think, Yalitha, to your point, we have to listen. We have to be more responsive to what donors want. And honestly, we've got a new workforce. Like the pandemic changed everything. And even though I feel like this year, we've just tried to act like it didn't happen. We were like, oh yeah, no, we didn't do anything normal for three years, but now we're gonna take a year and catch up on every single thing that we didn't do and try to cram it all into one year. I feel like it did change everything and we have a different workforce. And now we're not, you know, creating people that go out and have a 40 year career in the same industry. That's just not the way the world works anymore. So we have to listen to what the workforce is saying about what higher education should and could be. And then we have to also listen to what donors want to do, the kind of real transformation that they want to make in the world. Ty, anything you want to add to that? No, I couldn't agree more. And I think the best practices and as we're seeing with employee motivation, it all surveys are coming back. I think the science and research is supporting, you know, making sure that every employee knows how they are connected, not only to the mission, but the people impacted by the mission. And they feel that connection. And that can be everywhere from anyone from gift processing, you know, throughout the organization that they feel like, hey, their work is meaningful and that they are making a difference and moving the needle for the organization, that the organization is growing and that they're engaging as experts. And we'll come back to that Jenna, but yeah, that definitely comes from a culture of that growth mindset versus kind of the fixed mindset, which doesn't really facilitate that opportunity to think innovatively and to grow. Yeah, I think that you're leading right into this Ty, but you have to be able to experiment with new ideas, which means if you're gonna get ideas, like you actually have to put some of them into action. I mean, you can't just ask the question and listen, but not take a step. And so this is really thinking about, you know, how do we use what happened throughout these last four years as an excuse to keep experimenting? Everything we did in the pandemic was an experiment. It was forced, so it didn't feel fun. It was super scary. But now that we actually have a moment to think about where we are and to look at what worked and what didn't, when hopefully we aren't so afraid, then experimentation could actually feel like innovation. It could feel like, okay, what did we learn? And this means we have to like assess where we were and where we are today and where we want to be. And I think in fundraising, we don't take enough time to assess. We just kind of keep going because we are so future focused. We're thinking about the next campaign, the next, you know, event, the next donor meeting. But if we do take a minute to really think through what has worked, what hasn't worked, what did we love doing? What, you know, don't we like doing? All of those things I think can help us in a space now that's not as scary, not so high stakes. You know, if we can do some smart, thoughtful experiments, that is the way to progress and to innovate and to move forward. Ty, anything you want to add? No, go ahead. You're spot on. I'm driving. I'm driving these slides today. You're driving, that's right. So we, I think communication and I know this now even more, having worked with more than 60 universities across the country, communication is key. It is the key to building trust. It is the key to a really solid culture. It truly, there is no way to innovate without great communication. You cannot innovate in a healthy, thoughtful, progressive way without actually communicating. And you have to communicate about success and failure. You have to be able to talk about what didn't work just as much as talking about what did work. And this comes, this I think is so important with donors too. Sometimes I think we try to show up perfect and to pretend like everything is great. Well, what do we need donors for? If we're not creating actual change, if we're not doing anything differently, then what do we need donors for? Sometimes you have to talk about the struggle and the problem in order to have, to help donors to understand how they can make things better. So you've got to communicate both internally about what is working and what's not. And you have to trust donors enough to be a little vulnerable about where the university is, about where the organization is to really bring them in and make real innovation happen. And then ideally, if you wanna innovate, you gotta grow. And you actually have to, if you're gonna ask people to do things, if you're gonna experiment at all, if you're gonna talk about success and failure, you have to implement it and you have to show that growth, which means you've got to communicate about the before and after, like I was just talking about. You have to highlight successes and failures, make sure people understand both and the difference between them. And then you wanna reinforce all of the lessons that you learned along the way so that you can actually encourage risk-taking. And this is something that Ty and I have talked about in other presentations, like taking risks. I don't think that we encourage this enough in fundraising. I think it feels like a very perfect, we have to do everything right. There is no room for failure. You cannot innovate if you don't embrace failure and you have to take risks in order to grow. This is just a known fact. And honestly, as an entrepreneur, I know this more than I would like. Like you gotta fall down a little bit to go up a little bit. And so growth is a key part of innovation. Okay, so let's talk about how to make room for innovation. So thinking about like in an environment in higher ed fundraising that does tend to be very type A, very, very serious, maybe a little too serious sometimes. It doesn't feel like there is a lot of room for risk-taking and growth, but we wanna talk today about places that you can personally put in some room for innovation. So inspire a growth mindset. Ty, I know that you have done a lot of work on this. And so I want you to talk about what a growth mindset is. Yeah, so really thinking about that kind of distinction between the fixed mindset and a growth mindset. In fact, I forgot to grab it, but this is based on kind of the seminal work of Carol Dweck, a psychologist out of Stanford. The book's called Mindset. And one of my close friends recommended the book to me and it was a powerful like perspective in terms of how to like, I never thought about different types of mindsets and how does that, as I was reading it, I wasn't even reading it from the standpoint of our work and what we do in development. I actually, as I was reading it, I was thinking about my daughter who plays tennis and who loves to go practice and I pay for those lessons. But then she didn't like really to play in tournaments and tennis tournaments, as most of you know, there's only one winner. And so there's a high probability you're going to lose and not win that tournament. And so that kind of achievement versus innovation, if there's a fixed mindset, there is a real aversion to subjecting yourself to failure. And so what I'd seen even in the workplace was, transitioning over to being a manager and saying, hey, 150 visits is the goal. The anxiety that I'd see with those who may have more of a fixed mindset, it was, hey, can you lower that to 130? I know I'll get to 150, but I'm going to be a nervous wreck the entire year. And it's, I really wanted to foster that kind of growth mindset to where it's not like there to be punitive. It is really because it can drive, it can help you get out the door and turn over rocks and really see like, almost like a dashboard of, hey, where's the check engine light here with you getting out the door? And Jenna, I'll just say there is something to be said about Malcolm Gladwell's book, like on 10,000 hours. There is something about putting the work in. I always kind of say the devil's in the details, but sometimes the devil's in the details. Like sometimes you get so focused on the details that you're missing the bigger picture for that kind of growth. And so it is a real balance. But what I'm trying to think about here is those of you on the call who are frontline development officers who aren't managing right now, generous change provides some great tools to help with those tactics and to be able to apply them and to be able to hit some of those goals and those metrics. But really it is also from the manager standpoint or from even a frontline development officers, hey, how do I shift to that growth mindset to where going back to my daughter now being the, hey, don't worry about winning the tournament. That's important. Let's say this tournament, we're gonna work on your forehand every match. Let's just get better at that. The next tournament, let's work on the backhand. And so there is that idea of, hey, what are the areas that I need to keep growing in to become a better development officer? Maybe it is getting the visit. All right, you've mastered that. Now, where can you now focus on the next part of your skillset to grow? And I just realized it can be tough if the culture is not conducive of that. And we can talk about how to manage that as best you can, but that's just kind of the getting past the fixed aspect of it because the other thing that I've noticed is whatever the goal you might set, that is the level that you'll only get to. And you want to be able to inspire so that it is, hey, you blow that out of the water. And I think there are some other tactics that we'll talk about to help you think from that other perspective, from that mindset of, hey, what are some innovative ways that, and now donors are coming to me and I'm getting visits without having to do cold emails or cold calls, that's where Jenna's gonna talk about making room for planning for that for the year to where, hey, how do you stop the machine for a little bit, do some deferred maintenance and then make the tweaks and then kick it back up and get ready to let the growth take place? So we're gonna talk about this really, really tactically. So first from the perspective of a manager. So Gregory, I'm glad you're here. For anybody else who is considering management, I think it is one of the hardest roles in fundraising. Middle management is so tough. Leadership is a really tough position to be in because you have your own fundraising and your team's fundraising to be responsible for, you're managing campus partnerships, like it is a tough spot to be in. And so I wanna talk about it, about innovation from a manager's perspective and then from a fundraiser's perspective. So a day-to-day kind of how do you actually think about and demonstrate a growth mindset in your own work? So first we're gonna start with inspiring growth, a growth mindset as a manager. And I'm sorry about this slide, kind of, but Michael Hutchins was like my rock crush. And so since I had put the word mystify in the slide, I thought it was the perfect place, the only place to use Michael Hutchins. So first, demystify metrics. This is so important to, as Ty said, that thinking about 150 visits is what I need to get. Typically that inspires fear. It feels like it's that you're reaching for something, that it's punishment, that you have to struggle to get there. Ideally, if you could see metrics and your people could see metrics as the stepping stones to success instead of punishment, it's so much healthier. It helps you to look at metrics as just a guide to success as a fundraiser. But I don't think we explain metrics well enough. I think oftentimes it's just best practice. We just say, well, that's just the typical, those are the goals that everybody needs to reach. But if you could get more specific and talk about what happens inside of the metrics, what does a substantive visit actually look like? If you can demonstrate how meeting those visit goals and doing the stuff inside of the visits, what does a great discovery visit sound like? How do you know that you have qualified someone? What are the words that you use to get there? What are the great questions that you ask to actually understand if somebody is ready to make a gift? Like all of that stuff that we kind of take for granted sometimes that is a natural part of our process in fundraising, that's the stuff that I've kind of obsessed about and gone backwards and really tried to spell out super clearly because there is so much science in what we do. We just forget because we do it all the time. So the more that you can help as a manager or just as a mentor to really help people to understand the substance of visits, I think that that can turn metrics into stepping stones instead of like punishment and fear and oppression. Another piece of this that I think is so critical is to review contact reports. And if you are a manager, oftentimes I think people feel like reviewing contact reports feels like micromanaging, but it is the only way to know how fundraisers are fundraising. Like a coach doesn't not watch the game and then try to give you pointers about what you did in the game. And so, I mean, as a manager, this is the way that you actually see how your fundraiser fundraises. And for me, when I knew that my manager was reading my contact reports, I wrote them better and differently. I wrote them in a way that like, sometimes I felt like contact reports were like a diary. I was like, dear Jenna, you had a lovely visit with Ty at this restaurant. And like, I would just like, write this crazy long narrative. And then maybe somewhere at the bottom, I would say Ty might wanna do a scholarship for $50,000. When I knew someone was reading them, I flipped my contact report entirely. And I started with the most important thing, which was the gift. And so I put it at the top. Ty is interested in a scholarship at $50,000. And then I wrote more substance about what that gift could look like. And then I saved the bio stuff that like Ty has three dogs and houses in these places and blah, blah, blah for the bottom. Cause that stuff is important, but it's not the most important thing. And as a manager, when you look at contact reports and you walk through them and you can actually say, hey, here's the great things that I got from your contact reports that helped me understand you're having really awesome visits. I can tell that you had a great conversation. I see that you learned these things and that means you asked some great questions. Tell me more about this visit. And then on the flip side, for those that don't make a ton of sense or it feels like either missing some pieces, digging in there and just saying, I don't totally understand how you got, how you understand that Ty does in fact want to, you know, give to a scholarship at $50,000. Like tell me the process. And I think about this as long division. Like you actually want to see the long division of how they got to the answer of is this person a prospect or not? How do you know what the next step should be? Contact reports are the way to understand that. And for all of you who have to read them, like when they are more consistent and just better, it's super helpful for the entire organization. So I feel like this thinking about those little things like contact reports as a way to innovate, you could do these differently. You could think about new, better ways to write them and then review them as a manager and it will make the entire place stronger. We actually, and Jedah, just a segue or piggyback on that thought is at the OSU Foundation, we wanted to set those standards so that it went beyond just the numbers or the metrics. So for example, and this actually, I borrowed this one from the men's basketball team here and because they want to talk about standards and what they all agree upon, because they could say, hey, curfew is at midnight. But if someone shows up at the dorm at 1201, are they punished? I mean, that gets beyond the point. Actually, if you want to be a conference winning championship team or a national championship team, you're going to get good sleep. You're going to get good rest. And then so now 12 o'clock doesn't seem such a hard line. It gets now your team to think bigger about the purpose of what it's for. And I think Jedah, speaking to that purpose of what those visit goals can accomplish. So in fact, I'll just show you, this was really, we tailored this off of the training from generous change, but I'll just kind of show you, that's my mouse pad. And we've got five of those standards. And it's like, hey, a rockstar development officer gets out the door, has the right conversations with the right people, is a team player, is resourceful and closes. So now we are putting metrics in place that correspond with those standards that are somewhat transcendent, that get beyond just that baseline. Hey, that's the number I've got to get to, to be successful. But it doesn't get to that next level of growth or innovative, that growth mindset that we need to get to as an industry. It really is. It's just because right now it just seems very arbitrary. How'd you get to 150 close rate of like, hey, I need to have 15 solicitations. And to be honest, the inspiration for that was, it becomes easy to start gaming. Let's just a little bit. I mean, if your goal is to produce a million dollars and you get a million dollars state gift, you can have, you know, a hundred bad visits of the 150. You can have, if you had a goal of 20 solicitations, you could have 15 bad solicitations just to hit the number that said, hey, I did it. If you've got that one gift to just hit your goal and it just doesn't really inspire quality and the purpose behind those metrics. And so it's kind of flipping it a little bit. The metrics are kind of to measure and to help BNA to incentivize, but that's not the end. That's a means. Yeah, Ty, I think it's the why behind the metrics is, I mean, that's what's so important. Yeah. And speaking of that too, setting goals beyond metrics, and we'll talk about this in, as a fundraiser, you can do this for yourself as well. But I think that the goal here is to, as a manager, if you're helping your people to understand what success looks like in that, in your organization, it's how do you define that? Like what does growth actually look like? How do you spell it out? How do you really communicate what, where you are today and where you should be to be successful? So maybe that's taking on other projects, thinking really strategically about what projects could show leadership, encourage your fundraisers to be mentors. If that exists, like what exists inside of your organization that you can encourage your team members to do to help them to know how to succeed at your organization? Because that's different also for every organization. Sometimes there's too many things to do. Like you could join a gazillion task forces and you could over involve yourself. And then that takes you far away from your work. Really thinking about that person and what they need specifically to grow is the critical piece here and helping them to understand where they are today and where they need to be. That's the thing about, it's communicating what success really looks like. And the numbers don't always do that. It is, it's again, it's those behaviors and the why behind what you're doing that you can encourage. The next piece of this is rewarding learning and progress, not just achievement. So what, again, to that long division piece, it's like, how did you get there? How can you spell out how you, where you were today and how you got to that next step? Really celebrating the journey of learning something. And that's how you reward innovation. Because if the journey didn't lead to ultimately to success, the fact that they took it, that there were, you know, they asked hard questions, they tried to collaborate, they went above and beyond, like whatever that part of that journey that you can really celebrate, that is how you encourage growth and innovation. And it's how you help people feel like they can take risks without the idea that they might get fired. You know, you got to set some standards, like, because obviously there are risks you could take where you could get fired. But I feel like really giving people a path is so important and rewarding the journey that they've taken. The next thing I want to super quickly share is just you could, I'm obsessed with team retreats and really building culture intentionally. If you're a manager and you can do this, I think, like Ty said earlier, it's that deferred maintenance. It's the stuff that you don't spend time thinking about that is so critical. And really giving yourself a minute to be strategic super fast. I just want to show you a couple things that you could do in a team retreat. So giving yourself time to reflect and assess, asking some questions about what do you want to leave behind? What do you want to, what are you most proud of? Because all these questions I think are so important. Talking about core values. Most organizations have, you know, core values on the wall. But each individual team should have their own core values. You know, even just you alone as a fundraiser should have your own core values. It's the why behind what you're doing that keeps you motivated. It's easy to get burnt out in this, in this industry. But if you know why you're doing what you're doing, who you are, what behaviors you want to see, then those are your core values. And the more you know them super clearly, the more you can stay motivated. Asking questions about dream, you know, big dreams. What do we want to achieve two years from now? What will be, we'd be most proud of having accomplished? And then decide why you're going to accomplish what you're going to accomplish. Okay. The last piece of this is how to demonstrate a growth mindset as a fundraiser. So set your own goals for every single visit. This is so important. And I teach this in every single session that I teach. Ask yourself before every visit, am I asking today? If not, why not? What else do I need to learn in this meeting? Give yourself a strategic plan for every visit that you do so that you actually feel purposeful and you know that you're moving toward a gift. This helps, I think, you to feel like there is more science to what you're doing. Like you know why you're showing up. You know where you're going in every meeting. And hopefully you don't start that conversation over again and again. And you leave knowing you accomplished something. If you set a goal at the beginning of the conversation and you've achieved it, then that's amazing. And if you didn't, why didn't you? Like looking back and understanding what questions could you have asked, I think this is so important for every single fundraiser. Write consistent contact reports with strategic next steps. I already kind of over-talked about this one, but I think that creating your own template for contact reports saves you time. We're trying to make so many decisions in fundraising and it truly can lead to decision fatigue. Like it's too, it's really easy to get lost and like overly analyze things. If you just make a template that you always follow, it's so much easier to essentially, you start to have visits in the structure of your contact report. Which sounds crazy, but it's like if you know what your purpose is and what you want to learn, you start to actually create your own visit template in your mind. And you're kind of writing your contact report as you're having the meeting. Which just makes everything so much easier. And then Ty, I'm sorry if you need, if you want to interrupt, I just want to make sure I don't like leave us with enough time. So set your own goals beyond your metrics. You do not have to rely on your manager to help you to know how, where, and when you want to grow. Be proactive, create your own plan for this. Come with specific skills and places that you want to grow and challenge yourself. If it's public speaking, could you lead a session in a board meeting? Could you lead a team meeting? Like think of your own ideas and places where you want to grow and come proactively. If it, maybe it's data, like you want to learn more about how to use data. Could you shadow a prospect manager or prospect researcher? Is there a course that you could take? Is there a conference that you could attend? Like get creative and really think about places that you could invest in yourself. And I think there's nothing more powerful to me when I was a manager of somebody showing up and saying, I really want to learn this thing. And here's my idea of how, that's like the dreamiest. So take your career into your own hands and really think about how you want to grow. And I know, I know we want to leave some time for some of the questions, but this is where I really want to stress everything that you just talked about. It prepares you to become the expert in your area and your field. And so having a growth, like having that growth mindset and growing those skills to be the expert allows you, it gives you validity to now go back to your campus partners to be the expert. Campus partners, this is what the donors, this is what private support can do to get you to where you want to go. And the same thing with your donors. We kind of serve two masters here a little bit and you being the middle person that is the expert can bridge the gap. And here's, I had to learn this the hard way of the former department chair for chemical engineering, he was got his PhD other places, but he was an alum. And so he had just a built-in kind of passion affinity for chemical engineering, of course, cuts and state support. He hardly had any money for any operational funds. And he was really creating and taking charge of inspiring his donors to help support the future of chemical engineering, to give them an operational endowed fund, let's say. And what he was writing and communicating out to the alumni base, to the donor base was so inspiring that donors were coming in, they were pouring in. And that's where it's like an aha moment for me of, instead of just asking the minimum, would you like to do a $25,000 endowed gift or would you like, it is, all right, how do I now inspire my university partners? Because I am now the expert. How do I inspire them to shape a vision that tells an inspiring story of where we're going and where you need to help the, and this is with that growth, where you can advise on is, all right, what is fundable? What is feasible? What can we accomplish? But we need to inspire our donors. And it's a little bit of inspiring your campus partners and then being able to turn around and inspire your donors. But if you don't know your donor base, you don't know what's going to move the needle for them, corporate foundation relations, foundations, they do not care about the university. They have no ties to, for the most part, the alma mater. They just want to know, can you help us accomplish our mission? And so that is the expertise of knowing the donor motivation and then connecting it back to helping shape that strategy or vision with your campus partners. But you can't get there if you don't apply the, you know, if you don't have the FaceTime, if you don't have substantive visits, if you don't know what that donor motivation looks like. I tell people all the time, hey, our job is to build trust as fast as possible so that you can better understand what their motivation is, you know, what it is that they're trying to accomplish with their philanthropy so that you can bridge the gap. And so I'll stop there, but that's part of that growth. So now it went beyond the metrics. It went beyond the goal. Now it's like, hey, now I think it'd be inspirational. Now you're doubling whatever the production was. Now donors are coming to you with those visits and that's the innovative side. And it may look different for each of you at your shops, but just thinking about how do you get to that next level where it's inspirational and you're not just back on the hamster wheel at July 1 with zero production because the year starts again and I'm just going to grind it out another year. It's really trying to get to that transformational level of growth and expertise. Last two things, super quick, ask for feedback. Honestly, some managers are not good at proactively giving people feedback. And sometimes the more high achieving you are, sometimes the less feedback you get because people are like, ah, they're fine. They're totally fine. But elite athletes still have coaches. They don't just stop getting coached. They don't stop growing. And so really, if you can ask for regular feedback from your boss, from your colleagues, from your campus partners, it can be super helpful in just knowing where and how you do want to grow. And managers do the same thing. Managers ask your teammates, those who you manage, for feedback because that shows, hey, I know I'm weak. I need growth areas. It allows for that vulnerability and transparency with supervising the relationship. Last point here is just to demonstrate your own learning and progress. So don't assume that your boss knows everything that you're doing. This is such an autonomous job, which is wonderful on the one hand. It feels very entrepreneurial. It feels like there's so much opportunity. Every day is different. But sometimes that's super hard. This can be really, really tough. So do show that long division of how you get where you're going. How did you get a solution with a donor or a faculty member? Show the before and after of what you're doing. Advocate for yourself, and that helps your manager to advocate for you. Okay, we're at the end. Claudia, help us with questions. I'd love to. So we had several questions, and I really liked what you were saying about particularly like expanding your own knowledge base by learning what your colleagues are doing, because I feel like you can be in your own bubble so often. And I have no idea what gift processing is doing. I don't know what they do. I don't know what Advancement Communications is doing. I just know that they created an email for me, but I don't know what their process is necessarily. So I really appreciate that, because I think that is so valuable. Okay, so we had a few questions, and one of them was from Ulitha, and I know she turned off her microphone at one point, so if you want to jump in and go ahead and ask your question. I also wrote it down, but if you want to jump in and ask it, go for it, Ulitha. Okay, just wondering, are you guys participating in the CASE conference in Chicago in May at the educational conference? CFR specific. I will not be at the CFR specific conference. I'll be at the joint conference, the five and six conference in Chicago, but I think that's in April. So yeah, I won't be at the CFR. Ty, are you? I won't be, but yeah, it doesn't take much to convince. I don't know. I just haven't made any plans yet. I do know that that particular conference is geared toward higher ed, and I just thought, gosh, some of the things that you're saying, I know if it's beneficial for me being in higher ed, it could be so beneficial for the conference as a whole, so I was just curious. Thank you. Yeah, you give me something to think about. You also asked about transparency with donors and partners. Oh yes. So my philosophy, I'm new to fundraising. I've been serving in this role for actually March, May, three years, I think, and I had transferable skills kind of like you, Jenna. My background is finance. Long story short, I've done a lot of research on my own on how to be successful reading books, just trying to acclimate myself into the profession, and in several books that I've read, they talked about how the donors need to be able to trust you, you need to be honest, don't sell them other words, a bag of tricks, you know, just be honest and transparent, but I have found here lately with some of our donors, well, partners that we have partnerships with, I believe in being honest and transparent because I don't like giving false expectations because I feel like if I give a false expectation, and then I'm not able to fulfill their expectations, that puts a wedge within the relationship, which makes it difficult for me and for them, right? So sometime when I'm transparent about, and I'm very careful as to how I communicate my honesty, but I can tell it brings a pause, and sometime they'll go away and they'll think about it and they'll come back and say, we heard you, but, and I don't know, I just wanted to know if you have some suggestions or some thoughts there, possibly I'm wondering if I'm saying maybe I'm too transparent, but I don't want, because I've seen it happen with some others within the group, and I would think to myself, gosh, you should not have set them up like that. Yeah. You know what I mean? I totally know, and this is a tough one, and I know we're at time, but I just, I'm gonna, my perspective on this is that if, if you always show up as a philanthropic advisor, that you are advising on both sides. So if you think about your role being able to say, you know, I am here to understand the change you want to make, and I want to make sure that it's possible to make it here. And so anytime you're saying the thing that causes them to pause, if you do feel like there's a, that, that pause there, I would not be afraid to just say, what's causing you to pause? Help me to understand. The more you can show up with, as that advisor, it's just give me some guidance. Help me to understand. Tell me more so that I can go back and translate that to my organization. But showing up and just saying I'm here as your advisor, that's what I'm here for. So I'm going to ask a lot of questions to truly understand where you are, and I'm going to try to be as transparent as I possibly can. Make that statement out loud, and then you won't second guess yourself, I don't think, quite as much. Okay, thank you. Spot on, Jenna. Thank you for that question, Yulitha. You all, thank you so much for letting us spend time with you. Claudia, so you got, you got to wrap it up. We do, unfortunately, and I have other questions, but, but we'll just have to wait until next time you come and join us for another to gather. Thank you so much for being here, Ty and Jenna. Really, really appreciate all your time and effort. It was really, really great. And to all of you who came, thank you so much. Please check the chat. There's a link to register for the District 4 Conference. You'll see lots of sessions just as great as this one at our conference coming up in San Antonio in April. Thank you again for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Bye, everybody. Thank you. Kill it, everyone.

Jenna Goodman

Ty Rupp

innovation

growth mindset

fundraising

demystifying metrics

contact reports

setting goals

team retreats