1. What are your top three priorities right now?
2. Where will the organization be in 5 years?
3. What’s your annual operating budget?  Walk me through it.
4. What does success look like for the organization?
5. How will my donation make an impact?
6. How much do you spend on overhead?
7. What’s your long-term vision for sustainability?
8. How much cash do you have on hand?  Is it too much or too little?
9. What is your organization’s theory of change?
10. What are your biggest challenges?
11. How much cumulative funding has your organization raised since inception?
12. Help me understand social impact and how you measure it?
13. What else can I do to help you – I want to give more than money?
14. Who are your competitors and how do you compare to them?
15. Can I meet your CEO?
16. How much did you grant/fund last year? How and why did that differ from prior years?
17. If I support you, I’d like your organization to do ___________ [this project/in this geography/with these partners].  Will you?
18. How can our organizations work together?
19. Why are you passionate about this work?
20. [ADD YOURS HERE]

[UPDATE: thanks to a copy-paste slip-up, two of the items on the list were the same.  So #20 is now blank so you can add your "best question" in the comments section!]

I’m actually a big believer in taking that leap, because once you leap, your audience has no choice but to listen to you, the presenter, instead of pretending that the most important thing up there is the slide (it isn’t).

On the assumption that lots of people won’t make the big leap (yet), here’s a baby step: the amount of words on your slide should NEVER be the same as the amount of words you say.

Ideally your slide has very few words and you have a lot of interesting stuff to say.  Another extreme would be that your slide is full of a lot of really rich content (I admit, I fear this really is “too many words”…) and you just say a few words and let people read.

But when you have a bunch of words and a bunch to say it is totally confusing to your audience.  Are they supposed to read or listen to you?  Not only do they not know, you don’t know!

Number of words you say ≠ Number of words on the slide

(And hopefully once you start down this path you’ll end up at 6-word slides.)

Also we’ve quietly launched a Causes page for Generosity Day, so if you haven’t yet please sign up for the cause and take the Generosity Day Pledge: www.causes.com/generosityday.  (and tell us what you think about the site via email to generosityday [at] gmail.com).

Finally, we’re on the lookout for a virtual volunteer.  It will probably be around five hours (potentially more) of work to help get the word out about Generosity Day, just over email.  We probably only need one person so if you’re interested please send an email to: generosityday [at] gmail.com with one paragraph about what you love about Generosity Day – or just leave a comment on this post. (Note: it’s also OK to comment and NOT volunteer).

First, let’s clarify who’s asking the question and what this means about what they’re looking for.

For a long time I’ve argued on this blog that the nonprofit sector has radically misunderstood what fundraising means, what fundraising jobs are, and, consequently, how to staff the fundraising (“development,” whatever) department.  To recap: it’s not separate from “the real work.”   It is core to your strategy, to who you are, and to how you deliver on your promise to the world.

There’s a lot of talk about what “traditional fundraising” is and isn’t, and whether in the brave new nonprofit world in which we live, we need to re-imagine fundraising (yes) and what a fundraiser looks like and does (probably).

I think part of the reason we’ve ended up walking down the wrong path is because professional fundraising was born in a university setting – which unfortunately is a poor model of what most nonprofit fundraising is really like.  Referring to the 2-by-2 matrix below, I’d describe university fundraising squarely in the bottom-left corner: “existing constituency” and “primarily execution.”  That is, there is an established constituency (alumni) with an existing ties to and strong relationships with the university, and the role of the professional university fundraiser is largely to execute on a set of giving targets for this constituency.  University fundraising for really big donations can certainly drift to the top left corner of the matrix – think new chairs, new fields of study, new departments – but by and large the ability of the Development team to regularly and significantly impact the overall university strategy in the short- to medium-term will, in most cases, be limited because of the sheer size and scope of the institution.

Contrast this with the world of the startup / growing nonprofit: it has no constituency and its strategy and aspirations are evolving, expanding, taking sharp turns.

Suddenly it’s obvious that you’re looking for a different set of skills than what’s needed in a big, established institution.  An organization in the top-right corner is mobilizing resources against an idea with no defined constituency in place, and it is going through a period of its evolution in which there will be a constant interplay between the financial resources that can be mobilized, the promises made to funders and the overall organizational strategy.

So how do you find a successful top-right corner fundraiser?  There are no simple answers, but I think that this role is different enough from the traditional nonprofit fundraising path that you don’t need to put “demonstrated track record” on the top three list of things you have to see (great if it’s on the list, but you have to decide in advance if the absence of that disqualifies folks.  I’d say it doesn’t).

This is a terrifying notion if you don’t know what you are looking for, so I put together this list of things I’d be on the lookout for when scouring those non-traditional resumes:

• You want someone you want to be with, someone who has both the gumption and drive to get the first meeting and who is consistently interesting, personable and engaged enough that he’ll consistently get the second meeting.
• You want someone who cares deeply about your organization’s mission, who has a personal reason for being there
• You want someone who can tell the whole story of the organization, who can dive in and across the organization and get into the weeds with folks, but who naturally thinks in and talks in terms of narrative.  The person absolutely doesn’t need to be (and won’t be) an expert in everything you do, but they have to have the intellectual facility and curiosity to get their hands dirty.
• Inevitably you will want someone systematic, because when you have a few people (your team) managing a lot of donor relationships, you’ll need to build some sort of systems to make the whole thing work.  The level of sophistication of these systems will vary, but if you want to build something lasting for your organization, you’ll need to build more than your funding base and your funds raised – you’ll need to build out HOW you do this in the long term.
• Gumption (whoops I’ve said that twice now…maybe I should say it a third time), fearlessness, drive and passion go a long way
• Obviously they have to be articulate
• And finally, if you’re looking for nontraditional cues that might indicate success, you might look for people who have an element of performance / “it’s showtime” in their background.  This could be artistic, athletic or even military, but some element of: “the lights are on…now go!”

“Yeah, but what else?”

She already answered your question.

The hard part is: you have to post on all of these days.  And the dirty little secret is that no one, not even you, can tell which is which.

Keep at it.

(p.s. this post isn’t just about blogging)

Your Board members do it too.  They are looking around the Board room to figure out what’s normal – especially around giving and really especially around fundraising, since fundraising makes most people hugely uncomfortable.

So, unless yours is one of the 1% of Boards that is totally committed to giving and to fundraising, what you need to do is change what is normal when Board members look around the room.

I like the idea of the shirt being an instant Generosity Suit that gives you generosity superpowers.  You wear it, you’re reminded that you want to say yes….so you do.  And that makes you, and the people around you, a whole lot happier.

Super Generosity Powers, just for the price of a t-shirt.  Can’t beat that.

And the sooner you get one, the sooner you have an excuse to talk about Generosity Day when people come up to you and say, “Hey, nice t-shirt.  Where’d you get it?”

Think about the fun uses:

• Give them to your kids and start a conversation about all the different ways to say “Yes” around the world
• Buy a stack of them for your donors as a thank you gift for saying YES to your cause
• Or for your fundraising team for knowing how to get people to YES day in and day out
• Or maybe for your hubby so that he has no choice but to say YES the next time you ask him to take out the trash

The fabulous +acumen chapters together with Selfless Tees made this all happen.  $7 from each shirt goes to Acumen Fund if you buy in the next two weeks.

Please spread the word by sharing this link: http://www.selflesstee.com/generosity (how cool is that URL?!)

That time is now.  Right now.  Today.

Conversations swirl around in every which way, between everyone but the two people who need to sit down and talk.  As if that truth is somehow not really out there if we don’t look it in the eye.  As if we can get anything – anything – of substance done if we don’t get this out of the way first.

I promise, it will be a huge relief to everyone to talk about this – that thing that matters most, that thing that’s keeping you from getting from here to there.

These conversations need to be rife with respect and dripping with caring.  You can’t fake wanting the other person to succeed.

And you can’t wait another day.

Generosity Day (sign up here) is a little more than a month away, and I’m reminded of the original moment that kicked this whole thing off for me – the homeless person I walked by with my head down.  The guy I didn’t notice because I was busy doing other things.

A lot of the online conversation about my generosity talk on TED focused on giving to the homeless, as in “does it make sense to give to the homeless?”  That’s really not the point.

Rather, the point is that it’s high time we pick up our heads or, better yet, get out of our heads and really see the world around us.  The point is that there are other human beings around us every day who are craving our acknowledgment, our support, our attention, our generosity – just as we crave it from them – yet we’ll never notice them if we let ourselves keep on walking by.

To me the first step in leading a generous life is actually stopping to notice the full world around us – and notice it in an open way, a non-judgmental way, a way that’s not governed by fear or by separation.

Heck, if I can walk by a guy selling Twix bars (I LOVE Twix bars!!) every day for five years, then I’m pretty sure that I need to let go of the tunnel vision.

The simple act of stopping and noticing is how we begin.