Mallory Erickson spent several years as a successful fundraiser, at one point growing a humble $300,000 nonprofit into a $3 million powerhouse.
She dreaded nearly every second of it.
Erickson writes about her experience candidly in the new book What the Fundraising: Embracing and Enabling the People Behind the Purpose.
Featuring chapters with titles like “This Job Feels Awful” and “Show Me the Money (but Don’t Talk About It),” the book unpacks what Erickson calls “transactional fundraising” and how it keeps development professionals on a hamster wheel that leads to burnout.
Chronic stress led Erickson to reconsider her path in philanthropy and take up executive coaching. During the early days of the pandemic, she realized her new skills could help nonprofits navigate uncertainty and overcome a fear of fundraising during a global health and fiscal emergency.
Since 2021, Erickson has trained online and in-person more than 60,000 fundraisers to rethink their approach using a trademarked framework that helps them identify the “right funders without hounding people for money.” Her podcast, “What the Fundraising,” has also featured guests ranging from psychologists to scientists who break down the latest research on how to cope in high-stress environments.
We spoke with Erickson about how fundraisers can better align themselves, and their organizations, with donors.
The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You open your book with a bit of a confession. You write, “Like so many fundraisers, I became one accidentally.” Can you talk about your background and what inspired you to write What the Fundraising?
I’ve been involved in the nonprofit sector in some way, even just as a volunteer, since I was a little kid. When my family came to this country, we were recipients of nonprofits that helped us get on our feet. I knew I wanted to do work that was meaningful and helpful, so I started to work in different nonprofits. I found that as you get promoted, fundraising responsibilities tend to come with the territory. First it was in a managing director role, then I was the interim executive director.
Throughout all of that time, I’m not sure that I ever called myself a fundraiser, and I really hated fundraising. I felt like there was a secret that everybody understood but me. I was feeling very uncomfortable and was sure there was no way that good fundraisers felt the way that I felt. So I must be a bad fundraiser. I talk about that in the book: chronic stress to burnout to chronic pain. That was a moment for me to sort of step back and say, like, “Do I belong here?”
That feeling of discomfort is something I hear a lot from fundraisers and executive leaders.
A fundraiser told me once, “Fundraising makes me feel like a car salesperson.” I was like, wow, this feels really true for me, too. What is it about car salespeople that makes us uncomfortable? It’s that we believe they want to sell us the car whether or not it’s the right car for us. We do a lot of the same things in fundraising. We’re told to do more, to raise more. It’s all rooted in that transactional moment. It’s not rooted in deepening connections or belonging. The other way we see transactional fundraising play out is creating urgency no matter what.
Where do you think these transactional norms come from?
The history of the nonprofit sector since the Gilded Age has led to these scarcity myths. The first one is there’s never enough money. The second is we must compete for resources. The third is we should operate with minimal overhead.
So much of our thinking and feeling about fundraising is mixed with stigma around money. I often say to people, “Don’t tell me what you care about. Show me what you track.” We say in this sector that we care about relationships, but we track money, right? We have created these transactional norms that are really these disingenuous ways that we believe will help us raise the most money.
People talk about the culture of philanthropy, and I think about the culture of fundraising. How do we create healthy fundraising cultures? What are the key pieces that indicate healthy fundraising cultures? How do we measure towards those things? How do we design expectations that are realistic and feasible and doable and appropriate?
Your book lays out a concept you call “alignment fundraising,” which is designed to help fundraisers break from these transactional norms in a way that feels more authentic to themselves and their organizations. What does that look like?
There’s no amount of internal work that can make up for a toxic environment. What internal alignment work does is it increases your individual capacity to deal with that toxic environment.
Sometimes we experience discomfort because of misalignment. But sometimes we experience discomfort because we’re resisting rejection, and sometimes we experience discomfort because we’re really prioritizing alignment.
I will see organizations apply to grants so much more than they do other things because the grant portal is on a website, which is way less scary than reaching out to an individual person who might say no. I want to recommend that people really spend some time figuring out what alignment looks like inside of them and what alignment looks like for their organization. I talk about that a lot in the book — how you identify the assets of your organization and you understand a little bit more about what different types of funders you’re looking for — and then you really match that up.
You made it a point to emphasize that the burnout crisis afflicting the giving sector goes beyond just overworked employees. Can you elaborate?
These five elements of fundraising have been scientifically proven to increase stress: pressure, power dynamics, uncertainty, rejection, and isolation. All of those things are always going to be a part of fundraising, even really good fundraising. Some of the pressure is because of how deeply we love our work and our missions. So what does that mean? It means that we need unconventional strategies and tools to help us navigate a job and a world in which those things are part of our daily experience.
Burnout is a result of a chronic stress rate over long periods of time. We can work so hard to get people not working more than 40 hours a week or taking their PTO or having sabbaticals. Rejection is always going to be part of fundraising. How do we support people to be able to emotionally, physically, cognitively handle rejection? Let’s give them some tools for that.
Do you have any general advice for fundraisers?
There are systemic inequities and intersectional differences based on positions of privilege and power. To give any advice and say all fundraisers should be able to say X, Y, and Z to their boss is just not a fair statement for me to make, particularly as a white woman.
That desire to just, like, “Tell me what I need to know to do better.” That is a stress response, right? We are so overwhelmed. I understand. I really believe these quick fixes that we’ve claimed in this sector are rooted in the same transactional and scarcity mind-set that continues to perpetuate these problems.
I know it’s not always what people want, particularly when they’re really overwhelmed. The way I try to balance that is by really acknowledging and validating their experience, helping them feel really seen.
