The Brewer Wasn’t Doing Anything New
I brew beer in my garage. When a local brewery invited our home brew club to come watch a brew day, I was among the first to respond.
Many of the people in our club are award-winning home brewers. We all know the process. Brewing beer is basically the same process people have been using for thousands of years.
A few of us climbed onto the platform to watch the brewer work with the vessel open, steam rolling off the kettle. For him, most of this was habit. Muscle memory.
For me, those same steps still take focus and concentration.
Nothing new, nothing flashy
What struck me was that nothing he did was new. There was no trick or secret technique. He used the same basics I use in my garage, just at a much bigger scale, for customers who expect it to be right every time.
That was reassuring. It confirmed that I was doing the right things.
I think about this a lot with fundraising. We’ve studied why people give for centuries. What works isn’t a secret. But the pull toward the next new tactic is strong, especially when the basics feel slow.
I like to say that when fundraising becomes boring is when it picks up speed. Watching that brewer, his work looked boring in the best sense. It was routine because he’d done it so many times.
When the basics still take all your focus
If your major gift conversations still take every bit of your concentration, you may wonder whether you’re cut out for fundraising. You rehearse the ask on the drive over. You replay it for days afterward. Meanwhile, the nonprofit leader across town seems to do it effortlessly.
That’s normal. You’re not bad at fundraising. You’re just earlier in the process.
Effort-filled concentration is what the basics feel like before they become habit. My friend Nicole Cramer says: “It’s not hard, it’s just new.” She compares it to brushing your teeth with your other hand. It feels awkward, and then it gets easier.
When I talked with the brewer, he told me he didn’t start with this level of muscle memory. He built it by doing the same steps, brew day after brew day.
You get to choose your size
Watching him also showed me what it would take to scale up my own brewing. It left me confident that I like the size of operation I have.
That could be encouraging to hear if you run a small development shop. The basics are the same at any size. A one-person development office that does them well isn’t a lesser version of a big one. Growing may be the right call for your organization, but it’s a choice. Doing more is not automatic proof that you’re doing it right.
Pick one basic and make it boring
So try this. Pick one fundraising basic and repeat it until you don’t have to think about it.
Thanking donors is a good place to start. It’s part of the Love step in the R.E.A.L. framework from Ask Without Fear!®. Set aside time each week to call a few donors simply to thank them, with no ask attached.
The first calls will take focus and feel clumsy. After a while they won’t. As thanking becomes a habit, you’ll like find fewer of your donors drift away, and the asks you make later tend to feel lighter because the relationship is already warm.
The basics don’t get more exciting. They get easier. And when they get boring, that’s usually when they start to work.
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