They’ve thrown me a red herring!

Often in a meeting with a donor, they will throw you a red herring (a suggestion or offer of something that you don’t want or can’t use). How you catch it is critical!

Catch it too enthusiastically, and it becomes an insurmountable challenge; you are stuck trying to get the organisation to bend to the will of the donor:

You could use hours of valuable time trying to accommodate a gift-in-kind donation or find a suitable volunteering opportunity for their company away-day. Harder still are the suggestions of mission creep; a new programme designed by them.

But throw it back in their face, and they take you for an organisation that doesn’t want their help; you damage or stunt the relationship.

The challenge is to:

1.    Be grateful, but not accept it

2.    Get your conversation back on track

1.    Being grateful, but not accepting it

Gifts-in-kind: “that is so generous; reducing spending is one way for us to help even more people. Can I get you a list of things we plan to purchase this year with the exact specifications, for us to discuss? A donation or trade discount on those things would have a marked impact.”

Volunteering: “volunteers are invaluable to our work. Thank you. Our head of volunteering plans our schedule way ahead. Can I get you a list of all the opportunities she is trying to fill as priority? I’m not sure there will be (the opportunity you outlined), but enabling your team to fill the roles we need would be phenomenal for our beneficiaries.”

A new project: “your passion for this is obvious. I’d love to hear more about where the idea came from and the impact you hope it would have.”

2.    Getting back on track: 

Now you’ve politely said ‘no’, but if you don’t establish a new offer, you will still have rejected them.

In order to take the conversation back to the bigger picture of what they might do with your charity, you need to pivot. Here’s how you might do that:

-       Offers of help:

“Helping us to reduce spending/swell the ranks of volunteers is a powerful way to help. Which parts of our mission and work inspired you to make that offer?”

-       A new project:

Using open questions, take them back to what change they want to make. Then you can match their objectives to projects and work you already do and plan to do.

Now you’re all set to explore what they want to make possible through you and how they can best do that. 

My red herring moment

When I worked at the NSPCC, I had a meeting with a very successful businessman who had spoken to me, at an event, about being bullied as a child. I wanted to talk to him about our safe schools work. He was very receptive. Then threw me the following red herring “learning martial arts was the turning point for me and I’d like to work with the NSPCC to set up a martial arts programme across schools.”  

Setting up a project of this nature would have allowed me to secure a £1m+ gift from him. But that would have been ‘mission creep’; a distraction from the NSPCC’s expertly-researched cultural-change programme to eradicate bullying in schools.

So, I went back to his motivations and priorities and pivoted his focus. We talked about the other kids in his class who kept being bullied and what the school might have done to help. I asked for and secured a 6-figure gift to peer support.

His gift to safe schools was definitely smaller than the one he wanted to make to set up a new project, but it funded our actual work and priorities.

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Summary

Acknowledge and sidestep the offer. To get your conversation back to where you want to take it, return to open questions about motivations for their offer, and their priorities for their impact. Then you can more neatly align what they want to achieve with what you need to fund.

And that’s how you handle red herring propositions! 

Share your ‘red herring’ moments below. And if this has got you thinking about practising for challenging conversations, I would be more than happy to have a taster fundraising coaching call.

Ilana Jackman is a fundraising coach and consultant. If you want to talk red herrings, or any other aspect of fundraising, get in touch.