When a funder says no, the story you tell yourself is almost always about fundraising. The proposal wasn't strong enough. The timing was off. The relationship needed more cultivation. So you do the fundraising things: You write tighter proposals, you widen the pipeline, you book more coffee chats. Some of that helps, at the margins.
But go back to the leader from last week, the one who answered "what do you do?" and heard an outdated version of her own organization come out.
In her answer was the program she ran three years ago, described as if it were still the center of the work. For others, it might be two initiatives stapled together with "and also," because they haven’t decided which one is the core and which one is a side project they’ve outgrown. Often it’s a mission sentence that was true at founding and has since become a thing that’s said rather than done.
The funder hears an organization that hasn't decided what it is, and declines to fund the indecision.
Last' week’s leader couldn't say what she did convincingly because her strategy no longer made sense to her.
I find that often, a fundraising problem is a strategy problem you haven't finished solving.
The funder is responding to whether there's a clear, magnetic approach underneath your pitch, one that they could repeat to their own board.
So here's something to test this week, with the last real "no" you heard:
Replay it and ask: If you asked that funder why they declined to fund your work and they responded candidly, would they have said "I don't fund this," or would they have said "I don't fully understand what this is, or how it works"?
Last week I said articulating a strategy is different than having one. This week I'll go further: You don't need better words for a strategy you haven't finished building. You need to finish building it.
Own Your Strategy:
This is the work I do. Over nine weeks I sit with a mission-driven leader and we build the strategy itself, decision by decision, until the forks are resolved and the plan holds together under pressure.
I'm taking five leaders through the Own Your Strategy intensive this year.
Replay your last real "no" — which was it: "I don't fund this," or "I don't understand this"?
