Embracing Community-Centric Fundraising with Molly Marsh-Heine

Trent Stamp:
Welcome to How We Run, a podcast where we examine how nonprofits become successful. I’m Trent Stamp, CEO of the Eisner Foundation.

Julie Lacouture:
And I’m Julie Lacouture, Founder of Good Ways Inc. On this episode, we’re talking about community centric fundraising with Mollie Marsh-Heine, the Senior Vice President of Development at Earthjustice. Mollie shares with us, how her staff has been super intentional about embracing community centric fundraising principles. It’s a great conversation.
All right Trent, today we’re talking about community centric fundraising, which people in fundraising have been having a lot of conversations around this in the last year or so. Is it something that you have started to touch at your organization?

Trent Stamp:
We’re talking about it because I think it’s very important development. And I think that we need to figure out ways on the funding side to be more reflective of the community and to recognize the impacts that we have with our funding, and who we fund, and who we don’t fund and what that looks like. But I’m not going to pretend that we’re experts. Thankfully, we have a guest who certainly knows the topic inside and out. But it’s certainly something that we’re starting to try to understand a little bit better. Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:
So you run a family foundation and as such, your board is entirely made up of people from that family, yeah. So that when we think about diverse perspectives and you think about your board being all one family, how do you bring in conversations and diversity and learnings from outside of the family?

Trent Stamp:
We like to bring in grantees, perspective grantees and community experts. We like to introduce readings about the topic, because I think that the family that’s involved with our foundation is extremely thoughtful and contemplative and in it for the right reason. And we fund primarily in Los Angeles County and they’ve been residents of this community for over 50 years. And so they know it really well, but it’d be crazy for any of us to pretend that they’re particularly diverse group or that they have experiences that are reflective of most of the people that we serve. So I do think it’s important to bring other voices to the table and I think every foundation should do it, not just those that are family foundations and have one family on the name of the door.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah. And I’ve heard that from other foundations. I know the Disney Family Foundation does that fairly often where they’ll bring in grantees and say, how can we make our process easier for you? Where is it cumbersome?

Trent Stamp:
I think more conversations is a good thing. Just talking, identifying some sort of collective vision is surely going to advance our efforts in this area. And looking at each other as partners and not just as funders and grantees is a really positive step.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah. And that reflects one of the community centered fundraising principles of nonprofits should be generous with and mutually supportive of one another. So it’s not just about one nonprofit’s mission or dominance in a community. It’s really about the community first. I know that in your work, you encourage nonprofits to work with each other to serve similar communities.

Trent Stamp:
It’s important to recognize that in many cases, those nonprofits are competing with other nonprofits for limited resources. When we come in and tell them to collaborate, a lot of times, their initial reaction is are you going to collaborate with other funders to support us when we collaborate with other service delivery organizations? We just have to do a better job of getting on the same page with each other, whether it’s funders and other funders, or funders and nonprofits, or nonprofits and other nonprofits. We all made this decision to enter this sector because we wanted to make things better in some form or another. And if any of your behavior, whether you’re a funder or a nonprofit is detrimental to that goal, then you have to ask yourself what you’re really trying to do. And that’s one of the things that we do at the foundation is we ask ourselves all the time, are we helping? Are we really helping? Is everything we do helping? And if it’s not, who should we go talk to so we can get better at it?

Julie Lacouture:
That’s a great way to put it. So we have Mollie Marsh-Heine from Earthjustice here with us today. And she’s talking about how her organization is actually changing their fundraising mission to be more community centric. And so she takes us through all the things that the fundraising department at Earthjustice has done to be more community centric in their fundraising.

Trent Stamp:
That’s terrific.

Julie Lacouture:
What impressed me about their work was that they’re really taking on the principles one at a time and deliberately discussing them and saying, how does our work benefit from embracing this principle? So I think what they’ve found is that it has really improved their fundraising top to bottom, it’s improved their function as a staff, and they’ve seen great benefits all around. I’m really glad to share this conversation.

Trent Stamp:
And they show that if they can do it then just about any organization can and probably should be doing it.

Julie Lacouture:
Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So we will hear from Mollie.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
My name is Mollie Marsh-Heine and I’m the Senior Vice President of Development at Earthjustice. And Earthjustice is the world’s premier public interest law firm for the environment. Some people know us by our tagline, which is Earthjustice because the Earth needs a good lawyer. And sometimes to keep it simple, I will say we’re basically the ACLU for the environment.

Julie Lacouture:
Mollie, one of the reasons I wanted to talk with you is that I know that you’ve made it a strategy to be more community centric in your fundraising. And can you tell us what that means to you?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Environmental movement in particular has long had struggles with racism, just like many other NGOs. And particularly the environmental movement has been very white centered and white led. As part of our effort to be an anti-racist organization and to really uplift the movement, to create more authenticity and really a stronger movement overall, it can’t be a white movement for it to be successful. We have been looking at all of our practices and it’s been everything from who is Earthjustice And how do we look as a staff, making sure that we are diversifying our staff? What is our culture and how does our culture support everyone regardless of race, ethnicity or background, to bring their full selves, to work, to thrive and nurture and have a vibrant career? What does our board look like? And then what are our practices?
Sometimes organizations can diversify how they look in terms of racial makeup or demographic, but haven’t changed their culture at all. And if you don’t have a culture that is welcoming and a supportive, safe place for staff of color, then they just leave and you’re right back where you started from and really not being self-reflective. So there’s been a concerted effort around culture building. And I want to caveat that Earthjustice certainly hasn’t arrived and figured it out. We’re on a journey just like everyone else is. But how that comes down to the development department then, my area of expertise, we’ve had to do our own work around both how do we support the organization’s effort and the movement’s effort to be anti-racist?
And what does it mean to be raising money in an economic system that really encourages and fosters wealth disparity? How can we be part of the solution? How can we be funding our partners, helping both in wealth redistribution, as well as skills capacity training and uplifting and being partners, putting our partners stories first, all within this really interesting bubble of capitalism, where you really do need to raise the money. You’re not really outside of the system, you’re in the system. So what can you do to change it from within to create a more level playing field, to kind of rewrite how we interact with individuals of wealth, power, and influence?
And it’s [inaudible 00:07:54] our value system. So we don’t always get it right. And I think there’s a lot of challenges in it, but we’re really committed to the practice. And I certainly can’t take credit for community centric fundraising. I do want to point your listeners to a website called communitycentricfundraising.org.

Julie Lacouture:
It’s so great.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yeah. So maybe you’ve already seen it. One thing I really appreciate about CCF and the consultants there who really built the CCF model and the 10 principles of community centric fundraising is that they said this is a work in progress. I believe they started off seven principles and then built on that over time.

Julie Lacouture:
I think there’s 10 now.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yeah, there are 10 and it looks really different. There are organizations that have a million dollar operating budget or smaller, and then you have some really big organizations that have a lot of infrastructure, a lot of machine that needs to get revisited, looked at and retooled. And we are working really hard on examining, where are we in alignment with the CCF principles? Where are we not in alignment? Where might we either disagree or say, I don’t know if we can really be there yet? But more importantly, be in dialogue. We’ve actually embraced this as a goal for the department to work on collectively and within functional teams. So at our department meetings, every month we devote 45 minutes solely to a CCF principle and we present the principle, we share any learnings that we might have gleaned from podcasts and blogs that they have. There also is women of color in fundraising. I am an allied member of WOC, but not an actual member. You need to be a fundraising professional, who is a woman of color to be in that group.
But many of Earthjustice’s development department are members of that group. And so we share information. We post that on Teams channels, and then we just get into dialogue with each other. And sometimes ways that we are in alignment will lift up and say, oh, we need to do more of that. And less of that. Or there might be a brand new idea in particular, and that goes back to my development leadership team, which is a group of directors that oversee the different specialty areas within development. And then we will look at items in there that we can lean into further. So like one example, funding our partners, is we have a whole working group that has worked specifically on how do we raise more money to get it out and to the clients that we serve. We can’t directly fund clients as a law practice, but there are some funding umbrellas and consortiums that allow Earthjustice to send money there. And then our clients and other environmental justice partners can seek funding from those entities. But that’s just one example.

Julie Lacouture:
To be honest, I’m really tempted to go through all of CCF’s 10 principles, which yes, everyone listening should definitely check out and say, how are you doing this one? But maybe we can just pick a couple.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:
… Monthly, you talk about one of the principles. So recently, what is one of the ones that you’ve talked about?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yeah, we’re in principle six now.

Julie Lacouture:
So principle six says we treat donors as partners and this means that we are transparent and occasionally have difficult conversations. So tell me what that means at Earthjustice?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
So Earthjustice’s programmatic areas touch a bunch of different pieces of environmental protection. And they range from climate and clean energy work to what’s in our food and pesticides, toxic chemicals and straight up wildlife protection like wolves and bears. And then a bunch of work that we do that we still call healthy communities work. But a lot of that is intersections of health issues and the environment. And they have a clear connection to environmental racism. And an example could be Cancer Alley, our work in fighting the petrochemical industry in Louisiana. We represent the St. James parish and another community coalition down there. They’ve been fighting this work for decades saying don’t give it here. Don’t put it here. Those petrochemical plants don’t get built in white communities. They get built in black and brown communities. It isn’t just an accident. It’s deliberate and it’s targeted. And telling the story of that work, it can sound really clear. Oh, that’s environmental racism and you’re working to fight that and connect those issues. And here’s where I’m going to get to principle number six.
It would be easy to separate out the older environmental movement did this to say, oh, don’t talk to that donor who loves wolves about how this touches environmental racism. Don’t touch that. That donor just cares about wolves. That’s not what they’re interested in. And in fact, if you talk to them about that, they may say that you are in mission drift or that this is a social issue or a race issue and that’s not what Earthjustice is. And we’ve had to learn to dialogue and to respectfully engage our donors in conversation to actually be proactive, because you could be theoretically in the face of a donor who’s saying, oh great work, but just talk to me about wolves.
And what we try to do is show that just about every aspect of our work is centered with a client. We do not represent ourselves. We are a true law practice in that regard. And every piece of wildlife litigation that we do has a tribal client at its core. Most, I don’t want to say all, but many nations that we work with have sacred and spiritual value to the habitat of these charismatic species and they are critically important to their culture, both historically and ongoing. And our ability to litigate is because we are representing historic injustice that has happened to these tribal nations. And yes, it’s wonderful that we protect a wolf at the same time, but it’s not the whole story to say it’s just about the wolves.
And that’s part of white erasure that happens to say, oh, these issues aren’t connected. No, they are connected, all of the intact habitat and lands that our national parks are on. Many of those have negative stories at the core of indigenous peoples that were forcibly removed off of those lands. So we want to tell the whole story. We want to center our client in those stories and we believe we could also share beautiful successes and compelling information about the species themselves. They don’t have to be exclusive.

Julie Lacouture:
Let me ask you something about that. I hear you loud and clear, wanting to move your donors beyond their point of interest. And I think that happens a lot of places where the initial reason somebody gives is just one tiny aspect of the organization. And so let’s talk tactically about how you as a relationship manager, bring that person in and push them to grow really? Because I think that most donors will say one of the most rewarding parts of being a philanthropist is that it changes you. You get to affect change, but then you also change yourself. So can you talk me through how you are actually tactically approaching that?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
A lot of it has been practice and talking points. We’re not trying to move a donor off of loving wolves or grizzlies. It’s great that they love these animals. We’re trying to be inclusive in our language around the intersectionality of all of the work, that race and social justice isn’t a set aside from biodiversity and that’s the piece that we’ve had to work on in our language.
So another example of this narrative is telling the story of the Standing Rock Sioux and the Dakota access pipeline. One of our more famous cases. There is definitely a story that galvanized the world around indigenous rights and pipelines that go across native lands and historic injustices that have been visited time and time again on native peoples. We started telling that story when we first became involved in the case with narrative and also a lot about the pipeline, and the broken process of citing pipelines in the country, the subsidy of oil and gas industry, climate change, environmental harm. What we didn’t tell all the story of, but what we tell the story of now is that in Bismark, North Dakota, there was a white community that, that was where it was first proposed and they didn’t want it. And they were able to successfully block it and say, not here.
And where did that pipeline go? It went right to where pipelines always go. And it’s where coal ash plants go, it’s where big warehouse and transportation infrastructure goes, it’s where trash incinerators go. And that is into black, brown, Asian communities in this country. And that is historic environmental racism. And you can’t tell the story of the Dakota access pipeline without telling the story of racism and harm. And that’s the full picture. And of course, definitely not saying it as well as one of our attorneys might say it as well as the Standing Rock Sioux would certainly say themselves. But it’s, to me, another embodiment of the principle of who are we centering? Are we centering Earthjustice, or are we centering the Standing Rock Sioux? And what is the full story and how that educates a donor about the history of this country and racism and harms that we do to people and to the planet. So I know that’s a long narrative, but I think it’s an important example.

Julie Lacouture:
I remember working for an organization a long time ago. And before going into a donor meeting, having my boss say, “We’re going to stay away from some of these topics. We’re not going to go there.” And it sounds like what you’re saying at the simplest, at the heart of what you’re saying is we’re going to go there. We’re going to have the full conversation. With community centric fundraising, I think sometimes people think it’s limiting, but it sounds like what you’re finding is that it’s expansive.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Oh, absolutely. It makes it that much more of a moral imperative to support the work and you can come at it. And everyone wants to believe they’re about changing hearts and minds. And if someone is saying, this is really what is my philanthropic juice, this is what blows my hair back, it’s sharks and diving and whatever that is, that’s fine. They could still be excited about that and fund that. But we need to be in integrity with what the message is and our drive and the importance of our journey as an anti-racist organization. And really to be in authentic relationship with our environmental justice partners. And it’s a lot about doing right by the movement and doing right by Earthjustice ourselves.

Julie Lacouture:
Mollie, if you’ll end to be on some of these other community centric fundraising principles. What about number five? Time is valued equally as money.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
When we think about the way donors contribute, we know we all need money. We have to keep the lights on. And there’s a whole plethora of ways organizations do that. And giving of time is truly valuable. You could have a board member that had tremendous expertise and wisdom to offer, and yet is not your biggest donor. How we value that and how our language values that or our actions needs to be acknowledged. And one of the examples I can give is a very simple one in a way that we are changing our annual report this year. Annual reports often have donor lists and they could be big in print, there are some donors that like to see their name there. Mostly it comes from a place of recognition to say thank you. And we are going to acknowledge and print what your gift meant to us.
And we’ve moved ours actually electronically now on our website, instead of including it in our paper handout, primarily because we found that most people didn’t ask for the donor booklet anyway. But we still have it as we analyzed, time is valued equally as money. How could we change our annual report to reflect that principle? And so this year, and it’s our 50th anniversary. So it actually works really well. We are organizing our donor list by how long someone has been with the organization and their commitment over time versus the amount of money they’ve given. We have donors that have been with us for 30 years, who give us a check for $25 a year, and that’s significant for them and we want to value that. And their longevity with us means everything. So I think that that’s a simple lift that any organization can do that does an annual report or any sort of public facing document.

Julie Lacouture:
That’s very nice. I’ve seen a couple other organizations also include volunteers on those lists.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yep.

Julie Lacouture:
They’ve actually done a calculation of what is the value of a volunteer hour. And then they’ve looked and they’ve said, wow, some of our volunteers are giving as much as some of our major donors because they give us so much time. And the annual report is a really lovely place to show that value. How have these conversations changed your fundraising team and how do you think it’ll alter what you do in the future?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
It’s made our team, our whole department closer and more connected. We’ve had to have some balance in conversations. Sometimes we’ve had some fundraisers that just didn’t click. And what we try to acknowledge and work with is how can we support the fundraiser in this? What are the teachable moments without saying that we’re going to kick that donor to the curb? So just like anything when you’re learning something new, there has been some tensions in some instances. Those are few. We’ve really had to direct feedback. We’ve actually taken many courses in that. How do you talk about hard stuff? We’ve spent time on restorative justice, learning about how to acknowledge our impact. I would say that is … And by our, I want to call out myself as a white woman like that, we worked a lot with our white fundraisers and how they interact with their colleagues of color and being aware of implicit bias and microaggressions.
But overall it’s totally a net positive. So we’re really trying to hire for culture and see where people are on their diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice journey. And sometimes they’re super skilled and we want them to Earthjustice, and they’re not quite where we are at, and then you need to bring them back up to speed. And in COVID in particular, when everyone is on Zoom and you can’t be in person, we’ve hired probably 15 staff that we’d never met in person. How you bring them along in this deep culture work that we did initially with the department and continue to do and help them find their way in the journey but also get the foundational pieces that they need to have. That’s a challenge. And we’re still working on getting that right.

Julie Lacouture:
Can you share how you might evaluate in an interview, if someone is in the same place on their diversity, equity and inclusion journey as you?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Ask people what they do outside of work to stay educated and engaged. We also ask for how they would contribute in a fundraising capacity to the work. And we have a pretty clear set of rules. People within their first six months of hire have to go through foundational anti-racist training. And that is an organization-wide mandate. It doesn’t matter “how woke you are.” You have to do Earthjustice training, and that helps everybody have the same language. We have required microaggression training. We have policies on microaggressions and on anti-bullying, all supervisors have coaching sessions that they do that are specifically geared towards diversity, equity and inclusion work.

Julie Lacouture:
Can you tell me about a mistake you’ve made and what you’ve learned from it?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Oh, sure. My gosh, so many different mistakes. I think anytime there’s a mistake that you can look at as a teachable moment, it helps me find a place of self forgiveness when I hold up, and I just am like dang it, didn’t get that right. We had a case statement for support that we did for our current campaign, which is called Never Rest. And if anyone wants to check out the collateral, they can find the Never Rest campaign on our website and see some of our materials. So Earthjustice had never done a comprehensive campaign before. We’re halfway through this one, it’s 825 million we’re trying to raise over 5 years. And it was a big deal. Like we’re going to come out with a polished, professional, outside marketing firm, branded name, trademark, and this case statement, which lays out what we want to accomplish in the world for a donor to invest in us. And we had lots of eyes on it. We got through all the different stages. It was beautiful. And everybody that was looking at it was at an age where they don’t need reading glasses for the most part.
And our outside marketing firm said, I really think it should be not a big book, but something that’s a little smaller and precious in that way. And it will stand out more and be modern. And we were like, yeah, let’s do that. And talk about tunnel vision and showing it only to yourselves. Members of our board who are participating in that process had seen pieces of it, but blown up on slides. And we talked about it and they’d seen visuals. But anyway, the whole thing arrives, we’ve got a stack of 750 of them, expensive printing, and I could barely read them. It was in the tiniest font and it was like a $10,000 mistake, which is not much in the face of the whole number we’re trying to raise, but a waste. And we still try to use them, but it became clear we mailed them out. And I remember thinking this is pretty small and pretty much to a T, any donor over the age of 55 was like I cannot read this. Full stop.

Julie Lacouture:
What you said there was so important of just showing it to ourselves.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yeah. And not showing like the final proofs. And the audience, who was the audience this is for? It’s for a lot of people across the age spectrum. But a lot of our donors are over the age of 60 and they are really important audience. And we should have thought about having someone in that age group and demographic look at this print and font. And in what’s funny or ironic, we were focused on making sure that we were centering equity in the piece and our anti-racist values and our clients, and that our imagery was positive and affirming of our clients versus anything stereotypical. Anyway, and then we just missed the mark on the [inaudible 00:27:07]. Oh my God, really? Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:
Thinking about being in the middle of a pandemic, how has that changed how you connect with some of your donors? What have you done differently to adapt?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
The very beginning, so much fear. What’s this going to do to the economy? Is the zombie apocalypse happening? I remember telling someone I didn’t sign up to live in end times. I’ve been trying to prevent end times and like, oh my gosh, like we just didn’t know what we were working with. I can say the directors that I work with on our development leadership team were amazing. We just got into a huddle and what felt like a mind meld and A, what needs to happen first and how do we pivot? And met regularly to put that in action. I spent a lot of time with my network of other chief development officers talking with them about what they were seeing and their trends, and just trying to get support and ideas from each other.
We pivoted immediately to online events and teleconferences. We had already started to do some of those, and we just did more of those. We went right into Zoom, donor discovery calls, cultivation and solicitations. I think one month into shutdown, I did a 15 million ask that was successful. We started doing virtual reality trips. I’m proud to say that we’ve won two awards for innovation and successfully launching online events during COVID that were really well attended.

Julie Lacouture:
And so it’s almost like a virtual tour, or it’s a virtual …

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
You send it to their house. We’re like, I know we canceled our trip to Alaska, but do you still want to come along? And we had drone technology that was filmed up our work with our tribal partners and in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and up by the Arctic Circle. We had that put into a virtual reality format and then people get a kit in the mail if they’ve signed on for the experience. And they get to log in at a few times during the course of a week, it’s not every single day. They get time with our per program partners, with our actual clients, and then they could put on their goggles and they go on this experience, [crosstalk 00:29:12] virtual reality goggles that works with their iPhone. And it really is amazing, where you’re like, I am like flying over the Arctic right now.
So we’ve gotten great reviews on folks that have participated in that experience. I often laugh like fundraiser’s phones never ring. Like when a donor calls you back, you’re like, oh my gosh. And this is amazing. It made my day. Everybody was picking up the phone during COVID. They were bored.

Julie Lacouture:
Oh, sure. Yeah. I’ll answer those unknown numbers.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Bored, available, people who wouldn’t have taken the time to meet for a lunch in Manhattan, now were like, I’d be happy to spend 20 minutes on a Zoom with you. So some of those tools we are using actively to reduce our carbon footprint, to not travel more. We are not fully in person. We won’t be until January 1st at Earthjustice, but there’s voluntary travel happening. I’ve started traveling again, but I still meet with donors now regularly over Zoom. It’s become a tool and I think it will stay there and it’s imploring us to ask the question of, do we, and should we be traveling? And ways to reduce carbon footprint. Once you are back in person with someone, you really see, oh yeah, it’s a much more preferred form of communication and connection with someone. And seeing someone’s face on Zoom and having a relationship, you can build a relationship this way too.

Julie Lacouture:
Can you give folks who are fundraisers a tip on how to build connections on Zoom?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
I don’t think it’s very different. In fact, usually we offer Zoom first now, and I’ve just started to say, if I’m in the area traveling, I’ll be meeting with some donors in November on my way to our board meeting in New York. And I’ve said, we can meet by Zoom. I’m also happy to meet outside in a way that’s COVID safe. I’m required to be vaccinated. And I will wear a mask the whole thing but wherever you are, I can meet that comfort level. And some will say, let’s start with a Zoom. And many times, if I know I can’t travel to see someone I’ll just offer the Zoom right away, because it can make things faster. It used to be that you had to wait till the stars aligned so that you could make that lunch meeting work. And now it’s really about calendaring and a Zoom and it can have happen. Most Zooms, it’s rare that I have an hour long Zoom with a donor. I’d say you get right down to it and they end up being 30 minutes to 45 minutes long.
I keep my door closed. I have a dog that’s somewhere over here, but in general, I don’t have the dogs around, especially if it’s a solicitation. I try to just go into shut down mode or set expectations with the donor. Hey, I have my dog or my children are still doing online education. I just want you to be aware that there could be an eight year old, like running in here or something like that. I think that’s a helpful tool and visuals can work, but I’d be cautious about them. Sometimes when a power point comes on, you now are not seeing your donor’s face and you still need to read body language as much as you can and check in and they can easily tune out. People multitask a lot when they’re on screen. And so if you are going to use slides, it helps to really be strategic. And I think to be minimal in the use of them, just from my experience of …

Julie Lacouture:
Mollie, that’s such a good point, because I think that changes the connection from a conversation to a presentation. So it’s not let’s talk together. It’s let me talk at you.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yeah, that’s right. And you’re …

Julie Lacouture:
And if that’s not what you’re doing, that’s what it’s signaling.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yeah. And we do use online presentations a lot, but it tends to be with folks who are already known to us, a current donor or board members, board meetings, those often have presentations. But when I’m first meeting someone, I rarely have a PowerPoint presentation I’m going to put in there with them. And certainly even a solicitation. I don’t think I’ve ever used a PowerPoint with a solicitation either. I have done a lot of snail mail packaging during COVID where I want them to like get something tangible at their house. And I’ll say here’s our case statement. Would love for you to review that in advance of our meeting and just breeze through it and tell us what you think.

Julie Lacouture:
A great place to start a meeting.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Yep. Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:
Very smart. What’s your number one tip for someone who’s at an organization who says, yes, we need to be more community centric in our fundraising. Where should they start?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Well, I think it’s great to start with CCF and going to the website and getting onto any of their archived podcasts and webinars. I know that when I was exploring that, they were very busy and I relied on my attending of webinars and pulling down of material. But that doesn’t mean that they might not be able to engage someone that way. There are really talented consultants in that group. And so that’s certainly an option. You’ve got to just start somewhere and figure out where you can begin. The principles are a great way to do that. We’re not trying to get through all of the principles all at once. It’s a multi-year effort for us. You could easily spend a year on principle number one. That might be what your organization could take on.
The important point is that you’re starting someplace and doing that work and see how it can be adaptive for you. Those little changes, the beginnings of conversations, I would say lean into mistakes, because you’ll make them. I have fumbled many times and I’m really grateful for the loving, kind colleagues who have helped correct me. I so appreciate that. Have humility in it. If you’re a white person, do your work for sure in your place, in the privilege that you have. Be a beginner, be a learner too, don’t be afraid to say what you don’t know. And I think most importantly, you’ve got to begin and to do it. I really don’t think any organization has an excuse. I don’t care if you’re the Professional Golf Association or what. Everybody who has an incorporated nonprofit in the United States of America, their lives are touched by racism and need to be finding a way to center their work in racial and social equity.

Julie Lacouture:
Very well said. I always love to hear a fundraising tip. So do you want to leave our listeners with a fundraising tip?

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
I think a fundraising tip, especially in COVID times is to keep momentum and to be persistent. I used to work with just one of the most talented fundraisers ever. I used to work for The Nature Conservancy, Julia [Fascian 00:35:39], and she’s retired now and she just never gave up on some folks that she knew had the capacity to give. And I would be impatient and say, I don’t know. I don’t think they’re ever going to give more. And she’s, I don’t know. And she just kept doing these methodical little touches and just give a little bit the focus of her time to this individual. And that individual ended up making a $5 million gift and has been giving millions and millions to the work ever since.
And it was another one of those learning lessons around how you stay persistent. And didn’t mean she gave all of her time to that donor. She couldn’t. She had a big portfolio, but she just every now and then was like, I’m going to push this one article. Or I’m just going to see if they’ll do this one meeting or attend that event. And it had great results and it’s because she was so committed to the long game versus the short game.

Julie Lacouture:
I’m going to underline something you said there. I think you said persistent, but you didn’t say relentless.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
Oh no. Yeah.

Julie Lacouture:
I think sometimes when people hear the advice to be persistent, it’s no. These are tiny touches, these are open invitations, these are, was thinking of you.

Mollie Marsh-Heine:
By persistent, it could maybe at most have been a quarterly touch. Like just here’s something. Like I’m thinking of you and it paid off over time.

Julie Lacouture:
Excellent. Thank you so much for your time Mollie. Thank you so much for being here.
We have a request for you dear listeners.

Trent Stamp:
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