Episode 208: The Critical 10 Seconds of Moves Management-Qualification to Cultivation - What to Do
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
Thank you so much for taking a few minutes of your day to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall. I want to do a deep dive into a critical moment in what we call in our industry the Moose Management process. One specific moment, one specific second or ten-second period that can be the crux of a successful build in the relationship. The moment I'm speaking about is right when you realize that someone is qualified. They are someone you want to build a deeper relationship with. How do you take them from that moment into the next step?
To do this, we've got to go back just a little bit, do a little bit of a refresher, and then we'll do the deep dive—the tactical—into that ten seconds and what you can do to make that next step, that move into cultivation, successful. To start with, and I'll refer to other episodes of Around with Randall, different podcast numbers, because I think that there's other details in the qualification process that are better illuminated in those particular conversations.
We have different things that we have to think about to get to that moment. We have to think about, "Am I ready to call?" If you think about episode 133, I get into the details of making those calls, the fear that comes with picking up the phone and calling someone you don't know, and how to deal with that. So, we'll kind of push that to the side. If you want more details, more specifics on how to overcome these challenges, episode 133 is a great resource.
"Am I calling the right people?" This gets into the conversation about artificial intelligence, and I believe that's episode 33 on some of the bigger-picture issues. Also, when we look at the ability for us to really think about having the right people to call, we could think about grateful patient issues or alums. The neat thing about today's conversation is that it's not limited to major gift planning. This is for a potential $1,000 ask, but we have to be calling the right people.
Number three is kind of this idea of getting time. We have to be able to get in front of prospects. I specifically talk about that in episode 146, where I discuss the intricacies of getting someone's attention, someone's time. How do you get in front of them to figure out if there's someone you want to be speaking with on a regular basis? All of the qualification conversations that lead us up to this moment can be found in detail in episode 21 and episode 179, where we talk about qualification in more generalized terms.
The reason I'm pushing those things off is that this ten seconds, this twenty seconds—whatever the timeframe is—where you realize they're qualified and you've got to figure out how to take them from this initial kind of short, in-general conversation about what they want and what they're trying to accomplish, into a pivot. Does it match up with what we're trying to do as an organization with the goals of us making a difference? What does that pivot look like?
Before making that pivot, I want to spend just a minute refreshing, affirming, and really honing in on what we're looking for. We have become addicted to this idea of wealth, that we want to look at a screening or an outside source to tell us who are the wealthiest people we should be working with. Those screens are really based upon, I think at times, inaccurate total information. Now with that said, that's not me saying don't screen. I think you should screen because it takes 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 people and gets it down to 400, 300, or 200.
But to go from 300 or 200 to 30—the 30 people you want to add to your portfolio this year—you can't do that through numbers. That only comes from a conversation, which gets us to what we're really looking for. What we're looking for is likelihood. Don't ever forget or misconstrue the thought process that qualifying is 80 to 90% likelihood.
What do I mean by that? Likelihood means that they want to take a journey with us based on what they want, their passion, or at least the beginning parts of that passion, to become part of a larger discussion about how they like to make a difference within the organization and the things that we do. Capacity only tells us how much someone might consider. But if you don't treat likelihood as the most important factor, I'll put this in a math term: if they have 0% likelihood but 100% capacity—meaning they can make a world of difference, but they have no interest in what you do or what the organization does—then 0 times 100 is still 0. I don't care how wealthy they are.
In the same vein, if they're 100% likely, meaning they love what you do, they believe in it.
It's their passion. The world through the eyes, the lens of your nonprofit—it's 100. But their wealth is only eight, or let's say, 25. 100 times 25... Hello, we're talking about huge opportunity. This is why we have to concentrate on this moment so critically. If we really focus on likelihood, if we figure out that they're connected to us—and those other episodes, 21 and 179, get into the heart, particularly episode 179, about the details of how to ask these kinds of questions to find out if they have likelihood—if we do this better, then we come to the moment that we're talking about today, that ten seconds.
What? They love what I'm doing. What do I do with them? How do I know where to go next? This is the concept I talk about all the time around the next step. We may follow up on these next steps to pivot from qualification into cultivation, from cultivation into solicitation, and from solicitation into stewardship. Today, we focus on that first pivot. I think that we tend to think this is easy, but the best gift officers I've ever worked with, those I've learned from and watched do this with a great deal of grace and effort—or effortlessness—show that, frankly, it's really hard.
So what's happening in this moment? First of all, you have individually figured out that they have an incredible likelihood of wanting to have further conversations. The next ten seconds becomes about how you then figure out what's next. How do you begin this move? Too often, we tend to tell people, as we begin to move into the tactical, what we think they want. What I have found more and more, the older I get and the more I think about my own philanthropy, what my wife and I do, and how people approach us, is this: we're not doing enormous philanthropy. We're doing more than we used to, and I look at them and say—they never bother to ask what I want.
The best way to move into the cultivation process is really more about what you ask them. So you're sitting there, and in this moment, you're trying to figure out what to do. Get your pencils out—this is the tactical. Why not ask them a simple question or series of questions that will illuminate the next steps if you can get them to answer?
What am I talking about? Well, let's talk about honing in on that passion—not necessarily what they want to do, but what they think might be appropriate. What about a question like, "What would be meaningful for you going forward?" The depth of that kind of question gets us into where they think we should go. What is it that they need to learn? What is it that they value? Is there another person who needs to be part of this conversation, whether on their side or the nonprofit’s? Thinking about, in that moment, giving them the opportunity to point—still kind of an analogy—point a flashlight down the road to show us the way they want to go.
Here's another one: "Could we talk about what this means to you and how you'd like to be involved?" We're now positioning into how they view themselves, how they take what they think of the situation, and make it more about what they want to do and how they want to move forward. A third question: "What would you recommend for the next step for us?" This gets into a very tactical example of them actually just telling us, "Here's what I want." All of these questions, and probably a lot of others that come along with them, get us to the fact that we probably don't understand or we underestimate the way in which we actually have more control of the relationship-building process than we realize.
But it takes a great deal of self-confidence to steal from Maslow—Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—self-actualization. You, as a gift officer, board member, CEO, or leader in the nonprofit—whatever your position is—need to have some degree of vulnerability. This means not thinking you have to make all the decisions but creating guidelines for where we're trying to go and allowing them to choose the course within those guidelines.
I equate this to the way I look at raising kids. This idea came earlier on in my career when I was working in secondary education and private schools. I really began to understand how kids learn and grow. It was well before parenting, which gave me incredible insight because they weren't my kids. It was, maybe, probably, most likely, much more objective. I always thought about it, which is an odd thought, as being the difference between a riverboat captain and a riverboat admiral.
The riverboat captain gets to choose which side of the river they're on—the left side or the right side. What do you care? It's going down the river. But the riverboat admiral—the parent, guardian, rider, leader—keeps the riverboat in the river. Where things go askew is when they dock the boat and the captain tries to go up the hill. You're like, "No, no, no," because the riverboat admiral knows where the river ends. In some ways, this is very much akin to that. You know where you want this to go—you want this to become some type of formalized solicitation, asking them to join you in what you're trying to accomplish. But does it really make much of a difference if it's on the right side of the river or the left side of the river? Why can't they tell us which is the better path for them?
Think about the power that comes in any one of those three questions. What would be meaningful to you in terms of what we do next? Could we talk about how you might like to be involved? What would you recommend? What would you think is the next step in this process? Think about the power because what they've done is they've charted the course of the river for you.
But innately too often, I see gift officers who think, wait a minute, I have to make sure I'm in control, which actually I totally agree with. So this doesn't just turn over and over and over and over and over and there's no productivity. But control doesn't mean telling someone where to go. I think control sometimes is more powerful when you ask where they want to go and if you agree with them, let them go there. People don't like to feel as if they don't have a sense of autonomy where someone lords power over them. These questions get into the psychological perspective of allowing others self-determination. And in the same vein, it tells you what the next three or four steps might be.
If they say, "Great question, well, I really want to know what Dr. Smith wants," let's get a meeting with Dr. Smith. Let him tell you the story of what he's trying to accomplish in his particular area. Or they say, "I really am trying to figure out what the school is trying to do to make the experience I enjoyed so much." I had this experience recently with one of my alma maters where the dean said something that really caught my attention and my wife's attention about something the school does that we weren't even aware of, and my wife honed in on that. The dean, who's doing a much better job maybe than his predecessors, failed to connect what we're talking about. What do you want to know? How would you like to take the next step? Which is left as kind of where we are now of, "I'm not sure if we're giving or not. I don't think he knows if we're giving or not." If he just asked the question, I probably would have said, "We want to know more about this," or my wife would have just interjected, "I want more information."
When you ask these questions, this 10 seconds can be a differentiator in getting more people qualified with a clearer path of what to do with them going forward—a series of next steps. It will probably also inform other generically other things that will become more important. How much you're going to ask for depends on what they want to know more about. Whether they're going to be ready to ask, that depends on how quickly we can get them the information they're looking for or connect them to the right person or whatever that next step might be.
All this is to say that if we allowed our prospects to guide us to where they want to go, we'll close more gifts. But this is the first moment where that happens, or could happen, or should happen. And too often, by not being willing to be vulnerable enough to have a sense of self-confidence that you can do the right things to help move the relationship along by simply asking them a question, you lose the opportunity to figure out a series of next steps that could make the moves management process much easier.
I know it might think for some that these 10 seconds are just 10 seconds amongst many. I truly believe these are amongst the most important 10 seconds you'll ever have. I want to add one more thing to the tactical piece because if you do this correctly, I always talk about the concept of blessing and releasing, that it's okay to let people go if they're not qualified. But in this process, if you ask the right questions, it's amazing how quickly you'll be able to figure out if you thought they were qualified. Maybe you misread something and you ask the question; it's also a fallback position of saying, "Whoa, I missed that. I'm going to bless and release," because they can't clarify what their interests are. They can't clarify how they'd like to be involved.
Now, that may mean you have to maybe give some suggestions. They can't answer that question. "Well, we're doing some exciting things with this; would this be of interest?" Sometimes you have to feed the beast. But if you do it in the right way, if you can't get answers to anything, they aren't interested, they aren't connected. That tells me I've got to bless and release them. And hopefully, you have a pipeline development process that allows for other people to be in there.
These 10 seconds are the difference between being a great qualifier and not, and empowering people to join you on the journey—or not. To know what to do in the next one, two, three, five steps—or not. To bring people to a higher level of engagement, relationship deepening—or not. Really nuanced today. But these 10 seconds can illuminate, elevate conversations, and prospects to levels at a much faster, quicker pace than you realize possible.
And that's really what our job is—asking for $500,000, asking for $5,000, asking for $500, asking for $5,000,000 in a state gift. Are they qualified? And can we give them the option of figuring out how to help them move forward? The power of asking the right question inside those critical 10 seconds.
And don't forget to check out the blogs at HalethLand3.com. Two a week, different things I see, experience—just things that you can think about a little bit—90 seconds a piece. You do not have to read very long, but you can get our RSS feed as well, Hallettphilanthropy.com under the blog subsection. And if you'd like to reach out to me, it's podcast@Hallettphilanthropy.com.
As we move towards year-end, it's an elevated understanding of the value of philanthropy—not charity, philanthropy, love of mankind. How do we help others? What I want to do in these podcasts is give different options for people to learn, to grow, to do what's going to make a difference for their organization—whether you're the donor, the board member, the CEO, the gift officer, the CDO, CPO, whomever you are. And you're giving, you are making a difference because what life's all about is my favorite all-time saying, which I say at the end of every podcast and anytime that I speak: Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, then there are those who wondered what happened. You're someone making something happen.
Your nonprofit's doing the same. You're seeking others like yourself who can help you do that because they want to make things happen for the people and things in your community that are wondering what happened. The hole between corporate free enterprise and government—there is a hole, that's where nonprofit philanthropy lives, to fill that gap because it isn't cost-effective from a business perspective and government's too inefficient to do it. Philanthropy lives and that's where we make our difference. We change lives. You change lives. And I want you to know that each and every day when you do the work that you do, because it is critical in being someone who's making a difference.
I'll look forward to seeing you next time right back here in the next edition of Around with Randall.
Don't forget. Make it a great day.