Building on Your Resilience

When I speak to charities, the most common thing I hear is we as a charity are much more resilient or we showed great resilience throughout the pandemic.

But what is resilience and now you have it what’s next?

Resilience

You only need to be resilient outside your comfort zone – resilience is absolutely redundant inside your comfort zone, being comfortable and confident doesn’t require any “sticking power”.

Resilience is needed outside of your comfort zone because is it where you develop and grow, it’s where you feel uncomfortable and need resilience to stick it out and not quit, the sheer act of keeping going requires effort.

The pandemic came along and physically kicked us all out of our work comfort zones. The working from home debate (that was probably rooted in team surveillance) got kicked into touch, the making your service digital resistance suddenly didn’t have a leg to stand on, colleagues excelled in their adaptability, work was done at record pace, more collaboration with other charities made much more sense than competing, teams all jumped onto to Zoom and everything kept moving forward despite it feeling like riding a bucking bronco.

In short, you left your organisational comfort zone and become much more resilient and in many cases much more productive too. 

But don’t stop there the next step of this journey is now to become “anti-fragile”.

Anti-fragile Versus Resilience

In a nutshell anti-fragile is “things that don’t kill you make you stronger”, like your immune system the more it is attacked the stronger it gets, lifting weights at the gym the more stress you put your muscles under the stronger they become. 

Resilience is making sure things don’t break from the stressors but there is still a breaking point – anti-fragile is using the stresses to make you or your organisation stronger. The problem creates the improvement and continues to do so as you go along.

Perhaps during the pandemic you switched your service to a digital delivery in a matter of days or weeks, and now post the pandemic you plan to continue to use what you and your colleagues built. Being resilient you will look to protect your service from any other disruptors, being anti-fragile you will use those disruptors as a sign to adapt further.

In other words, your job is to focus on how to response and use threats rather than how to avoid them.

If you have read any of my articles you will know I strongly believe the external funding environment has been changing for years and continues to change, but the internal fundraising departments for a number of reasons have not been given the investment, time or room to adapt, and hence many charities find fundraising a real challenge.

The anti-fragile thinking would suggest really get under the skin of the problem and use it to adapt. The “problem” is the road map to improvement and too much resilience (you figure out a way to protect yourself from the problem) can actually make you more fragile, as you are not adapting but compensating for or masking the problem, like being over reliant on one big donor or one large income stream.

Fundraising at scale has an advantage when it comes to being anti-fragile. Whereas fundraising one donor at a time is wide open to being fragile. Direct mail and mass participation events for example produce clear data, it makes testing, tweaking much easier. It is much harder for teams working with one corporate, trust or major donor at a time to pinpoint the real problems, as it takes so much longer to build up the evidence/data - but the price of progress is to adapt and experiment.

I’ve always loved the famous quote that says, “Invest in businesses that any idiot can run because sooner or later one will be running it”. That of course is the ultimate anti-fragile business model a system or process that is so attuned to its external environment that any idiot can run it.

The Challenge

The challenge of becoming anti-fragile boils down to mindset. No surprise there then. If you really want to grow your fundraising income in the ever-changing external funding environment, having a fixed fundraising mindset will hold you back whereas a growth fundraising mindset will help propel you forward.

If you would like to a quick test to see how fixed or not your organisation is, please help yourself to a copy of my:

 “14 Key Differences between a Fix Fundraising Mindset Versus a Growth Fundraising Mindset”

I created this list from working with hundreds of charities some thriving and others living hand to mouth. Check it out HERE

Here’s to your success ??