A Conversation with The Godfather of Relationship Fundraising

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Ken Burnett is an international fundraising legend. He quite literally wrote the book on relationship fundraising. He's the founder of SOFII. That's the showcase of fundraising innovation and inspiration. Ken has been a career fundraiser for 45 years, first as the UK director of ActionAid and later as a consultant, prolific author and lecturer. I wanted you to hear from Ken because he's an innovator, he's a visionary and he's charming. I believe we still have a lot to learn about relationship fundraising. As Ken says, we aren't in the money business, we're in the inspiration business and I think you'll get a heavy dose of inspiration in this episode.?

Tammy Zonker. We are so honored and completely over the moon delighted to have Ken Burnett. Join us for this Intentional Fundraiser Podcast. Ken, welcome to the Intentional Fundraiser.

Ken Burnett. Thank you, Tammy. It's just great to be here and hello to everybody. It's a real honor. Thank you for including me.

Tammy Zonker. Ah, when we made the list of people that we wanted to speak with, you were literally the first person that came to mind.

Ken Burnett. Okay. Great.?

Tammy Zonker. No pressure.

Ken Burnett. No pressure now. Absolutely. Yeah.

Tammy Zonker. So Ken, when I think of you, I think I always refer to you as the godfather of relationship fundraising.

Ken Burnett. Yeah. Right. Well, it's now nearly 30 years that have passed since I wrote the book of that name and that was a transformational moment. And I tell you one thing, Tammy, I'm so pleased to be on your show because I love the name fundraising transformed. And I almost think that's really what I was looking to do. I was hoping to transform the way we thought about fundraising.

Ken Burnett. I actually started in as a professional fundraiser in 1977 so well over 40 years ago, and in those days, fundraising was seen as being kind of like a sales activity and I very quickly saw that wouldn't quite do and that actually, that tended to be transactional based. So I think I was looking to, I mean, I didn't have any expectation to actually transform fundraising, but I wanted to have a different, to come up with a different approach.

Ken Burnett. One of the things that was concerning me was retention of donors and looking at, particularly at what was happening then in the United States and the kind of churn and burn direct mail programs that were being run by quite a lot of very good organizations. But it just seemed to me that this wasn't quite the way to go and talking about fundraising transformed, I love the name and I love the logo. I think fundraising still needs to be transformed, but what I hope that book kicked off was a realization that fundraising is not so much about money. It's about the people who are sending it and that we put them at the heart of our activities. So the subtitle of my book was a donor based approach to the business of raising money and that I think is what I was just really at that time, trying to get on the agenda, trying to get discussed and that seemed to work.

Ken Burnett. What worries me looking back now over 30 years, I mean, it's been great, the book has sold very well, it's continuing to sell, it's still in print and still selling. But I think we, the fundraising community talk the talk, but I'm not sure we always walk the walk. So I think there's still quite a long way to go, but in essence, I think that really, I wasn't trying to create a relationship fundraising as a science. It was much more a philosophy and really a simple philosophy at that. I think the core of my philosophy then was that if you're nice to people, they'll be nice to you back. It's not enough to fill half a page, but I've now I think written seven or eight books on the subject.

Tammy Zonker. Indeed. Indeed you have.?

Ken Burnett. I'm not sure how I got away with that really.

Tammy Zonker. Truly, I think Ken, you were ahead of your time. So I'm just going to go through the list of the books that you've written on this topic or related topics because you were, again, I think really ahead of your time. So we had Relationship Fundraising to kick off and then Friends for Life, Relationship Fundraising in Practice.

Ken Burnett. That's right.

Tammy Zonker. The Zen of Fundraising.

Ken Burnett. Yes. That was the nine things that matter most to fundraisers. That's right. Yeah.

Tammy Zonker. Yes. Which I think is such a snackable, very digestible read and some amazing nuggets that can be put into practice immediately. We then had the Tiny Essentials of an Effective Volunteer Board.

Ken Burnett. That's right. Yeah. That was really a bit of a departure because at that time, I had moved across a little bit and I worked a lot with boards, charity boards and the challenges at the board level, I think, slightly different in America because you operate on a slightly different system, but it's essentially the same issues crop up. And I had joined the board of the charity that I first started working for, that was a nonprofit called ActionAid. And they had grown very spectacularly in that had helped me launch my career. So I came back to them as a board member and three years later, I was made chairman of the board, which was kind of like, I think everybody else had declined politely so I was the last man holding the baby in me.

Ken Burnett. But no, I learned a huge amount as a board chair and so I kind of moved from the fundraising side to the governance issues and I tried to put that into the tiny book, but we were also, my wife, Marie and I, we were running a small publishing company and publishing books on fundraising. Again, it's different in the states to most of the rest of the world, but it's rather like having a large hole in your back garden and just throwing money into it. It's not a very, a remunerative activity, but it is quite satisfying. We were trying to get short bite sized communications. So moving slightly away from the long discursive detailed textbook type approach to something that people could have easy access to read in an hour on a plane or on a train and it would give them the essential point. So yeah, that's what I was tending to do.

Tammy Zonker. Sure. I think what a fascinating and introspective view that must have been to go from a frontline fundraiser to a board chair and now trustee on so many organizations, to have that 360 degree view of relationships and donor engagement.

Ken Burnett. Yeah. I was surprised Tammy, because I found that in the top sort of the top 20, top 50 British charities, there were very few fundraisers actually on boards. I have spent a lot of time interacting with boards, as you do, I'm sure, and you do presentations to board and we do trainings for boards, but I started to encourage people in the fundraising community to put themselves forward and take on the role. A, because it's so rewarding and so interesting and it helps them in the work that they do, but also because the fundraisers have got such a lot to contribute and if a board doesn't have an experienced fundraiser among its line up, then it's not going to really be able to govern in one of the most important areas, which is the responsibility of all the board, not just the fundraising committee. So, I think it's a good area to focus on.?

Tammy Zonker. Yes. Clearly. And I think too, it's interesting, well meaning board members who want to help create sustainable funding oftentimes will reach for another event or the next, like the trend, whether it's the ice bucket challenge or the trend versus what you've espoused for these many years, which is relationship fundraising, making introductions, participating in donor engagement.

Ken Burnett. Yeah.

Tammy Zonker. So I'm curious about your perspective on that.

Ken Burnett. Yeah. Well, 80 plus percent, I think it's in the UK, it's something like 86% of income comes from individuals one way or another. So the individual givers, the donors, who had also your bedrock there, your supporters, they're the people that you can turn to in times of trouble, they will campaign for you in times of need, but they are the financial core of any organization. They also give you that independence. We can speak truth to power if we have a large body of supporters who are actually committed and engaged and who believe as we believe, we share the same why, we share the same reason for doing things, and so building that part of it, and often you'll get sort of individual giving will be seen as just one of a whole range of activities. It doesn't make much sense commercially, given it's so predominant that you should be focusing the same level of attention on corporate or special events or something like that.

Ken Burnett. To get relationship fundraising into context, when I started planning to write a book, I had done a book on charity annual reports before then in 1982, actually believe it or not and so there was a great gap in the UK. There was no good book on fundraising so it started life as a how-to book and it was just going through the process of how to, the two things that I, the two messages I really wanted to get across were to focus on monthly giving and on bequest legacy, legacy giving. So those were the kind of core, and I had seen that in ActionAid, which had grown from nowhere to become a top 20 British cause, British not-for-profit, through monthly giving, particularly and less so legacies, but legacies was also... We get, in the UK, one third of all not-for-profit income comes from bequests. So really, it's a no brainer.

Tammy Zonker. Significant.

Ken Burnett. It's always been seen as manna from heaven and not the fruits of a lifelong relationship with a committed donor. So, the concept of relationship fundraising evolved as I was going through this how to book, and I changed it from a how to... Well, it still had all the components of how to do it, but it was a book which expressed a point of view. It expressed a philosophy and that philosophy was, we need to focus on long term mutually beneficial relationships and not on short term hits and churn and burn. That was basically the thinking behind it.

Tammy Zonker. It's really brilliant. And again, ahead of your time in terms of monthly giving, and again, the long term strategy of legacy gifts. So all this, we know that good fundraising, that high quality fundraising comes from deep relationships with donors and yet certainly in the U.S., we struggle. Overall, we retain less than half of our donors every year and only less than 20% of our first time donors. So why the knowing doing gap? Why do you think we still continue to struggle with individual donor engagement and relationship building?

Ken Burnett. Well, it's a very good question, Tammy, and I don't know if I've got any more insights. I think the issue with my approach was that, as I say, some people have taken it forward and they have turned it into a science really, and there's been lots of books produced about relationship marketing and there's relationship this and relationship that, and it almost becomes an overused word. I don't lose sleep about the fact that probably a large number of people who come into our orbit are not coming in as regular supporters, they're coming in response to a very specific issue and they will give a gift and they don't see that as being the first step in an ongoing relationship and that's what we want them to see it as, and so we are in the persuasion business, I suppose. But I think where we've gone wrong is that we've not put enough emphasis on reciprocity, on the fact that giving needs to be a good experience and that people need to, they need to get as much out of it as we get, it needs to be a mutually beneficial relationship.

Ken Burnett. So I think we will inevitably, and we probably always will not retain a percentage of first year donors, but if we are good at the relationship part, and this is why I think it's storytelling rather than sales pitches, it's where... I always say to people, "We're not in the money raising business, we're in the inspiration business and if we inspire people properly, then the money will follow as a natural reaction from the donor." They will say, "Yeah, that sounds great. I'm really moved by that, what you have just told me. That's captured my imagination." I think if we can get much better at the benefits for the donor, then donors are going to want to stay. I mean, they should. We should be able to get to a situation where people are going out of their way to tell their friends about this great thing that they've just done, that they get satisfaction and a sense of meaning and purpose and fulfillment from.

Ken Burnett. That almost really if ever happens because of this kind of transaction and I still find when talking to younger fundraisers, that if you say what you do for a living, you can quickly clear a room. At a party somebody says, "What do you do?" People cross the road to avoid fundraisers. Now, to me, that seems, given the nature of what we do and the good that we can help facilitate in this world, that seems. We've somehow communicated rather badly and I think.

Ken Burnett. Which brings me to another major issue that I've been espousing over recent years, which wasn't high on, wasn't even on my agenda in the early days of relationship fundraising, and that is that it's becoming increasingly apparent that giving is good for you. It's good for your mental wellbeing. Donors tend to live longer. Giving is supposedly good for your health, it produces oxytocin. It makes you feel good and it makes your marriage stronger and various things like that. And when you start digging into what the behavioral scientists have been finding about giving, it strikes me as remarkable that our business sector has not made a better job of saying, "Actually, this is a fantastic thing. This is actually something that you will get a great deal out of."

Ken Burnett. The other thing that we're really bad at, and consistently over the last 30 years or more, I have banged on about communication. To me, fundraising at its heart is communication. It's about telling those stories with power and passion and beauty in a way that will move people to action and if we were better at that, then I think we'd keep people longer, we'd bring more people in and this would be, we'd definitely be a very good thing.

Tammy Zonker. I agree. Ken, I think that we are very good at it before, like leading up to securing the gift.

Ken Burnett. Yeah.

Tammy Zonker. And then from the donor's perspective, there's a huge let down oftentimes after the gift is made.

Ken Burnett. Tammy you are so right. You are so right. The phrase I use is the five Ps. We need to be famous for frequent, fast, fabulous feedback. Donors never give you money for things to remain the same, they give you money to change something. They want to see something happen as a result of that gift. So donors essentially are there because they want to make a difference. Now, what we do is we take their money, we bank their money, and then we'll start thinking about the next thing that we can ask them for money for. And we're not really good at feedback. We are not famous for frequent, fast, fabulous feedback. So if we could build the five Fs into our communications, into our philosophy, into our strategies, then that would be a phenomenal thing to do and I think that's what we've got to focus on.

Tammy Zonker. Yes.

Ken Burnett. Yeah.?

Tammy Zonker. And again, I think it goes back to a knowing doing gap. We've seen the data, we know that people want to know the outcomes, how did my gift make a difference, and to your point, we fall sorely short in that area. And I wonder, I look at the work, the research that's done out of there in the UK, the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, Jen Shang and her work is remarkable.

Ken Burnett. Yeah. No, they do some fantastic things. Yeah.

Tammy Zonker. And Jen says that we need to love our donors as people and not sources of income and I so truly believe that they’re at the core of our retention challenges is an inauthenticity, that we may talk donor love, but we don't really love our donors.

Ken Burnett. Yeah.

Tammy Zonker. We love that we meet our goals because they gave.

Ken Burnett. Yeah. I mean, the thing about relationships also is that people should be able to choose the intensity and depth of relationship that they want, that's comfortable for them, but we should be the nicest people. Tammy, I'm sure I know you will do this too, I get involved in a selection of senior fundraisers and I sometimes see the short list and I think, why is this person there? They're just not the right person to put in front of a donor. What we should be is, we should be just empathy and appeal. We should be the nicest of people simply because we need people to trust us. We need people to believe in us. We can't follow the kind of leadership that we get from our political leaders nowadays, which is shocking.?

Tammy Zonker. Don't get me started, Ken.

Ken Burnett. No, no. I know. Well, we're both on both sides of the Atlantic. We've seen just how awful this can get. The problem I found with that is that there's this tendency where people say, "Yeah, but you can get away with that." People will believe what you tell them, where there's actually, there is an opportunity for our organizations to occupy some moral high ground and to come in there and to preach things like kindness and generosity and doing things with principles and doing things right.

Tammy Zonker. Yes.

Ken Burnett. And I think we need to get that very firmly established in our DNA it has to be, so that people will want to talk to us and will realize that actually, we can help them to achieve in life because most donors tend to be, you need to have disposable income to be a donor. That tends to mean the family will have grown. The traditional kind of donor village is a quite a narrow demographic.

Ken Burnett. What we want to do is to be able to speak to those people and say, "You're coming to a life stage where you are thinking about your legacy and where you will get meaning and fulfillment. Perhaps as you're coming up to retirement, you'll have the opportunity to get involved in the kind of things that we do." We should be able to make that a very attractive proposition and I think the first thing we have to start with, which we still don't do, breaks my heart to see the turnover of young fundraisers and if we can show them that this is the best career ever for would be world changers, if you want to make a difference in your life, it may not be the best paid job around, but actually the conditions of employment are much better than they were when I was starting out.

Tammy Zonker. Yes.

Ken Burnett. So we have made some advances, but that aspect of the rich history into tradition that is in fundraising, the body of knowledge upon which you can build, we stand on the shoulders of giants and we get to see further because we know our past, which is, I know you are an enthusiast for the SOFII foundation and wish I'd thought of that. And these are things that I and my colleagues have been working with to try and capture.

Ken Burnett. The elephant in the room is the word fundraising itself. I'm really not happy with the word fundraising because it talks about money. It seems to be all about money. And the first piece of advice that I got, which was so important was, my mentor was a guy called who was the architect of Oxfam. In the 1950s, he produced their communications and he said, "Don't start by asking for money. Fundraising is not all about money. It's about work that needs doing. If you start by asking for money, you won't deserve it and you won't get it. So focus on the difference that people can make."

Ken Burnett. I talk about campaigning fundraisers because I've never known a donor just to be interested in giving us money. They give for a cause, they give to make a difference. There's something they want to change. So all of us, we are all campaigning and our organizations, whatever it may be, it will vary from organization to organization and if you don't believe passionately in the work your organization does, then you're not going to be a good fundraiser for it. But if you do, then the potential for a rewarding, fulfilling career, and then we need to focus on things like leadership among fundraisers.

Tammy Zonker. Yes.

Ken Burnett. My last book I've written, which Tammy, I think you know about this book.

Tammy Zonker. I've just ordered it.

Ken Burnett. Excellent.

Tammy Zonker. I'm so excited about it.

Ken Burnett. So it's called The Essence of Campaigning Fundraising, and it focuses on the core content that is available for free to everybody on the sofii.org website.

Tammy Zonker. Can we pause for a moment? I want to make certain everyone understands what SOFII is.

Ken Burnett. Okay.

Tammy Zonker. So SOFII is the showcase of fundraising innovation and inspiration. So essentially, you have curated the most excellent, most inspiring examples of campaigns and fundraising, messaging and showcased it available, free of charge, although, donations to support the foundation are much appreciated.

Ken Burnett. We need that now because we reached the stage. It started as an idea for when Marie and I, we were traveling to do some work in Australia, with fundraisers in Australia. We were on the train to Heathrow and we were talking about the history of fundraising. It really started as an idea for an online museum. So this was in 2007. Yeah, around then. Basically, it started as the museum of fundraising in innovation and inspiration, because we had realized that I'm of a generation where I tend to think that me and my colleagues, we invented direct mail and we invented segmentation and we invented all the techniques that so characterized and I learned from great people like Jenny Hansen, Mal Warwick and Roger Craver and people like that.

Ken Burnett. But we thought we were of that first generation and actually when you dig into it, you find that the Victorian era was a fantastically active time of fundraising innovation. But then you go back to the middle ages where people were raising money to build the great cathedrals of Europe, for example, and... Well, Tammy, I could go on for a very long time on this subject, but the earliest exhibits that's on the SOFII website is Moses and the children of Israel raising money to build a tabernacle, which is basically a mobile church while they're wondering in the desert. In fact, the first ever, that's 3,500 years ago, the first known fundraising campaign was so successful that Moses had to return jewelry and gifts and clothing that people had donated because they had so much of it. They had the fluidity of donations and all of this is chronicled within SOFII.

Ken Burnett. And then you go to the Roman era, Tacitus and his colleagues, plenty the younger, the first matched funding, the first major donor dinner was actually King David raising money for a temple to his son Solomon. And there's a fantastically rich body of information. So SOFII started life like that, almost as a kind of three dimensional online museum. And Marie and I, our motivation was that we had enjoyed a good career through our success in the fundraising sector and we wanted to put something back. So we thought it should be a free service and particularly we were interested in loan fundraisers, who didn't have access to, maybe couldn't afford to go on training courses, couldn't attend conferences and things like that.

Ken Burnett. So we started that, but then we realized that there's much more... We changed the name from a museum because a museum suggests that it's in the past and it's static. We realized that there, it was possible to use these examples from the past to inform the present and inspired into the future. And so we started a thing with the help of a large number of people who'd got involved with us and particularly two guys from an advertising agency group called Open fundraising, who came up with the idea for a seven minute series of seminars. I think you've been to at least one of these.

Tammy Zonker. Yes.

Ken Burnett. And we've held those all around the world in all sorts of different countries and they're always hugely successful because it's fundraisers, mainly young fundraisers standing up and saying, it's not work that they did. It's something that has inspired them. I wish I had thought of that. It's called IWITOT for short.

Tammy Zonker. Yes. I was so honored to present, it was at AFP Congress 2012 and I presented, I wish I thought of that about charity water and how powerfully they use video to share their story.

Ken Burnett. This was the one where your Department of Homeland Security decided that I was an undesirable alien. And Marie had to stand in for me and do the opening speech to about 1,400 people without any notice.

Tammy Zonker. You are pretty dangerous, Ken. You are pretty dangerous.

Ken Burnett. That's right. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I missed that one, but I wish I'd thought of that is, has been a great success and it energizes. People say things like, "I've fallen in love with fundraising all over again," because they see the creativity and the imagination, the innovation that has gone into the communication of good causes. We are very lucky. I always say we've got the best stories in the world to tell, and we've got the best of reasons for telling them with power and passion to move people to action and that's such a great challenge to have. So SOFII celebrates that and I wish I'd thought of that, does it in a slightly different format and arena, but it is the same thing. And what we're trying to do is encourage debate and awareness and understanding and spread, make it easier for people to copy the best of the best and people do. They use it. We have tens of thousands of people using SOFII every month.

Tammy Zonker. And one of the things I love about SOFII, and it's S-O-F-I-I.org, you must check it. One of the many things I love about SOFII is that it really does showcase concepts and campaigns and ideas that are so innovative and truly inspiring and I love that fundraiser, fundraising professionals, nonprofit professionals are so generous to showcase that work.

Ken Burnett. And it's from all around the world as well. And we've had volunteers translating into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Chinese, a whole range of other languages. I wish I'd thought of that event in different countries. So if you get a chance, any of your listeners get a chance to go to something like that, then please do, because you will enjoy it and it will make you think.

Tammy Zonker. Absolutely. The other thing I'll point out, on the SOFII website, you have a digital version of the commission on the donor experience.

Ken Burnett. Oh, right. Yes.?

Tammy Zonker. Which really tells its multiple chapters showcasing different fundraising success stories. Please talk about it.

Ken Burnett.?It's important for people to realize that the commission on the donor experience was a formal commission that we set up. It was founded by Giles Pegram and myself, where Giles was the deputy director and head of fundraising at the NSPCC for 30 years, which is one of Britain's biggest childcare organizations. He was a hugely successful fundraiser and we were both kind of two old guys on the sidelines when the press started being very critical of charity fundraising techniques, after rather a singular scandal in the United Kingdom, which focused on high pressure, hard sell fundraising. There was a huge outcry from the public to say that they too felt that fundraisers were often inconsiderate, aggressive, and unhelpful and that you really had to cross the street to avoid them.

Ken Burnett. The effect of this was that a lot of people in the fundraising sector felt that the media were being unfair to them. Well, the media are often unfair, but actually there was a lot of truth. To me, it seemed to represent an opportunity and so what the commission was set up was, and it had 12 members and a very eminent chair of Martin Lewis and its purpose was to try to capture best practice and to review what was not good practice in fundraising terms and trying to find what I called the new era of responsible fundraising, which was fundraising where the donor was at the center.

Ken Burnett. So they produced a huge body of work. Now, all of the published, there were 28 different projects, and some of them went into very great detail, analyzing different aspects. So the one that I was responsible for was the use and misuse of emotion. All of them are documented on the SOFII website, along with a document we called the six Ps, which is a blueprint for the future of fundraising and it talks about the purpose of the change, the fact that it needed to be permanent change, the principles that would underpin that change, the pillars of change, a promise to donors and then there were 526 practical actions. So all of those things begin with a letter P. So we called the document the six Ps document. It can be downloaded. It's eight pages. Well, I wrote it and it was one of the hardest things I've ever had to write, because it had to condense the findings, which ran to thousands of pages into a sort of an eight page blueprint for the future of fundraising.

Tammy Zonker. Yes. So powerful.

Ken Burnett. It's worth people getting ahold of that too.

Tammy Zonker. Agreed. Absolutely agreed. So, Ken, I want to go back to your newest book, The Essence of Campaigning Success. Tell us about that book.

Ken Burnett. Fundraising. Yeah. What I wanted, again, going back to this issue of fundraising not being the most popular career or the most popular destination for people from universities or school, starting their employment and I wanted to put together something that drew on all of this body of information that fundraisers can use that considered the role of the fundraiser, it's particularly about campaigning fundraising. It's about uniting the purpose with the money and really the money comes secondary to the purpose. 199 of SOFII's exhibits are linked or other exhibits. Also, there's quite a lot of content from the Agitator. So the book is actually, it comes with a USB key. Yeah, I do have it. There's the USB key that comes with it.?

Tammy Zonker. Yes. Yes.

Ken Burnett. It comes with a USB key and that has direct link so it is a portal to a whole range of content, which is, if you like, it's everything that your apprentice fundraiser needs to know if he or she is going to really master this new craft that they have chosen. It presents the very positive aspects of fundraising and it looks at everything from the principles that need to underpin fundraising through to the practicalities of campaigns. The biggest section of it is about individual campaigns and using television, using direct mail, using posters. There's a great deal of content and you can go to the White Lion Press website or SOFII. In fact, probably again on SOFII, there is quite a lot of the content is available and there are parts of it that they can be downloaded for free.

Tammy Zonker. In the notes below this podcast, we'll add links to SOFII, to White Lion Press, should you want to get your own copy of Ken's latest book. I know mine is probably on some FedEx airplane over the Atlantic right now on its way to me.

Ken Burnett. Yeah. Well, Tammy, I'll be very interested to get your feedback to it. It's somewhat different from all of the other books I think in this area. As I say, I think this definitely will be my last fundraising book. It's got contributions from others. There's a brilliant forward from Roger Craver and I think it is a book which I hope will help to cement this change to a new era of responsible fundraising. I think the keys are in there, but it will be up to individual readers how they access that information.

Tammy Zonker. Yes. Well, I can definitely attest that we are all standing on the shoulders of those who came before us with the examples that you talked about from the Victorian era and even before. And certainly, you've had a huge influence on my 20 plus years of fundraising. So I'm excited for this new book.

Ken Burnett. Okay. Well, that's great Tammy. Can I just say, it's a two way street, because you had a huge impact on me through your campaign with General Motors, the major gifts and the city of Detroit, which is a case history which is featured on SOFII actually, and because it's such a great story. So it works both ways, but I think if we stop learning from each other, that really is time to give up. I may be 72 next birthday, but I'm keeping going for a while.

Tammy Zonker. Yes you are. And while I hear you, that this may be your last book, I'm not putting money on it.

Ken Burnett. Well, I have to tell you that I'm not sure I can afford to write anymore books. It's not the most sensible thing to do, but nevermind.

Tammy Zonker. Well, I have a couple rapid fire questions for you.

Ken Burnett. Okay.

Tammy Zonker. First is, after decades of fundraising and leading fundraising consultancies, what are the top three characteristics you think a fundraising professional needs to be successful?

Ken Burnett. Woo. Well, I think I was talking earlier about empathy and empathy is a really good word to really understand. Empathy and rapport, I think you have to have that ability to get the best out of people. It's not an easy thing to be a really effective campaigning fundraiser. You have to have likability and you have to have passion. I think I would put those and I remember Bruce Barton, who was the advertising head of BBDO. He said, "The best thing that you can give your child is passionate enthusiasm." And I think we need to come to our causes with infectious, passionate and enthusiasm, but I think there are a hundred other things that you could add, Tammy. You mean, you need tenacity, you need humor, you need to be flexible. You need all sorts of things really. You need to be accountable. I'm very patient and tolerant.

Tammy Zonker. Yes. Yes.

Ken Burnett. It's not easy. So it's a special role for special people.

Tammy Zonker. Yes, indeed. Best fundraising advice you've ever given and received?

Ken Burnett. All right. Okay. Well, as I mentioned, I had a wonderful opportunity because I was brought in to this business by the guy who was the founder of Oxfam and he started me on my career. One of the things I was told is that you need to write to people and talk to people where they are and not where you want them to be. Possibly the best piece of advice is that communication is... Not for profit organizations produce lots of information, but not a lot of communication and the big difference between the two, information is giving out and communication is getting through. And we need to focus on communicating. If we could send less, but better, less information, more communication, that's... I consider my 40 odd years in this business, I'm a copywriter basically at heart. That's what I see myself. And I think that's very good advice and I tend to give that advice to...

Tammy Zonker. Powerful.

Ken Burnett...to people, whenever I speak to young fundraisers. In terms of advice that I have given, I worked with Allan Clayton for many years and we had a very successful training and consulting setup between us and he's continuing with that, of course. We used to sort of spar with each other in terms of the sort of influence and I think the best thing that I said to him was I said to him, "You can look at the output that we are doing and a lot of it is good enough, but for what we are trying to do, good enough is not good enough." That really stuck with Allan and he would use that phrase again and again because he was striving for excellence and good enough would not cut it with him and he used that as a kind of core part of his management technique.

Tammy Zonker. Yes. Brilliant.

Ken Burnett. I got from him a beautiful phrase, which is 10 words, which each word has no more than two letters and the phrase is, "If it is to be, is up to me." I think that's a very good thing to say to yourself and actually unconsciously, subconsciously, I think we say it every day because we know that if something's going to happen, we have to make it happen.

Tammy Zonker. So powerful. All right. Last of the rapid fire questions, knowing all that you know about relationship fundraising, our profession now, what advice would you give your younger self just starting out?

Ken Burnett. Get a proper job. Actually Tammy, this is a terrible... I haven't really thought about this because I so much have enjoyed what I have done through my life and I feel I've been very fortunate and people often say to me, "Well, you're very lucky." So I've ticked a lot of the boxes as I've gone along and my response to that is, "Yeah, I am very lucky and the harder I work, the luckier I get."

Ken Burnett. I think I would say to people, it's never going to be easy. Don't look for it to be easy, but do look for it to stretch you and if you set your mind to something, you can always do it. You will get there. Or at least you'll get something from the trying. The worst thing is not to be challenging and to accept that things are as they are. No, we add in the change business. I wish we weren't the not-for profit sector. I wish we were the for change sector because to me, that's what it's all about. I don't want to be judged by what I'm not for. I want to be judged by what I'm for.

Tammy Zonker. Beautiful. I completely align with that. All right. So to wrap up, tell us about your incredible birthday celebration and what you dedicated yourself to.

Ken Burnett. Right. Well, it wasn't really a birthday celebration. So my wife and long term business partner Marie died now nearly four years ago. I last year started a new relationship with a new partner and she is a painter and a potter. She's very artistic and she is very fit. She has walked the Camino de Santiago eight times, which is an incredible feat. When she retired at the age of 60, she set herself the target of walking the 500 miles of the Camino every year, until she was not well enough to do it.

Ken Burnett. Halfway through last year, she suggested that I might like to walk the Camino. Now, I have never done anything like that and I suppose I agreed to it because I thought, well, this is one way to carry favor with my new friend. Walking 500 miles across some of the most interesting, but also most challenging terrain across the north of Spain, from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, which is just on the French side of the border, across the Pyrenees, in the middle of Northern Spain, to the medieval cathedral of St. Jack in Santiago de Compostela.

Ken Burnett. We did it in September. It took 39 days of walking. We averaged about 25 kilometers a day so roughly seven hours of walking. The first part of it, the first 10 days were, for me, an absolute nightmare. One reason was that I broke my leg a few years back and the first thing that we had to do was we had to go up to climb the Pyrenees. I live in Suffolk, in rural England, and Suffolk is notoriously flat and I had done all my training on tarmac roads in Suffolk. So I had done quite a bit of training. I was in relatively good shape for this, but I was not prepared for the first three days of climbing to cross the Pyrenees.

Ken Burnett. I tell you, Tammy, I was so pleased with myself that after the, I think it was the third of the fourth day, I met this woman and I was saying to her, "I've just walked across the Pyrenees." And we'd done I think, I don't know, 50 miles, 60 miles, something like that and I said, "I'm really proud of myself because I have climbed up there and I've actually survived it. It was blooming difficult, but I survived it." So I said, "Where have you come from? And she said, "Oh, we've walked from Brussels in Belgium." She had already completed 1,800 miles and she was about to do another 500 miles to cross to Santiago on the same route as us. At that point, I stopped boasting.

Ken Burnett. The other example I must tell you about was, I met this guy, French guy called Pascal. Now, I lived in France for 16 years and I speak French, but Pascal also spoke English. Sorry, it wasn't Pascal. It was Patrice. I'll get his name right. Pascal, I did meet a Frenchman called Pascal, but this was Patrice. Now Patrice was, I was telling him why I... He asked me why I was doing that, walking the Camino and I said, "well, I'll be 71 next birthday, which is just next month and I thought this might be the last thing of any substance that I attempt in my life." And he said, "Rubbish, absolute rubbish." He said, "I am 81 years old and I am walking the Camino as well." And I felt humbled by that because he was an absolutely lovely and entertaining and quite charming man. I met him several times on the road and I later learned that he'd been taking taxis over the really difficult bits.

Tammy Zonker. He gets a little grace there.

Ken Burnett. Yeah. But I still thought he was charming and optimistic and he basically showed me that you can do anything if you set your mind to it. It was full of experiences for me. The worst bit on the journey was, about four days in, when we were coming down the other side of the Pyrenees, the road, well, there was a stretch of road called the dragons teeth. It wasn't a road. It wasn't a path. It was jagged rocks and it was much more like rock climbing and my leg was killing me. It proved to be really, really difficult.

Ken Burnett. But Jenny who had been there before, she said to me, "The first week, 10 days will be really difficult, but then you will get into your stride." And I did. I found that people were fantastic. The weather was wonderful, lovely and sunny but not too hot. The food fantastic. The value for money everywhere along the Camino is great. The companionship that you meet and we met with people at the start and at the end, and we had a big dinner at the end in Santiago. It was just a wonderful experience.

Ken Burnett. So I don't know if there are any direct fundraising lessons, but plenty of lessons for life I think from that.?

Tammy Zonker. Incredible.

Ken Burnett. The only thing I would say is that 1,400 pilgrims, because that's what we call ourselves when we do this thing, 1,400 pilgrims arrive in Santiago every day, it's a very busy trail and there are several of these ancient pilgrimage roots. You don't have to be at pilgrim. You don't have be religious to walk the Camino. In fact, most people who do are not, but that's what they're doing. They're following in the footsteps and so much of what we do is following in the footsteps of others. So it's a worthwhile activity.

Tammy Zonker. Yes, absolutely. I can't help but compare it to some of the things that you said earlier about being in the fundraising profession. I feel like the lesson out of that I see when I compare it to fundraising is, there will be rough spots. It's really hard in the beginning. There'll be really hard, unexpected things that come up along the journey and the key is to keep going and to never, never give up and enjoy the relationships along the way.

Ken Burnett. There will be emotional moments as well. One of the things that people walking the Camino do is that they leave mementos or they leave memorials. So I built a memorial to Marie. There were other instances where you share in people's... People walk the Camino because they have had a bereavement or they have grief or they have something that they want to expiate and it can be exceptionally touching and you share with people, sometimes and under considerable difficulty, and that in itself is very illuminating and quite humbling.

Ken Burnett. So, no, it's a terrific thing to do. You do need sturdy boots and you get a lovely certificate at the end of it. So in my home in Suffolk, I'm not sure actually in my home in Suffolk at the moment, my house is 500 years old and I have a wall which has the root and a picture of my boots painted by Virginia, my traveling companion. So it has a picture of the boots at the bottom, the route along the top and in the middle are the two certificates in Latin that were awarded to somebody who's completed all 500 miles of the Camino de Santiago.

Tammy Zonker. Incredible. Incredible. Ken, as always, an inspiration, a huge source of knowledge and encouragement and I am so grateful that we had this conversation today and I can't wait until we can see each other in person again and I want to give you a big hug.

Ken Burnett. Absolutely, Tammy. That would be just great. And then I can tell you about my next big plan, which will I'm sure surprise probably surprise me as much as it surprises you.??

Tammy Zonker. Well, we'll end on a cliff hanger then.

Ken Burnett. Okay. Okay. Tammy, thank you very much. It's been a delight to talk to you.

Tammy Zonker. And you.

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Links mentioned in this interview

KenBurnett.com

Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration (Sofii)

ActionAid

I Wish I Thought of That (IWITOT)

Camino de Santiago

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Books mentioned in this interview

The essence of Campaigning Fundraising in 52 exhibits and 199 web links

Relationship Fundraising: A Donor-Based Approach to the Business of Raising Money

Friends for Life: Relationship Fundraising in Practice

Tiny Essentials of an Effective Volunteer Board

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Connect with Tammy

Can connect with Tammy on Twitter and Instagram at @tammyzonker, and on LinkedIn.

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