Use your failures to fuel your future

I once sent 60,000 pieces of one nonprofit’s direct mail to another nonprofit’s audience by mistake.

As the head of annual gift fundraising at a children’s hospital I was an early adopter of text messaging and invested $15,000 to promote giving by text.

That program generated $480 of text message-based donations. We launched a campaign for a university hospital associated with the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, certain that it would drive digital, mobile, and phone fundraising revenues.

It didn’t come close to paying for itself.

I’ve hired several people in my career who on paper looked like they were amazing and highly qualified candidates. They turned out to be anything but fantastic candidates.

Over the years I have allowed people who behaved poorly to stick around longer than I should have, and that damaged the morale of my team and organizations, and limited our ability to deliver our best work.

Why am I telling you all of this?Because making mistakes and failing is part of our humanity.

I learned and grew from each of these mistakes.

And I’m a better leader, person, and fundraiser because of these mistakes and what I learned from each of them.

It's easy to beat yourself or others up when you or they make a mistake or fail at something.

But instead, we should embrace failure as a means to learning.

Fail fast and fail often, and learn from all of it.

And remember, you can still be incredibly successful and make a huge impact in the world, even though you’ve experienced failure.