How to Fundraise for Non-Human Causes Without Burning Out!

Katherine Lacefield is the founder and head consultant of Just Be Cause Consulting, bringing a wealth of insights to the table. Through her clients, volunteering, webinars, speaking gigs, articles, and podcast, The Just Be Cause Podcast, Katherine has helped hundreds of nonprofits get excited about fundraising again. She has supported many nonprofits in establishing sustainable funding plans, from small grassroots advocacy groups to large international organizations.

More information at https://www.justbecause.consulting/

Summary of the Interview 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. Today, we’re exploring a challenge that many mission-driven organizations know well. How do you raise money for causes that do not always have a human face, a direct human voice, or an easy emotional story without exhausting your staff, volunteers, or donors? Our guest is Katherine Lacefield, who helps nonprofits build sustainable fundraising systems, strengthen donor engagement, and bring joy back into the fundraising process. Today we’ll talk about stewardship, community communication, and practical ways to invite donors into the excitement of causes that protect animals, the environment, and the wider world, that we all share. Katherine Lacefield is the founder and head consultant of Just Because Consulting. She brings more than 20 years of nonprofit and philanthropic sector experience and helps organizations increase funding capacity through fundraising strategy, grants, donor engagement, campaign support, coaching, communications, and practical tools. Her work includes animal welfare and rights, environmental and climate causes, sustainable development, social justice, and other mission fields where impact can be hard to translate into everyday donor language. So Katherine, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange. Tell us how you got started in this fundraising business.

Katherine Lacefield

First of all, thank you so much for having me. And fundraising, well, as I’m sure anyone listening, if you work in a nonprofit, usually when you say the word fundraising, people run out the door. No one wants to touch the term or the word or the actions around fundraising, it seems. And I guess I was weird in that sense of I loved fundraising. I got involved in fundraising at a very young age. And as I was just sharing with you before we started the recording, when I was working at an animal shelter, I was young, I was 19. I was doing all of the things, including working reception. And it just came naturally to me to ask people, hey, you’re bringing in this animal. Would you like to make a donation to support the organization, the work we do? And just by asking, it was surprising how many people would be very generous with their donations. And that got me thinking, what if everyone had more of this fundraising mentality when working in nonprofits? What much more work could we get done if people integrated fundraising into their daily thought process. So that’s kind of how I got into fundraising, but how I got into animal welfare is a whole other can of worms, and I’ve been in there for a very long time.

Hugh Ballou

Well, your title for today is Fundraising for Non-Human Causes Without Burnout, and there’s two pieces to this. So, what makes Fundraising for Non-Human Causes different and more challenging?

Katherine Lacefield

So first of all, when I say non-human causes, a lot of people are thinking about AI these days, and that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re really talking about animals, environmental conservation. It’s not the nonprofits that are run by robots or for robots. That’s just to be clear. The thing that makes it different is there’s seeming competition between protecting humans and everything else. And if you’re not protecting humans first, you’re almost seen as an enemy. I’ll tell you a little story just to kind of put this into context. I was fundraising for animal welfare. It was for puppies. So like very accessible animal welfare. It was against puppy mills. And I was on the streets and we were asking people to sign petitions against puppy mills in Quebec. And this man literally stops me on the street, spits on me, I kid you not, spits on me, and says, how dare you be here protecting animals when there are kids dying because of the war in Syria? And so there is this kind of us-versus-them mentality, and I have seen it both external to the animal welfare movement and even inside, of people that care for animals and people who don’t are seen as these opposing sides. And depending on how far you are on that range, there’s a lot of internal conflict. So there’s a lot of differences and challenges in the non-human movement, because people tend to prioritize, yeah, but we need to focus on humans first, without realizing that they’re actually very intimately related. And that’s actually one of the topics that I’ve covered a lot in my own podcast, the Just Because podcast, where I talk about the intersectionalities. But unfortunately, if we think about fundraising, a lot and the majority of funding is attributed to human-focused causes.

Hugh Ballou

So the second part, thank you for that clarification. The second part of the title is Without Burning Out. What’s that about?

Katherine Lacefield

So how many nonprofit leaders do you know that are working seven days a week, mostly working 12 hours a day and not taking any time to self care, not taking any time to take care of themselves and they’re absolutely tired and most of the time they just feel like they’re stuck and they can’t get out of it. So that’s what leads to burnout. They just keep on having these tasks added on, added on, added on, and they don’t have the time to actually set up these systems that would get them out of that hamster wheel of burnout. I’ve seen it time and time again, and let’s be honest, in an animal welfare, animal shelter framework, it’s a very emotional cause. Not saying that there’s other human-focused causes that are not emotional either, but running a library, a nonprofit library, might not have the same emotional toll as when you’re working in an animal shelter and you have to euthanize dogs or cats every single day. So there is also the combination of how do we compensate, I guess, for that emotional turmoil from nonprofits by making the rest of your nonprofit management, including fundraising, as easy as possible.

Hugh Ballou

Whoa, that’s music to their ears. You’re listening or watching the Nonprofit Exchange, and we have a very fascinating topic today. Everybody talks about fundraising, but people struggle with it, and here’s some secrets today to help you get a different mindset. So Katherine, you talk about nonprofits tend to focus inward and forget to share information with their community. We’re doing exciting things, but talk more about that. Why do we do this? And what’s the danger in doing that?

Katherine Lacefield

I think this also ties very well into the burnout ideas. There’s just so many things on our to-do list that we’re focused on the work and we’re not focused on building out the people that are going to support you. And unfortunately, this tends to be very self-destructive of you can’t support your organization if you don’t have a community around you. And you can’t build that community if you’re not taking the effort and time and energy to build up that community. So you’re just going to constantly be in this vicious cycle of no capacity, I’m alone, but then you’re also not taking the time to build those relationships with people around you that can actually come and support your mission. And I would also add this little caveat that I think it’s specifically the case in a lot of animal welfare organizations that there’s very much this like I hate humans type of belief because humans are the ones abusing animals, humans are the ones abandoning. There’s a lot of this toxic mentality. I do think things are changing and I have seen it over the last couple years where people are starting to be more open, more community focused, but I do think that a lot of times people that go into the animal welfare world are not really good with people, so they tend to forget the very human component of nonprofit work, which is talking to your supporters, sending emails, calling them. If you can send a little thank you note, that goes a really long way. And if we’re thinking from a return on investment, the energy you will put into building those relationships is definitely going to come back. I’ve seen it time and time again. But we tend to forget that because we have to do the work today.

Hugh Ballou

We tend to do too much ourselves. So how do we shift from doing the work to inviting people to come experience? Because we do have people who want to volunteer. So there’s an engagement piece. How do we make that mind shift?

Katherine Lacefield

Well, first of all, we have to be willing to accept help. And I think that that is a big difficult thing for a lot of people, especially nonprofit founders that have always done it themselves and they want it done in a specific way. And I can definitely understand that because even as the founder of a consulting firm, like I’m used to doing things my way and I have a system and I’m so efficient. No. At the end of the day, we’re not efficient if we try to do everything ourselves. and we have to start being more open-minded to allowing people in and even if it’s not going to be done like you want it necessarily, that doesn’t mean that that’s bad. It’s probably better to get someone in and to teach them and let them learn on their own pace so that eventually you can hand off that task and it not be perfect than not doing it at all. I’ve seen some people, oh but what are they going to say to donors? Okay. Right now you’re not saying anything to them. Almost anything is better than not saying anything at all. Choose the right people, of course, and you can give some templates and you can have extra support to start them off, but doing something is often better than doing nothing at all when it comes to these things.

Hugh Ballou

I have seen in my 40 years of work with nonprofits some guilt positioning with this kind of fundraising. So how do we shift from that kind of guilt-driven to storytelling, providing evidence that people see the impact of the work, especially when we have our people who can’t talk, our dogs, our cats, they can’t tell the story themselves. So how do we create that story for these great creatures that we’re supporting?

Katherine Lacefield

That’s a great question. And I think, especially in the rescue animal shelter world, we all know, and there’s this, the SPCA Sarah McLachlan video that I’m sure everyone knows about. There was a campaign going on for a long time. Those sad photos of the dogs behind the cages and the nasty conditions, like those like guilt tripping, making people feel bad, those types of ads, unfortunately, they do work. there is a limit to what they do. So often what I tell people is to get someone in the door, you do need to share the reality. I am not saying paint to this rosy picture that is false of like, all of the animals are great, because then people will also think, oh, so you don’t need help. You have to show the transformation. You can’t just focus on the sad sob story, and you can’t just show the happy endings. you need to show that story of transformation, you need to give people that hope and show that it’s by the community showing up, that middle component where the transformation happened, that’s the spark that they can be. And I think a lot of times it’s You have to think about it. You have to think about, oh, this animal’s coming in. I need to start filming, or I need to take pictures. I need to start documenting the situation so that I can show that transformation. But even if you’re not good with a camera, and I’ve seen many people that are really not good with a camera, myself included. I always forget. Telling the story with your words. I just shared this story about a dog that walked into my garage space here in Albania. And I told the story from a very personal perspective. People have been responding so well because we shared the story of she had a broken leg. She had a dislocated shoulder. Her paw was injured. She was alone. No one was going to help her. Brought her to the vet. We got her fixed. We did all this stuff. And now she’s healing. We showed that transformation and all that was needed was 420 euros. And so there’s this sad story. We could have just shared a story of this dog and like, we’re not going to help him until we get the money. Like, we could have done that, which is very guilt focused. But instead, we’re showing like, we did it. We showed up for this animal. Now, will you help us cover the vet bill? And I found that that’s been very successful.

Hugh Ballou

You have said that you’ve identified stewardship as one of the biggest gaps in nonprofits you work with. Why don’t we start by defining stewardship? What does that mean to you?

Katherine Lacefield

So there’s a lot of people that think like recognition and stewardship are the same thing. So when we’re, there is a difference. Recognition is saying thank you. So basically someone makes a donation, they get that thank you receipt that says, thank you so much for your donation. Here’s your tax receipt, and so on. There’s also, you can maybe go a step beyond if you want to have certain high-level donors that you’re sharing on your website, thank you to our major donors. That’s recognition. Stewardship is not really defined around a specific action. It’s just about building a relationship with this donor. And I’ll share this story about Brian. And if he’s listening, Brian is my absolute favorite donor ever. He joined Animals Need Me, the organization that I’m working with in Albania, as a monthly donor. And we just started emailing. I just said, thank you so much. Why are you interested in supporting this organization? And then he started telling me about his dog Toby that he rescued. He’s a photographer at another animal shelter. It wasn’t around his donation anymore. It became about us being interested in who this person was. What we’ve done since, we’re officially friends on Facebook. We talk on an almost like weekly basis about what’s going on in Albania. What’s my experience been as a Canadian living in Albania, working for this shelter. We share stories about rescue. We vent about things that are frustrating. For me, that’s the stewardship versus the recognition. I’m building a friendship and a connection and a relationship with this donor, but also seeing him as a human. And oftentimes I think about it as, you know, your grandmother always tends to send like a check or a $50 bill for your birthday or for Christmas. What are you going to do? Are you going to ignore it? No, you’re going to pick up the phone and say thank you to your grandma and you’re going to have a conversation. You need to start treating your donors as if it’s your grandma sending you $50 every month. Like what would you do to that relationship with them so that they feel like they’re part of a community? So that’s my definition of stewardship.

Hugh Ballou

Well, part of stewardship is we are actually stewards of other people’s money. We’re managing money for other people. So there’s a big gap I see in my years in the communication systems. So let’s talk about the rhythm of communication. Sometimes they only reach out to donors when they want more money. Rather than, I mean, what you talked about is a great example. Now, all the donors aren’t like that and all the donors don’t want that much contact. So how do you figure out a rhythm in communication? How do you figure, I think most of our communication is about the work. It goes away from money to the results of the work and why it’s important. Then when you come back around to the money conversation, people understand what’s happened with their money before. So talk about the rhythm and the communication system and why that’s so crucial.

Katherine Lacefield

Yes, so just to come back to Brian, I have never asked him to donate again. And yet he donates all the time because we built that relationship and that’s because we constantly share the impact. So from a cadence perspective, that really depends on each organization. It really depends on what you’ve been historically doing and what you can realistically keep up with. It’s better to keep a regular cadence that you can keep up in the long term than to start sending a whole bunch of emails and then ghost them for a couple months because you can’t keep up. You can also automate a lot of these things to make it like, okay, you have some time during the summer. Probably not if you’re an animal shelter, but if you’re another organization, maybe you have more time in the summer. Why don’t you write 12 stories of really impactful things that have happened in the last year and schedule them once a month for the rest of the year. Obviously, you can always come back and update them, but at least you’re just sharing stories. There doesn’t even have to be a fundraising ask, just sharing stories of impact. So those are some ideas. I would say at least once a month, a touch base with your donors and your audience is a good pace to follow. And if you can increase that to twice a month, I would say that that is a good amount of communications to have. And sprinkling in some very subtle, support our work, within those stories is fine, but making it so that people don’t feel like every single email you’re sending out is going to be an ask for money is really important or else they are going to stop opening your emails altogether.

Hugh Ballou

Yeah, we tend to be on both sides of that. Either ask too much or don’t ask enough. We’re not specific about what’s going on. So the first three letters of fundraising are fun. You talk about putting the fun back in fundraising. Tell us what that looks like.

Katherine Lacefield

Okay, I’m going to share this very fun story, or at least in my opinion, I think it’s fun. So you know those annoying people, as people tend to call them, that are on the streets and they say, hey, do you have two minutes to talk about Greenpeace or Amnesty International or World Vision or whatever organization? I did that for five years, okay? It’s a very difficult job. It’s very emotionally demanding. You have to be on and happy all the time. And some people say, oh my God, I would never be able to do that. I was a team leader and I made it fun and here’s an example of what I mean by that. So we were collecting one-time donations in cash and in credit card on the spot as well as monthly gifts. So what I did with my team, it was summer, we went to the dollar store and we bought these little funny felt hats. There was a pig, there was a bee, there was a bear, silly hats. And the only way that you could remove your hat and give it to someone else was if you got a donation. And so when we approached people on the street and we were like, you see this stupid hat? Let’s be honest, I look absolutely ridiculous. Well, I have a challenge today by my team leader. And if you make a donation today, it doesn’t matter what amount, any donation, you can choose who we’re going to give the hat to next. People loved it. They laughed, they got engaged, they were excited about choosing who they’re going to give the hat to, and it removed the question around the donation and it made it about the fun of the action. Now, did we end up having a conversation about where the money is going? Yes. Did we have an insightful follow-up conversation, yes. But did it make the ask around the funds a lot easier? Yes. And was it fun? Hell yes. So that’s what I mean by bringing fun to fundraising. It’s gamifying, if possible, the process.

Hugh Ballou

So you have seen a lot of mistakes and missteps. What are some of the common mistakes in fundraising, and what should organizations do instead?

Katherine Lacefield

[Brief connection issue.] Did you lose me for a second?

Hugh Ballou

Just for a second.

Katherine Lacefield

Okay, we’re good.

Hugh Ballou

Did you hear my question?

Katherine Lacefield

No, sorry. I think my internet just logged out for a second.

Hugh Ballou

It was just a brief blip. So folks, we record live, so you’re getting this live. So what are some of the common mistakes people make, and what should they do instead?

Katherine Lacefield

In fundraising in particular? I would say a lot of them, a lot of organizations that I work with just do not talk about their fundraising enough, or they talk about it too much. There is, it is like always one extreme, like you’re saying, but the number of organizations that I work with where I go onto their website and I say, where’s your donation button? It is there on the side. There’s our PayPal email. No one is looking for that. You have to make your fundraising easy. We are in competition with Uber and click this and do that and everything is done for you on all of our phone applications. This is what we’re competing with in the nonprofit sector. So you need to make your fundraising process easy, smooth, and easy, and fun, and make people think about things. So making your donation page accessible, not make it be three scroll pages long of questions that you’re asking your donors, and why not get interested in them? Hey, what’s inspiring you to donate today? Then you’re showing that you’re interested in them as a person. So not making the process clear enough is probably one of the biggest things that I think organizations make as a mistake.

Hugh Ballou

Love it, love it. So people can find your website. It’s justbecause.consulting. What will they find when they get there?

Katherine Lacefield

So I do have my podcast. If you look in the top menu, you do have the podcast where you can find my own episodes, mostly focused around fundraising. I do talk about my services, which I do grant funding or requests, and related services. And the blog has a few articles. I am building that up, but I would say there should be a pop-up that you would probably be very interested in, which is called Donor Lingo. If you scroll down a bit, you should have it pop up. Donor Lingo is a 30-day, I don’t know why it’s not showing up on your page, but anyways. It’s a 30 day stewardship challenge where you get daily prompts to get you involved in stewardship in a very easy way. So it’s kind of like Duolingo, but for donor stewardship. So you get 10 to 15 minute prompts every day directly by email that’ll help you build up that habit of talking to your donors and building those relationships.

Hugh Ballou

That’s your consistent message. Talk to your donors. Hey, let’s have a little bit of fun here. Let’s do some rapid fire questions. Is that okay?

Katherine Lacefield

Let’s do it.

Hugh Ballou

Of course. So, um, one word fundraiser should use more often.

Katherine Lacefield

One word. Hmm. I would say, no, thank you is too easy. I would say community, really inviting people to join your community of donors, making them feel like they’re part of a community and not just saying thank you for your donation. That’s boring.

Hugh Ballou

And what word should they use less often?

Katherine Lacefield

Please stop using the word, please. I feel like people, sorry.

Hugh Ballou

No, that’s good. What’s the most underused communication channel?

Katherine Lacefield

Email.

Hugh Ballou

What’s a fundraising myth that needs to go away?

Katherine Lacefield

There’s not enough money out there. Ooh.

Hugh Ballou

And last, what does conscious philanthropy mean to you?

Katherine Lacefield

Conscious philanthropy means that we are working all together in the nonprofit sector. We need to stop this competition between us and learn that by working together, we can solve all the problems. We just have to stop all the infighting.

Hugh Ballou

Katherine, you’ve been a great guest today. You’ve given us a lot of useful information. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve been doing this for a long time. And you have such a fun spirit about you. It takes away the fear of the topic of fundraising. So what’s your last thought you want to leave people with?

Katherine Lacefield

Fundraising can be fun if you start seeing it as an invitation for people to invest in the world they want to see instead of you asking for money. So shift your perspective and you’ll see it makes a big difference.

Hugh Ballou

You heard it right here on the Nonprofit Exchange. Katherine, thank you for being my guest today.

Katherine Lacefield

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.