Your Fundraising Problem Isn’t a Fundraising Problem

is the founder of Expert Fundraising and creator of the Donor Alignment Methodology. With more than two decades of experience in nonprofit leadership, development, and executive roles, he helps organizations clarify their message, strengthen leadership, and build meaningful donor relationships. Through advising, teaching, and speaking, Alex equips nonprofit leaders to invite donors into a shared vision and turn organizational alignment into sustained support.

 

The Interview Summary

What if your fundraising challenges reveal something deeper about how your organization leads?

In this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange, Hugh Ballou welcomes Alex Morrison to explore why stalled campaigns, disengaged boards, and uncomfortable donor conversations often point to gaps in leadership, clarity, and alignment. Alex’s central insight: fundraising reveals leadership rather than creating it.

Drawing on more than two decades of nonprofit experience, Alex explains how to approach donors as partners in creating a shared future. He explores the difference between a board that agrees with a plan and one that takes ownership of specific commitments—and offers practical ways to move from polite approval to meaningful action.

The conversation also examines how fear and scarcity influence donor meetings, why listening matters more than delivering a perfect presentation, and what leaders can learn from a donor’s “no.” Alex shares a simple preparation practice to help fundraisers enter conversations with greater awareness and confidence.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• How to look beneath the presenting fundraising problem.
• Why board agreement does not always produce alignment or action.
• How to turn board support into specific, time-bound commitments.
• What a donor’s “no” can reveal about timing, trust, and fit.
• How honest communication and consistent follow-through strengthen fundability.

Alex’s invitation to nonprofit leaders is clear: help donors see what they could become part of. That shift begins with telling the truth—to yourself, your team, and the people who support your mission.

Learn more about Alex’s work and resources at ExpertFundraising.org.

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Today’s episode of The Nonprofit Exchange is about fundraising. It’s called Your Fundraising Problem Isn’t a Fundraising Problem. Fundraising reveals leadership rather than creating it. A stalled campaign, a disengaged board, or an uncomfortable donor conversation may reveal deeper patterns in how an organization practices trust, clarity, shared commitment, and accountability. This conversation helps leaders identify what is underneath the presenting problem and invite donors into meaningful participation. This is The Nonprofit Exchange. I’m Hugh Ballou, founder of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. Today, we’re exploring a challenge that’s familiar to almost every nonprofit leader. We need to raise more money. But what if the fundraising difficulty is where a deeper leadership story becomes visible?

Our title today, as a reminder, is Your Fundraising Problem Isn’t a Fundraising Problem. My guest, Alex Morrison, asks leaders to examine what they’ve been practicing long before they enter a donor conversation. Fear or trust, scarcity or abundance, urgency or commitment. We’ll explore what those patterns reveal, why board agreement does not always produce action, and how to help donors see what they could become part of. Alex Morrison is the founder of Expert Fundraising and creator of the Donor Alignment Methodology, which he’ll tell you about. He brings more than two decades of experience in nonprofit leadership, development, and executive roles. His work connects organizational messaging, leadership presence, and fundraising systems to help nonprofit leaders build stronger donor relationships.

He advises organizations, teaches courses, and speaks on fundraising and leadership. So Alex, welcome to the Nonprofit Exchange and tell us what experiences led you to recognize that fundraising reveals leadership rather than creating it. Can you take us into a moment when that became clear?

Alex Morrison

Thanks, Hugh, for having me today. I’m happy to be here. Yeah, for me, what I came to see is that so often we need to raise more money, but the money itself is a lagging indicator. And really what we’re needing to pay attention to here is what are we acting on? How are we behaving before we even get into those conversations? And I really started to see that over thousands of donor conversations where I would step into a conversation and donors would be asking really critical questions about the strategy and the plan. Those meetings are actually the place where what gets revealed is everything we’ve done beforehand.

The donor conversations illuminate all the work that we did ahead of time to think about the strategy, to address the breakdowns, to align the team. Those are the kind of things that I’ve come to see over time really impact the donor conversation much more than perhaps we’re aware of.

Hugh Ballou

So when a leader comes to you and says, I have a fundraising problem, what do you want to know before you answer that?

Alex Morrison

Yeah. I think when they say that, what they really mean is we need more money. But really what I want to understand is what’s going on underneath that? And what does the problem really mean in numbers? I think there’s a quantitative assessment we can look at, which is, are you talking about you have fewer donors? Are you talking about smaller donations? Are asks not happening or the CRM itself isn’t producing the right kind of reports, but we also need to look at some of the qualitative pieces as well like who’s asking, what are we saying in those meetings, right, can you take the executive director, the board chair, and another staff member, and ask all three of them to describe the impact you’re trying to have in the future?

Can they describe it in the same way? And other things I want to look at is what happened in your last three asks? How did the donor respond? How did you respond? And what are you afraid of happening if the donor says no? These are the kind of things that we start to look at that really help us to uncover how to create better relationships with donors and ultimately more gifts.

Hugh Ballou

I want to highlight the word relationships. That’s kind of the base of it all, isn’t it?

Alex Morrison

It is. And I think sometimes even that word can get a little confusing. I have a relationship with my wife. I have a relationship with my dentist. These relationships actually are really different. What’s interesting in a fundraising relationship is it’s actually in some ways unique. It’s about a shared commitment to creating a future that doesn’t exist yet. And so when we can approach those relationships in that way, then we can actually even shift how we show up in those donor conversations. Very often I run into folks, many people who are raising money, they don’t come from a certain class. And so they have a relationship to money and power that, stops them from having conversations with people who have capacity and means.

And what I help people to see is ultimately, you have commitment, capacity to deliver, the donors bring wisdom, they bring money, they bring relationships, and you’re really peers in creating this future. And so that’s, I think, an important distinction for people when they’re talking about what kind of relationships are we building here.

Hugh Ballou

That’s a lot of wisdom. And, we sometimes get in the trap of thinking of donors like an ATM machine, when it’s really what you’re talking about that really drives for a lasting ongoing process that’s going to be supportive. They get to support the work that we do and we get to change lives together. Does that make sense?

Alex Morrison

Absolutely. And I think what, when I think about fundraising, it’s donors aren’t buying a widget. And yet they are investing in something. And so part of this relationship is actually the need to bring back to the donors, the impact that you’re creating in the world, because it’s really, they’re actually, they’re asking you to do something more than give you money here. They’re actually asking you to hold their commitment. It’s their commitment to creating a future that they themselves can’t necessarily do themselves. They don’t have the on-the-ground means to produce the result they want to see So when they give you money, they’re saying: can you help me fulfill this commitment i have in the future And when those commitments align that’s when they give you money so part of the relationship is actually bringing back to them not just the results you produce, not just the goals of this many programs or this many people, but also what changes in the people who took our programs.

And then, who do they become out in the world? What impact do they create because they experienced our programs? And that impact really ends up being almost your mission in action. It’s what’s moving you towards your shared vision. And that’s what you want to be feeding back to people. That’s the exchange in the relationship is they get to see that impact because it’s really their impact too.

Hugh Ballou

Wow, that’s so much. I want to unpack a little bit of that. That’s a whole lot of wisdom. And that speaks volumes to people that tell me, and I’ve heard this for 40 years, Alex, oh, I hate asking for money. Well, that’s not what we’re doing. You just defined it: you’re helping somebody achieve a greater purpose they cannot do themselves. So we become partners in delivering impact. We also tend to speak about how we do things or what we do, rather than why it’s important and what the results are. Would you highlight that a minute? Because that’s part of what you said.

Alex Morrison

So much of what makes for an organization being able to receive funds, to be fundable, in the words that you like to use, and I love those words, is really about getting really clear about, first, the future we’re committed to creating. What does that really look like? And then we want to then from there kind of design backwards, the strategy we have to achieve that? And so we want to be clear, what will we achieve in quantifiable and qualitative terms over the next 12–18 months? That’s an indicator that can tell us we’re pointed in the direction to achieve what we want.

And when we can get that message really clear, then it’s actually something we can bring to donors and explore if it’s aligned with who they are and the commitments they have. So the messaging ends up being a very important component before you’re in a conversation with a donor.

Hugh Ballou

Another huge moment of wisdom here. So if you’re watching this, listening to this, go back to the transcript. You’ll find these words here. Those address, Alex, those address so many of the paradigm problems and the leadership paralysis and the inherited weaknesses in leadership and the systems that we’ve had generation after generation. That is a paradigm shift. we’re partnering with people who have earned money, who want to hold on to it, but they want to make sure that it’s purposed well, and we’re having a conversation together. This is so very helpful. So, we’re talking about the leadership and the alignment, and this is a subset of that, but When you see signs that there’s a leadership or alignment gap in the leaders, the skills, capacities, or the systems, walk us through an example of an organization that addressed these issues, and how did their donor conversations change?

Alex Morrison

Look, so much of this is about alignment, but there also can be the challenges of we don’t necessarily have the skills yet or the team capacity to do that. So it’s not so simple that it’s one or the other. Often it’s a little bit of both. So I think what’s important is to investigate these very things. I was a development director for many, many years and also executive director. So I’ve been in the room asking for money. Now I teach people how to do that. And I have a client right now who, when they came to me, they were really struggling with how to tell their story.

They’d raised about $50,000. They had about seven donors. And so the question we were looking at is, What’s in the way of growing this and so first we started to look at, is it skills and systems, is it that you want to ask but you don’t know how is it that you don’t have a list, and you’re not doing any follow up, those kind of things are totally learnable and are able to be systematized, which is really what we want to do? It’s if the story’s not clear, but people aren’t making time to engage the donors, that’s something we want to pay attention to at a system level.

So we started to look at that for this organization, who’s asking for money? How often are we asking for money? Are we paying attention to donor relationships? And then there’s questions about alignment, which is, people know what to do, but they’re not doing it. Or they had this campaign they would do every year, and so many organizations, especially this time of year, are doing another end-of-year campaign. And so, is the campaign stalling every year? Now, that could be a systems question, but very often it’s an alignment question where you, in this particular instance with this organization, the board was behind the campaign, but then the board wasn’t actually taking actions to support the campaign.

To me, that was really an alignment issue. Where the leader’s stories are changing from person to person, or the leaders can nod their head. So often, what was happening with these folks is they’d go to a board meeting, the board would say, yes, let’s do this campaign, and everybody would be nodding their head. But when it came time to call certain donors, no one was taking action. And to me, that’s an alignment issue more than it is a systems issue.

Hugh Ballou

Oh, it’s so true. So true. I think before we went live, we were talking about we become what we practice or something like that. So how do fear, scarcity, and constant urgency show up in a donor conversation, even when the words sound right? How do we minimize our ask by our internal scripts?

Alex Morrison

What I see happen time and again is if it’s an email to a donor, you’re adding that extra paragraph to try to explain everything. Or if it’s a conversation with a donor, you’re really speaking the whole time, not listening, not really taking time to understand what the donor cares about. For many years, I resisted using a donor deck because I thought it was a crutch. But then I came to see it actually can be a useful guide to help me navigate a conversation. The shadow side of that is sometimes, and this happened to me early in my career, I thought, ‘I just have to get through this deck.’ If I can walk them through every slide, they’ll understand everything.

But really what that was, was fear. I was afraid of the questions they might ask me. I was afraid of places where we hadn’t fulfilled what we told them last year and we didn’t talk about it with them. So it’s those kinds of behaviors where we end up overexplaining or not really listening, not actually creating a space for donors to really ask us questions, especially the ones over a breakdown. So often we want to avoid talking to a donor about where we didn’t hit our goals, but really there’s gold in that. So those kinds of things, I think, are examples of how fear and scarcity can show up.

And there’s some simple things we can do, actually, to work on that. And as I was touching on earlier, we’re working on a shared commitment with this donor. So before we even get into the donor meeting, one of the simple things people can practice, because as we said, we become what we practice, is for the five minutes before a donor call, for the first couple minutes, I reflect on what does this donor care about? What is important to them, and really tune into that. And then for the next couple minutes, I ask myself, what’s speaking in me right now, to just become present to how I’m feeling, what I’m concerned about, and just notice what’s going on.

And, we talked about in the work I do about centering, but centering isn’t a soft skill about breathing and paying attention to your body. It’s actually noticing what kind of messages I’m carrying before I step into a donor meeting.

Hugh Ballou

If they’re paying attention, they can see those nonverbal messages. So you talked about the polite nodding that we get from a board. They do nodding and they go home and do nodding. So how do we turn that politeness into commitment as a leader?

Alex Morrison

Approval looks a lot like nodding, a unanimous vote, ‘Great plan.’ But commitment looks like someone putting their own name on it that lives in time or money. And so for me, it’s really about getting clear, how would I like this board to participate? And then it’s simple requests. Many boards don’t want to ask for money, and that’s totally fine. Not everybody needs to ask for money. But the real thing I want my board to do is to be able to hold the invitation of the organization. Can they speak to what means something to them and why they’re involved and create a space for a donor to share that too?

So I’m looking for real commitments that live in time. So I ask questions what will you personally do about this before the next time we meet? Or what part of this plan would you be proud to explain to a friend? And if they say the part of the plan that they’d be proud to explain to a friend, then I’d ask them, great, which three friends will you speak to about this in the next two weeks? And so having like a real commitment that lives in time, and then you get to be their accountability buddy? Like they’re adults, they can do their promise or not.

It’s not my job to shame or blame them. But I do want to create a container to support them fulfilling on that. So after the meeting, when you get them to commit to something, you send them their commitment as a reminder, here’s what you said you’d do in case they didn’t write it down. And then you check in with them. Is there anything that you need to fulfill on this commitment? And then when it comes time for their deadline, as it were, the due date for when they said they’d fulfill this thing, check in with them again? And it’s really just about being in a supportive relationship.

But again, it needs to be specific and live in time. That’s how we get them to move from nodding yes to taking action.

Hugh Ballou

Specific and time-bound. So here’s the big elephant in the room. Leaders and maybe the board members are afraid of the no. How do we deal with the no and what do we learn from that?

Alex Morrison

Well, no can mean lots of things. I’d like to look at no as information. Is it not now, not this project, not this amount of money, not me asking? I had a situation when I used to be executive director where there was a funder who had been giving us like $25,000 every year for five years. And they came to this donor gratitude event and they seemed really excited about this big project with a much bigger budget. And so we asked for a meeting. And then I had the meeting with the donors and I’m explaining to them what was going on about the project.

And they’re not just nodding, they’re sharing wisdom and reflecting, having deep questions. And when I got to the ask and I asked them for money, they fell silent. And then they said, we’re not sure this is for us. And I thought to myself, what went wrong here? Because they seemed totally invested in this the whole time. So I said to them, all right, well, they said they want to think about it. I said, great, we’ll follow up in a couple weeks. I went back to the team and I asked the team, you all were there at this donor gratitude event.

Did anybody talk to them? And the program director for this new program had spoken to them in depth, and we got to explore a little bit about what they shared, and I realized, oh, they trust him to fulfill on this promise. It wasn’t me that they were looking to to understand. So we brought the program director into the next meeting, and he got to share more about the program, and he got to be the one who invited them to participate. I still asked for the money, but by the time we got to the ask, they were already in because the “no” in that situation was “not me as the asker”.

I think that, as I said earlier, people aren’t just giving us money. They’re asking us to fulfill on a promise that they share. And so very often, we want to investigate, what does the no mean, really?

Hugh Ballou

And it might not be a no forever, is what I heard you say.

Alex Morrison

It may not be a no forever. Sometimes it’s not now. So often we can hear no and we go, oh, what did I do wrong? But it could just be this is not the season for them. I was just in a conversation the other day where a donor wanted to give, but now they’re saving up to buy a house because they’re having a baby. We have to come to understand what’s really going on for this donor to really understand what the no is. And usually the no doesn’t mean no never. Very often it’s rare that donors are going to take a meeting with you and when they say no they mean no never.

When I hear no, then I want to ask more questions. I want to stay curious in that moment. And those questions can be well, what would you need to see to get behind this project? Or what isn’t working for you? Or what’s that old treasure map question? What would you need to see to make a transformational gift for this? Right? So it’s asking more questions, staying curious, not getting deflated in that moment. And that’s really where alignment and leadership show up in that moment for myself as the asker.

Hugh Ballou

You weren’t defensive; you were probing, asking open-ended questions. So, ask open-ended questions and listen carefully to the answers, is what I heard you say. So, I talked to you about my latest book about fundability. In my work, fundraising is an activity and fundability is an organizational condition. How does your focus on alignment help leaders strengthen that condition before they even go out for an ask?

Alex Morrison

Yeah. I think alignment is the internal part of that condition. It’s whether people inside the organization can agree on the future. Do we trust each other? Can each of us carry the invitation in a particular way? And when we show up in those conversations, a funder can feel that in a single meeting. So it’s really about, conditions in my experience, they’re built from practices. I don’t think you can install fundability in an organization. But you practice your way into it, you keep promises, you tell the truth about what isn’t working, and you help the board come to be partners in being able to speak powerfully about the work.

Hugh Ballou

Expertfundraising.org is your website. I’m going to show it to people who are on video. For people who are not on video, tell them what they’re going to find when they go to expertfundraising.org. There’s a good-looking picture of a guy in blue there, but besides that.

Alex Morrison

Besides that, on that homepage there, I have a free course called the Foundations of Donor Alignment, where I get into more of the philosophy underpinning this. But, again, it’s about practice. And so even in that course, I walk you through how to apply that philosophy to a donor conversation. So you can really practice this. We just practice over and over again, each time becomes better. There’s also a bunch of free resources, clips from videos, workshops I’ve done. I really want people to see this new approach about how we relate to donors and then to learn and make it their own.

Because you need to be able to say it, always being authentically yourself while understanding how to speak to the listening of this particular donor.

Hugh Ballou

And it says get in touch so people can message you because, you’ve given us a lot of wisdom. People are going to want to know where to find you and how to have conversations with you. We’re just touching on the volumes that Alex. Let’s have a little fun as we’re nearing the end of our session today. This went fast. How about a few rapid fire questions with short answers? Give us one fundraising assumption you would invite leaders to reconsider.

Alex Morrison

Donors don’t need to be convinced; they actually already care. And then your job is to find out where they care.

Hugh Ballou

Wow. One sign a board is aligned?

Alex Morrison

Your board members start to bring you names of people without being asked.

Hugh Ballou

One habit to practice before a donor meeting.

Alex Morrison

Sit in silence for a couple minutes and ask yourself, what’s speaking through me right now?

Hugh Ballou

So what’s a question that helps a donor feel like they’ve been heard?

Alex Morrison

There’s a lot of juicy ones, but one short one, Hugh, is what do you hope changes in the world because of what you gave?

Hugh Ballou

Really good answers with a few words. So as a final question, what’s one thing you want a nonprofit leader listening today to do differently before their next donor conversation?

Alex Morrison

Tell the truth early to yourself and the team, especially about what’s not working.

Hugh Ballou

Alex, thank you for helping us learn. I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve learned some new things today, and even reframing the things that I thought I heard. So, for our listeners and our viewers, take one question from today into your next leadership or board conversation. Identify the pattern you want to change, agree on one action, and decide who will follow through. And you help them do that. So you can learn more about Alex Morrison at expertfundraising.org. Alex, it’s been delightful. Thank you for being on the Nonprofit Exchange today.

Alex Morrison

Thank you so much, Hugh. It’s been a pleasure.