There is one little word that can have a profound impact on your fundraising and it might not be the word you had in mind. "Reframe." The formal definition is, “a way of viewing and experiencing events, ideas, concepts and emotions to find more positive alternatives.”
We tell ourselves thoughts all day long. This idea is genius, this plan is awful, this donor is driving me crazy, this visit has me nervous.
After reading many articles, I learned the stories we create around a particular circumstance are far more predictive of our success than the circumstance itself. These stories affect not only our willingness to act, but the quality of our ideas and solutions. Research shows our brains have a strong tendency toward negativity, leading most of us to create stories in the face of uncertainty that are more likely to paralyze, to stunt creativity and progress, than to fuel action. Some of this research is based on a concept called Appreciative Intelligence (AI), which is “the ability that allows people like those to take new or challenging circumstances and turn them into golden opportunities and enriching experiences.” Reframing is a key component of AI, where it has the ability to “perceive the positive inherent generative potential within the present.”
Reframing is a process that asks us to suspend negative storylines and to explore the outcomes we tell ourselves. Most of the time, we believe the story’s outcome is the only one, but we could imagine a different ending and frame a new storyline that empowers us to experience an uncertain circumstance not as cause for failure and inaction, but as a sign for meaning and opportunity. As with many things in life, it’s one thing to know it and another to practice it.
A personal experience brought this lesson home. A friend who had cancer a few years ago got news of a recurrence. After hearing the news and being depressed because he thought he had been cancer-free, he had to deal with the reality of it. One doctor told him that his medical team was still optimistic for a cure, which while good news overall, didn’t really put his mind at ease. It wasn’t until another doctor told him that while he wasn’t cancer-free, he had been asymptomatic for several years and with this change in treatment he might be asymptomatic for another five, ten, or twenty years. The point being that this doctor reframed the topic of curing in such a way that my friend was not only able to accept, but to embrace his future in a way he hadn’t seen before.
If we can use reframing to deal with a serious health issue, why can’t we use it in our daily experiences, and specifically with our donors? Sometimes focusing on our fundraising goals can be debilitating. There are many things we have no control over. We never know how a call or visit will go and no one likes to be told no. But, a "no" today does not mean a "no" for tomorrow. If your disabling storyline is around the risk of failure, instead of just creating a negative scenario, also ask “how will I recover, what if I do nothing, what if I succeed?” Then build new stories around those questions. If we take every visit and call and reframe it to find the positive in that conversation, we can create a story where we envision how a successful future unfolds from the present. Our next call or visit could look very different from the last one.
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