Career Pitfalls For Fundraisers
Seth Godin posted a rant last week on the US Congress, and offered this list of elected official behaviors to avoid in pursuing any career.
Agitator friend Caity Craver thought this wasn’t a bad list for nonprofit fundraisers to think about.
- In all things, look for money first. Listen to people with money, respond to people with money, justify your actions around money.
- Embrace the fact that you don’t know what you’re talking about. Aspire to run systems you don’t understand.
- Compromise over the important issues, but dig in and fight forever over trivia.
- Along those lines: focus obsessively on the short run. Even though you are virtually assured of re-election, define the long term as “before the next election.”
- Take months off from your day job (with pay) to actively campaign for a better job.
- Blame the system, the other side and your predecessors for the fact that you are not taking brave, independent action.
- Avoid developing independent thought and analysis. Focus on parroting the work of lobbyists and the party line.
- When given the choice between being on television or doing hard work, pick television.
When a difficult problem shows up, duck. - Try mightily to outlast passionate resistance by quietly ignoring it and waiting for it to go away.
My favorite is #3.
What do you think?
Tom
And thinking about #6 — taking brave independent action — for you direct response fundraisers, perhaps nothing requires more courage than setting out to ‘beat the control’. Roger’s moderating a webinar that will present a new approach and tool for pre-testing packages, developed by DonorVoice. Seats in the February 9th Direct Mail Testing Webinar are going fast. Agitator Readers can register here FREE.
One response to “Career Pitfalls For Fundraisers”
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I think this is absolutely wonderful! 🙂