The Human Factor in Fundraising

Welcome to this edition of the Click and Pledge's fundraising command center podcast, where we talk the why, the what, and the how in the Click and Pledge's ecosystem.

And we are, really excited to continue our the why series. This is all about educating our customers and really the public too on how to be genuinely effective fundraisers.

Today we're taking a deep dive into a really unexpected place. We're going to connect the, well, the very rigid safety protocols of technical scuba diving with nonprofit strategies.

Sounds a little strange at first, I know.

It does, but when one of our team members, our CEO, actually brought this up, the parallels were just, I mean, they were instant.

That's right. He's an avid diver and he took this class called the human diver with Gareth Locke. And Gareth is a real expert in this field and he offered eye opening angle on failure.

On why things fail.

Exactly. It's all about what they call human factors. Basically understanding how people and, you know, by extension, entire organizations, how they fail when they're under pressure.

And the connection was just so clear. The principles that keep a diver alive hundreds of feet underwater, they're the exact same principles that keep a nonprofit solvent and healthy.

It's kind of a shortcut really.

It is. You don't need to get wet to understand how brains work or maybe more importantly how they malfunction when things get stressful.

So our mission for this deep dive is to explore four key concepts from that human factors perspective. We really suggest that if you can integrate these ideas, you can stop just fixing broken campaigns and start building truly resilient systems.

Okay. So let's unpack this. The first concept, it sort of tackles the biggest, let's say, political hurdle in talking about failure. Yeah. It's this idea of the incident pit versus the bad luck myth.

Right. And this is where we learn the difference between what we're calling the shark and the silt.

Okay.

In diving, it's actually really rare for a diver to get, you know, taken out by one single massive catastrophic event.

Like a shark attack or something.

Exactly. That makes for a great movie, but it's not the reality. The reality is what's called the incident pit.

That sounds pretty ominous.

It is, but the key thing is it's predictable. It's a slow compounding sequence of small individual problems. You know, they all layer on top of each other until they become fatal.

So not one big thing?

Never one big thing, it's maybe a diver's mask fogs up a little, and they're distracted by a new camera, and then they're a little bit cold and then they realize they missed a navigation marker.

Oh, okay.

See, no single one of those is dangerous, but altogether that sequence is what drags them down into the pit.

And that is exactly what we see in the nonprofit world. There's this, this desire to blame failure on the big, singular external monster, the shark. Right. And just to be clear, you know, we love sharks. They're great animals.

We don't want to demonize them. But in this metaphor, they represent that big perceived external threat.

The easy explanation.

The easy explanation. Our year end appeal failed because the economy crashed or a competitor got all the media attention. It's always some big external villain.

But we suggest failure is almost never the shark, it's the silt.

The silt.

Yeah, it's the sequence of small ignored internal messes that you just let build up. It's that classic Swiss cheese model.

Where all the little holes line up.

Exactly. Your processes are the slices of cheese, success is when they're solid, but failure. Failure is when all those little holes, the minor flaws you ignored in each process, when they all align, the problem gets right through.

Okay, let's make that really specific for a nonprofit. What does that kind of silt look like?

Well, the nonprofit version of the incident pit is something like the database wasn't properly cleaned six months ago. That's problem A. A little bit of silt.

Right. Then maybe the appeal went out a day late because of last minute copy changes. That's problem b.

And then problem c is the donation page wasn't properly tested on mobile phones.

Exactly. And none of those things sync the campaign on their own?

Not at all. But when you combine them, suddenly the whole campaign is underwater. And it had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with the shark.

The lesson there, we suggest, is to stop looking for that big external shark to blame.

And start cleaning up the small internal messes. The silt. You have to make those messes visible before they combine and drag you down.

That is a perfect transition actually. Because cleaning up that silt, it takes time, it takes bandwidth, which leads right into our second concept, task loading and the tunnel vision it creates.

This is such a fascinating piece of human psychology. In diving, if you ask a diver to do too many things at once, like navigate, take photos, and control their buoyancy all at the same time, their brain gets overloaded.

It's just too much to process.

Way too much. And the brain's response is to create a cognitive tunnel. It prioritizes what it thinks is the most important task, maybe taking that perfect photo, and it literally starts to ignore everything else.

Even the important stuff.

Especially the important stuff like their air gauge. They will stop seeing that they are running low on air because their brain has filtered it out as a low priority signal.

Wow. And we do this to our staff all the time. We hire one development director, a unicorn really, and we ask them to manage grants, plan the gala, do social media, and meet with major donors.

All at once, they become completely task loaded.

Oh, as a result.

The exact same tunnel vision. They get hyper focused on the immediate visible crisis, the gala that's next month because the board is watching. And they start neglecting the essential long term tasks.

And what's the non profit equivalent of the air gauge? What's the thing that gets ignored first when that tunnel vision kicks in?

It's always donor stewardship. Always. The personalized thank you calls, the relationship building, the data hygiene, the things that ensure long term survival.

The oxygen for the organization.

That's a perfect way to put it. They trade that long term oxygen for short term survival because the brain is just too overwhelmed to see it.

So what's the fix? You know, for a small nonprofit that can't just hire three more people.

Yeah. That's the real challenge. And the answer isn't try harder. We suggest you have to deliberately reduce the task load. You have to radically simplify and prioritize.

So you choose not to do something.

Exactly. Maybe you accept that you can't run a gala, a peer to peer campaign, and a major gifts program all at the same time with a small team. You pick one, you resource it fully, and you pull your team out of that tunnel before they run out of air or, you know, cash.

That connection is so powerful. And it leads perfectly into our third concept, which is how those short term cuts become permanent problems. It's called the normalization of deviance.

Or as we call it, the slow drift into failure. This one is. Mhmm. It's really insidious because it starts so small.

How small?

Imagine a really skilled diver. They're running a bit late one day, so they skip their full safety check just once. And what happens?

Nothing. The dive is fine.

Exactly. Nothing bad happens. They get away with it. So a month later, do it again. And slowly, that unsafe practice skipping a core safety check, it just becomes the new normal.

They've drifted into a new unsafe standard without even realizing it.

They've completely redefined what safe means. And this happens constantly in fundraising. A nonprofit gets busy, they stop sending personalized thank you notes. They just use the automated email receipt.

And it feels fine at first. Donations don't immediately drop off a cliff.

Right. And because they got away with it, because there was no immediate negative consequence, they justify stopping them entirely. They have now normalized a deviation from a best practice that is fundamental to loyalty.

So what does that crash look like? Because donor retention is a lagging indicator, right? The impact isn't felt right away.

No, the crash comes maybe a year, maybe two years later, and it's devastating because it feels like it came out of nowhere. Your retention rate just silently plummets because you slowly eroded the foundation of loyalty donor by donor.

You're drifting into failure that whole time.

That whole The takeaway we recommend is to treat every core procedure. Your data entry, your communications, your stewardship. Treat it like a non negotiable safety check.

Just because you got away with skipping it once doesn't mean it's safe.

Never.

This all brings us to the final piece, which is really about culture. We've talked about processes and individual capacity, but now let's talk about the organizational safety valve, psychological safety.

And the idea of thumbing the dive.

What does that mean?

In technical diving, giving the thumb up signal means end the dive. Now.

In what?

Immediately. And the most important role is that anyone on the team, no matter how junior, can thumb the dive at any time for any reason.

No questions asked.

No questions asked. No shame. No penalty. It's the ultimate safety valve to protect the entire team from a catastrophe that maybe only one person sees coming.

So the critical question we have to ask is

Yeah.

Does your nonprofit have a thumb the dive culture?

Think about this scenario. A junior gift officer runs the numbers. They know for a fact that the fundraising goal the board just set is mathematically impossible. It's based on bad assumptions.

Okay.

They know that chasing it will lead to burnout and guaranteed failure. But the whole team is excited, the ED is on board, can that junior person stand up and say stop this isn't realistic we need to abort this plan.

Or will they be labeled as negative or not a team player? Will they worry about their job?

That's it. That fear of penalty is what stops people from raising the alarm before it's too late. We suggest that if your team can't safely call off a bad idea, the organization will eventually drown in it. Psychological safety isn't a nice to have.

It's a critical safety system.

It's everything.

So what an incredible framework. Let's just let's quickly recap these four human factors we've translated. First, avoid the incident pit.

Right. Stop looking for the external shark and start cleaning the internal silt.

Second manage task loading to prevent that dangerous tunnel vision.

Which means reducing scope not just yelling at people to work harder.

Third you have to actively fight that normalization of deviance, that slow drift into failure.

And to finally build a culture of psychological safety where anyone, truly anyone can thumb the dive.

At the end of the day, this is all about how human beings, your team function in high pressure environments. Understanding these factors is, we think, the shortcut to building effective, sustainable fundraising.

It really is.

We've seen just how easily safe practices can drift into unsafe norms. And to leave you with a final thought, we recommend you ask yourself this one question today.

What is one small non negotiable safety check-in your daily operations? Maybe it's data hygiene, maybe it's a personalized touch point that you your team have recently started to skip, and what is your immediate tangible plan to lock that procedure back in place before that slow drift sets in.

For more information about this and all Click and Pledge products make sure to visit clickandpledge.com and request for a one on one training or demo. Whether you are a client or curious about our platform, just ask us and we will gladly get together with you to chat.

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