All too often the effort put in by organizations to raise money equates to little more than the beginning of this text message chain which my nephew sent me this morning.
Unlike the loving and playful Uncle response that I gave back to my nephew, most people with their hands out are left with silence and wondering why someone else is getting the funding that they should have gotten.
People search for all sorts of reasons for why they are getting back radio silence at worst and empty hands at best. Sometimes, the reasons really are, it's not you, it's them. (Seriously, an organization with whom I was affiliated were told that they didn't have any diverse executive leaders, which obviously surprised the non-white male executives who comprised a significant portion of the executive leadership).
However, more often than not the reason why you are coming back with empty hands is because of you.
There are tons of things that go both noticed and unnoticed when raising money. However, Rod Lee and I were chatting with the Squared Compass team and came to the conclusion that there are 5 factors that are significantly correlated to whether or not you'll get funding.
The first and highest correlated with success is what I like to call the Garfield Test: are you sleeping around, kind of lazy, expecting that sweet sweet lasagna to fall into your lap or are you doing just the opposite and enticing Jon to give you the best pan of lasagna that you've ever eaten? If you're not enticing Jon than you have a 83% worse chance of receiving funding.
So what should you do? At a minimum join me in teaching our nieces and nephews the value of a dollar by responding with "I got you fam. When do you want to come and and do the work and pick up the cash?"
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