Personal wellbeing

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplas

This area of the site was written for very experienced trust fundraisers.

If you’re stressed with the job, you’re really not alone. (It can just seem like it.) Trust fundraising can vary between very interesting (with moments of elation) and sometimes really quite stressful. If it’s often stressful, there’s likely to be something wrong. However, to quote The Porcupine Principle, Jonathan Farnhill’s general book on fundraising: ‘If you are finding fundraising hard work, you are probably on the right lines because it was never meant to be easy nor was it claimed to be.’ No one is normally going to physically attack you or expect you to work 18 hour shifts like some jobs, but there are challenges.

However, if you’re in it for the long haul, you need to find ways to stay positive, motivated and resilient, to be positively, not negatively, challenged. Some people think they need fear or anger to function well. However, you can get burnt out, lose energy, enthusiasm, creativity, breadth of vision and judgement. If you can relax but stay motivated, you may find that in a lot of situations you will bring a lot more to the job.

I’ll go through some of the issues we face and then cover some general points about looking after yourself.

Income targets

In over 25 years at nearly 30 charities, I’ve never been let go for missing my target. I’ve had two roles that I couldn’t do very well, due to very high expectations of productivity, where I’ve probably jumped before I was pushed – but that’s about my personal suitability to the specifics of that job, not the numbers. I’ve not met anyone who was let go due to missing their target (though one person I mentored needed to reassure their hierarchy that there was real potential in the post).

If you have the ability, the charity would be fools to get rid of you. Trust fundraisers who’ve shown they can do the job are usually a scarce resource. (Not at the time of writing, due to COVID-related redundancies, but at every other time.) If you did lose your job, you’d very probably be able to find a way back into work – I’ve seen one or two fundraisers been forced out because they were terrible who’ve managed that. (For clarity: my personal opinion, for what it’s worth, is that if you are a poor trust fundraiser and cannot improve, you should think whether this is the best career for you.)

In fundraising team reforecasting meetings, you see that some of the teams are, actually, missing their targets. It’s a natural part of the fundraising process for it to happen at times. You make a very educated guess at the numbers (or have them handed down from above) things work out differently in practice for a variety of reasons – including people not being perfect – and the Director of Fundraising is hoping that things will even themselves out across the teams.

When people set their own targets, there’s an instinct to set them higher and it’s easy to overdo it. It doesn’t make you a bad person if you don’t achieve your own unrealistic expectations – it just means you made a mistake, at a time when you were quite possibly too busy meeting last year’s target to do your target setting thoroughly. Perhaps you can chalk it down to experience.

Julia Ammon did an exercise on confidence and resilience at a Fundraising Everywhere trusts conference, where she got everyone to list three achievements that had nothing to do with money. She had a great point – we all talk about ourselves in terms of what we’ve raised, but it is only part of the process. I know that some of the things I’ve done the very best didn’t raise any money at all. They were still great and I try to be just as proud of them.

The very experienced fundraising director, Mark Astarita, told me he thought good trust fundraisers were target driven and that they could lose and regain that. I totally agree and encourage people to cultivate a strong desire to succeed, for example by really celebrating their successes. However, you also need to let go when things aren’t working and to see yourself as bigger than just the money you raised. Then you can go again, focussing on what you CAN achieve.

Having more responsibility than power

When I’ve mentored stressed people, the stress has often been because they aren’t getting what they need from Services (and they feel quite isolated with it). There are things that can help, they’re one reason for the pages on this web site about working with Services and it can be a mistake to give up, or try to hand off the situation to your manager who doesn’t understand. However, people often aren’t doing badly – it’s just a difficult situation.

Another issue of responsibility is that you can see a direct connection between what you’re raising and people getting help and keeping their jobs. If you cannot control the situation, though, it’s important not to beat yourself up about it – especially the small failings that we all experience.

It’s good to expect a little more from Services, rather than less, because: (a) you’re usually either going forwards or backwards; and (b) behavioural science teaches us it’s easy to under-estimate people’s wish not to refuse/disappoint others. However, the truth is that, especially in some places, trust fundraising can be a lower priority and some staff get very focused on just their top priorities.

Rejections

Dealing with rejections is a matter of practice. As this site targets more experienced fundraisers, hopefully you mainly see rejections as just part of the job – if you didn’t get rejections, you’d be doing something very wrong because you’d only be going to the very best prospects. There are few niches where things are so predictable (and worth the time) that you can develop extremely high success rates.

If you’ve invested heavily in an application, it’s hardly surprising if you’re knocked back in some way by a rejection. It can help if you can accept that you’re just going through a process of dealing with that – and use it to learn what you can as you fume, or fret, or whatever, but otherwise to be patient with yourself and wait it out. 

My own experience with the very big, important rejections can be that there’s a limited period afterwards when I can’t do that much, except maybe analyse and try and think how to improve things in future. Then there can be a longer period where my motivation isn’t the same, I maybe get more self doubts and ideas for improvement are probably still coming occasionally. Then my enthusiasm builds properly back up over time and I’m ready to go again in a bigger way. It’s really not nice to go through that, but I don’t worry because I know it’s just a process.

It’s a good situation to use Julia Ammon’s advice in her Fundraising Everywhere talk and to re-frame things, as her examples illustrate. Rather than settling with the thought “I failed because we didn’t get that grant” to see can you think “I did the best I could with the information and resources available to me”. Rather than thinking “This failed application means I’m really bad at trust fundraising” can you think “I learned so much from this failed application – I’ll make the next ones better!!”

Time management/having enough time

There are a number of elements to this:

• It can be a symptom of just being earlier in the job. All roles take time to get up to speed on, especially when you step up, rather than sideways:

Source: Wikipedia

• We all know that when we start a job, it’s hard – but you have to progress through several stages to get to the stage of mastery, where it’s maybe happening as quickly as you’re likely to achieve. We may think we’re working slowly in the early stages, when we’re engaged in learning sessions or sorting out a lot in feedback with our managers. However, at “conscious incompetence” we’re still not working quickly, because we have to think it all through. It’s only at “unconscious competence”, when things are second nature, that you’re working quickly. I don’t think this is always adequately reflected in KPIs/KPOs, which can reflect how the previous post-holder was doing once they had reached “unconscious competence”. 
• Achieving efficient systems is a LOT of work in some jobs. It’s quick not to put in the time – but you keep paying for it.
• There may be a problem with planning, if you end up being troubled by lots of deadlines at the same time.
• My current manager likes to say to himself that there is plenty of time for the important things. It can help to be rigorous in prioritisation and ruthless with the low priority tasks
• Finally, we need to make sure we have reasonable expectations of ourselves. If you set your own KPIs/KPOs, it’s common to set them higher and this may be unrealistically high. Time spent doing KPIs is time not spent sending out applications, so there is a temptation to try and save time, going on gut feelings which can be unrealistic or analyses that leave out the time needed for a lot of tasks. If so, it’s worth keeping a detailed record of how you actually spend your time for at least a month – you’ll probably be surprised.

The relentlessness of it all

The Pareto Principle notwithstanding, in a lot of trusts role you’re expected to keep going, continually meeting deadlines. That can be how you really succeed, too. It’s much easier to keep going if the job’s more of a pleasure than a struggle:

• Try and relax and enjoy the work
• Keep your expectations realistic
• Perhaps you can keep a good number of your expectations shorter-term – and notice and celebrate when you meet them
• Do the things that promote general wellbeing: eat well, get enough sleep and at the same time everyday, do some exercise
• Can you find ways of doing the job that allow you to spend more time doing the things you find fulfilling and/or that give you enjoyment/flow?

Guilt

My experience in the early years as a fundraiser was of a lot of guilt when I wasn’t delivering – either because of a lack of skills or because I wasn’t trying hard enough. It’s possibly no bad thing to be moved by your failure to live up to reasonable standards that you set yourself. However, beyond that, if you’re having a decent go at the job, guilt doesn’t actually achieve the objectives it aims to. If you dislike the job because you feel bad about how you’re doing it, you’re not likely to apply yourself as effectively, at least over the long term.

My own experience in that situation was that trying more to just see it as a job, to let go of some of the sense of responsibility, allowed me to enjoy and so better apply myself – making more difference for people in need. We aren’t selling paperclips and it’s truthful to know that. However, it’s a balancing act – finding a “sweet spot” where you are behaving ethically and the work is fulfilling, whilst not burning out, feeling you need to move on or messing with your head.

There are lots of great things about growing up in a strongly Christian-influenced culture, but we do arguably experience more guilt than other cultures and in a job where you have real-world responsibilities like ours it’s easier to fall prey. A longstanding Buddhist teacher, who has had heart-to-hearts with many thousands students, once remarked that we judge ourselves so harshly that if we took the same attitude with others, not even Hitler or Stalin would employ us in their courts. Looking at things objectively, you might find you should “come off it” a little bit.

Being messed about by your own management

Being let down and messed around by your manager will happen every now and again in our field and it can be immensely frustrating, especially when they tell us to do genuinely stupid things. We may be managed by someone who doesn’t fully understand or appreciate our work and they can be constrained by some of the internal politics, which blows through our work more than others. It can be hard enough to struggle with outside forces, without being sabotaged by your own manager! Especially if you feel you have been going above and beyond the call of duty – I’ve seen people resign at that point.

Action plan:

• Don’t resign or do anything else fundamentally destructive.
• If you experience very strong emotions, recognize them for what they are, that they temporarily make it hard for you to be objective and skilful, but they should pass
• Find a motivation that keeps you going, until your enthusiasm returns. For example: someone’s paying you a reasonable wage to be there, or: the needs of the end user mean you’ll feel better about your behaviour in the long term if you do the right thing
• However much you now feel you’re in a Dilbert cartoon, the chances are your ignorant/stupid manager is just trying their best
• Once you feel you can trust your objectivity again, look at the web page on “managing your manager”

Boredom

There can come a point in a Trusts job where things seem very same-y. (For me, it used to be after maybe 18 months.) It can become grinding for some people. Some ideas to help are:

• At charities working service development or those with extremely varied services, you can get a lot more variety
• I’ve personally found a big difference between five day a week jobs and three day a week roles (doing something else with the other time – usually, freelancing).
• Freelancing is much more varied (though there are plenty of other stresses).
• Management roles are more varied – I’ve been managing people for four years and haven’t felt bored for a moment, which is pretty good for me.
• Some people find that if you can be closer to the service users – for example, getting out and seeing the work – helps. It doesn’t work for everyone, though – I’m currently at a charity that’s very close to the cause and had someone working for me who was going up the wall doing the same work for 18 months.
• In an online discussion of this, someone suggested adopting a strategy with higher success rates (rather than one with a success rate of 1 in 8 or 1 in 10). That got a lot of thumbs up in the Facebook group.
• Boredom can be a symptom of being burnt out, demotivated because things aren’t working, or other stressors. So, it’s worth checking there isn’t a deeper issue.
• In her Facebook chat, Beth Upton recommended the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy’s Philanthropic Psychology course. I haven’t done that (it’s not cheap) but – having read a lot of their findings, I can 100% see how it would work to help you kick on. There are bits in the pages of this site on emotions, on Trustees and on thanking donors well.
• If you need a (cheaper)  new challenge that you can realistically fit into your job, there should be ideas dotted around this website to try. For example:
  • Making better use of the phone (under the Trusts\Research sub-menu). If you can get past the nerves, better engagement calls can be invigorating.
  • Using WOW techniques with donors (under the Relationships menu). Rob Woods reports that fundraisers find these kinds of techniques bring them to life more.
  • Improving your writing skills. I’d start with the three videos on injecting more emotion into your writing. It will only take you a couple of hours to go through the material, but it’s full of ideas.
  • If you’re doing bigger applications and want to be stretched intellectually, there’s a huge amount of material under the Developing and Evaluating projects sub-menus.

Positive self-talk

There’s a correlation between negative thinking and stress. That’s not to say that it’s easy to change all your thoughts to positive equivalents. However, finding things you can reframe positively does work for quite a few people.

Focus on personal growth

Rob Woods, fundraising guru, suggests:

1. Note the things you have learnt each day
2. Focus on the fact that incremental small changes build to a major change
3. Always be looking to learn something, even when things go wrong. At those times, be aware that there are learnings in there and focus on those.

I’ve just been through a pretty bad year. (I gave so much effort and focus in my spare time to this site, it affected my day job.) Thinking every other day about what I’d learnt, and alternating that with thinking about my successes, has helped me see my problems more as learning, which is useful both to me and to my charity. (It’s also helped me allow my mind to compartmentalise, so that when I’m working I’m really switched off from this web site!)

General stress-busting techniques

Everything above is more to do with a trusts job. However, it’s well worth thinking about general techniques for dealing with stress, as well. There are lots and lots and many (not all) can be combined with each other:

1. Worries can have a valuable place, in identifying possible concerns. (Anxiety is not very good at then evaluating the issue, or identifying or implementing solutions.) Rather than completely suppressing the worry, noting it and evaluating it in a positive, relaxed way when you are more settled can help you use your capacity to worry in a positive way – making friends with yourself.

2. If in practical terms, you’re doing great and you’ve got “nothing to worry about”, maybe the answer is just to think/talk that through in some way.

3. Adjusting your work in some way could help with stress. Just one example: you might decide you’ve been on too much of a learning curve for too long, or you need a break or a gentler learning curve.

4. Practical anxiety coping mechanisms. There are lots of simple things you can do to reduce anxiety. Here’s a list from the NHS, but there are lots of tip-type lists out there: https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/overcoming-fears/.

5. Wellbeing and Recovery Action Plan / Wellness Action Plans: This is about planning what strategies you can adopt practically in a particular scenario – for example, at work – to head off and reduce stress: https://www.mind.org.uk/media/1593680/guide-to-waps.pdf. WRAPs/WAPs are really a framework to be proactive in thinking things through.

6. Physiological stuff that promotes relaxation and wellbeing: 

1. 1. Eating and sleeping at the same times each day. 
   2. Nutritious food. 
   3. Enough sleep. 
   4. Regular exercise. 
   5. Cutting down on caffeine, alcohol and sugar

Studies show that for some people, exercise, for example, is as effective as medication in reducing anxiety. If the body’s less stressed and producing more endorphins for physiological reasons, you feel better.

7. Binaural Beats: You maybe don’t want to use binaural indefinitely, but they do work well in the short term. The gist is that, by listening in different ears to sounds that are slightly out of phase with each other, it entrains your brainwaves to adopt corresponding wave patterns for alpha, beta or delta waves. Sounds a bit like new age mumbo jumbo, but it does actually work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa9YSAdbKh8. If  that one doesn’t  work, this one should after 5-10 minutes, but it’s not great for working:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnhFsHyeeNQ. You’ll need to be wearing headphones for this to work.

1. Meditation. There are three kinds of basic, calming practice:
   1. Practices that involve developing concentration, such as physical yoga, or yogic pranayama breathing. I think maybe Tai chi too, though I’ve never done enough to be sure.
   2. Practices that involve working to cultivate positive emotions, such as loving kindness practices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSFBbs2UCOk.
   3. Practices that involve developing mindfulness and acceptance. For example:
      1. You imagine someone accepting you absolutely as you are, with nothing about you having to change, for two minutes. It can be a real person who’s kind or loves you, or a made up one, whatever makes it easiest. The exercise is to allow that acceptance.  If your mind wanders off, that’s fine – it’s one more thing for the person you’re imagining to accept
      2. You bring someone else to mind and accept them for two minutes
      3. You allow the present moment to be just as it is, including all the sights, sounds, sensations, thoughts that come and go, etc, for two minutes

…if you want to extend the period of the exercise, then once you recognise the accepting mindset, you can combine that with a little bit of attention to your breath, just to give you a way of staying in the present moment which makes it easier to be accepting.  The breath is always happening in the present.

There’s a lot of clinical evidence for the effectiveness of mindfulness, less so for other approaches, though insofar as they overlap with the next item there have been trials. There’s also a lot of evidence from their use over millennia by different, mainly eastern, religious traditions: they’ve survived down the ages because they work.

1. Positive psychology: This is other stuff to cultivate a positive mindset (things like exercises to cultivate gratitude). Randomised Controlled trails indicate it can be as effective as cognitive behavioural therapy, at least for depression: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Positive-Psychotherapy-Clinician-Tayyab-Rashid/dp/0195325389
2. For some people, adopting much, much more positive and confident body language, maybe with a much more positive focus and language, can make a quick difference. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezSkpyuhymk. I don’t know if there are any relevant clinical trials.
3. General tips for better work:

• Although anxiety can alert me to a possible problem, I generally find I actually think things through best when relaxed. You make better judgements, are more creative, think more widely.
• If you’re in rather a “keyed up” state, the mind can then get a bit “spun out” if you’ve been doing a lot and thinking about a lot of things. Taking a break – having some time to yourself, just doing repetitive work for an hour – can bring things back down.
• If you’ve been very stressed over something, it can help you deal with it to do something that lets you relax, but not to pick up the hard stuff for at least 20 minutes after you feel relaxed, again. That’s because it takes that amount of time to get the adrenaline back out of your system.
• When it’s hard to think things through and digest them in a noisy office, going for a walk helps me

1. Psychotherapeutic interventions (things like counselling). Many workplaces offer telephone-based counselling. The main thing that stops us using them is usually stigma – not wanting to admit to having a stress. However, a lot of people who’re brave enough to push past that do find they learn useful skills/techniques or just have very positive and usual conversations.
2. It might be worth looking at the resources around HALT – being Hungry, Angry/anxious, Lonely and/or Tired. Some look a bit at work consequences and unexpected things you can do – for example, if you’re hungry, you’d apparently be better off eating nutritious food, also if you’re angry a lot (not a problem I get) exercise apparently really helps. 

Mental ill health

All of the above consists of ideas about dealing with “lower level” stresses, rather than out-and-out depression, anxiety or other conditions. If you think you might have mental health issues at that level, you should see your GP, or a fully qualified counsellor. A close friend with very chronic mental health issues got quite a bit out of going to one of the local Mind-type community services, because there’s a lot you can also learn from peer support from people who’re clued up and in recovery. I care for someone with quite severe mental health issues and always think I should use those services a lot more, myself.

My own experience in my teens and twenties – and that of a number of friends – is that the worst bit is just admitting that there is something wrong. After that, there is help available – and the earlier you can go, the more problems you prevent.

Resources

Fundraising podcasts

• Fundraising Bright Spots podcast #6 is about resilience
• Trust Fundraising Hayday podcast Season 3 #3 is “Break the stress cycle: what we all need to know”
• Trust Fundraising Hayday podcast Season 4 #4 is “Burnout: has it happened to you?”

Further reading

www.mentalhealth.org.uk/publications/overcome-fear-anxiety