3 Things to Define Before Every Major Gift Donor Meeting

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There's a specific kind of quiet that happens right after a donor meeting ends.
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You've wrapped up the conversation, you've shaken hands, maybe you walked them to the lobby or out to the parking lot.
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And then you're back in your car with the engine off and your notebook on the passenger seat.
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And you sit there for a second, trying to get a read on what just happened.
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Not bad necessarily, not uncomfortable.
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It didn't blow up in your face.
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The donor was warm and the conversation flowed.
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You covered a lot of ground, but now that you're sitting there, you're realizing something a little uncomfortable.
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You're not actually sure if anything moved forward.
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You don't know if the relationship is in a different place than it was when you walked in.
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You had a good conversation, you're just not sure you had a productive one.
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I've been in that parking lot more times than I care to admit, and for a long time I told myself it was just part of the work.
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Donor relationships are human, they're messy, they don't follow a script, and you can't always walk out with a clean answer to the question of where things stand.
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That's part of major gift fundraising, right?
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You're playing a long game, and to a degree, that's true.
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But the more I've sat with that feeling, the more I've started to see what's actually underneath it, because that parking lot ambiguity, that not sure if it went well feeling, it almost always traces back to the same root cause.
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And it's not that the donor was hard to read, it's not that the conversation got complicated.
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It's that I walked in without a clear enough picture of what the meeting actually needed to do.
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Most of us go into donor visits with good intentions, solid preparation, and a general direction.
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And I want to be clear that a general direction is not nothing.
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But there's a difference between a direction and a strategy.
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And that difference shows up in how we navigate the conversation, how clearly we can read what's happening in real time, and whether we know with any confidence what we actually accomplished when we're sitting in that parking lot afterward.
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That's what today's episode is about, because there is one thing, one specific discipline that I believe every major gift fundraiser should build into their preparation before every single donor visit.
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It's not a complex system and it's not a long checklist.
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It's not another tool to learn.
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It's just three things that you write down before you walk in the door, and I'm gonna walk you through all of it.
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So let's talk fundraising.
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I want to start with a story, and if you've been listening to this podcast over the last couple of weeks, you've heard this one before, but I want to come back to it now from a completely different angle because it's relevant in a way I didn't fully get into the first time I told it.
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A few years into my major gift career, I was working with a donor who was interested in naming a room in a building that we had just completed.
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It was a beautiful opportunity, a unique one, because the building hadn't been publicly unveiled yet.
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So we had this window where I could bring in someone, show them the space, help them start to imagine what it would look like with their name on it.
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This donor was engaged.
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Every conversation felt like it was moving in the right direction.
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They were asking great questions.
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They seemed genuinely excited, and I was following up regularly with photos, with updates, with details about the space, and it felt like we were building towards something real.
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So I kept building week after week and month after month, and I kept nurturing the relationship.
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I kept adding layers, I kept thinking, we're getting close, just not quite there yet.
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And after about six months of that, I reached out and I asked if they were ready to move forward with the gift.
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They told me they had just made a six-figure commitment to their alma mater, an endowed scholarship.
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I remember sitting there with that email trying to make sense of it because everything I thought I understood about where we were, it didn't match what had just happened.
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I'd been so sure we were moving towards something, and we weren't.
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Because apparently they'd already been there for a while.
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When I reached back out and asked what had led to the decision, they were gracious enough to explain it.
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They told me they would have made the gift to name the room two months earlier if I'd just asked.
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And when I told that story a few weeks ago, I was using it to talk about the attention environment, about how people give their attention now, how you can miss a moment without realizing it, how timing in major gifts is more fragile than we think, and all of that's still true.
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But there's another layer to that story that I didn't get into, and it's one that's directly relevant to what we're going to talk about today, because when I look back at those six months of conversations, here's what I notice.
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I had a direction, and the direction was to keep building this, keep the relationship warm, keep moving it forward.
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And that direction felt completely reasonable.
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It wasn't wrong exactly, but it wasn't a strategy.
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A strategy would have included a much more specific question at the start of every single visit, something like, how close is this donor to being ready?
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What signal would tell me they're ready to be asked?
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And am I actively looking for that signal every time we talk?
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I wasn't asking those questions, and because I wasn't asking them when the donor was giving me their signals, I wasn't recognizing them.
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I was just having a good visit.
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I wasn't leading the conversation toward anything specific.
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I wasn't looking for anything specific, so I didn't see what was right in front of me the entire time.
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That is what we're gonna fix today.
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Before I get into the tip, I want to name something that makes this problem a little harder to see because the frustrating thing about walking into a meeting without a clear strategy is that it doesn't feel like a mistake.
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It feels like responsible relationship building.
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You're letting things develop naturally, you're not forcing anything, you're being thoughtful and patient, and in major gift fundraising, those are actually virtues.
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The problem is that patience without direction is just waiting.
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And waiting quietly is how we end up six months down the road wondering why a relationship that felt promising hasn't gone anywhere.
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I've also noticed that the fundraisers who struggle the most with this tend to be the ones who care most about doing it right.
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They don't want to be pushy.
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They don't want to make the donor feel like they're just a number in the pipeline.
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And those are completely legitimate instincts.
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But there's a version of caring about the relationship that can actually underserve the donor because it keeps you in a holding pattern when they might be ready to do something meaningful.
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Real respect for a donor includes taking the relationship seriously enough to lead it somewhere.
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And that's the reframe I want to offer before we get into the practical piece.
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Defining a clear strategy for a donor meeting isn't about being transactional.
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It's about being worthy of the trust that they're putting in you by showing up.
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It's about treating their time as something worth being intentional with.
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And here's something I've come to believe about the moments before a donor meeting.
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There are three kinds of fundraisers walking into those conversations.
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And while their situations look completely different on the surface, they share the exact same underlying problem.
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The first is someone earlier in their major gift career.
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They've been trained and you've read the books, you've been through the orientation, you understand the basics of moves, management, and cultivation stages.
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And when you're preparing for a visit, you do your research, you review their giving history, you pull up your notes from the last conversation, and you remind yourself where this person is in the pipeline.
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You walked in informed, but when you're actually in the conversation and the donor takes it somewhere unexpected, or there's a natural lull and you're not sure what to say next, or you get to the end of the meeting and you're shaking hands and it dawns on you that you didn't quite get to the thing that you wanted to.
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You walk out of that meeting with uncertainty.
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You're not sure what just happened, you're not sure what happens next, and you have a contact report to write that doesn't have a clear next step in it.
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The second is someone who's been doing this for years.
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You have real experience.
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The relationship work comes naturally to you.
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But there's a donor in your portfolio, maybe, maybe more than one, who you've been stuck on for a while, and you've had plenty of visits, and the relationship is real.
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They clearly care about the mission, but nothing is moving.
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Every visit is good and nothing changes.
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You keep showing up, you keep engaging, and six months have gone by and the relationship feels like it's in the same place it was in the fall.
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You're starting to quietly wonder if this is ever going anywhere.
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And the third is a fundraiser preparing for a high-stakes meeting.
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Maybe it's a discovery visit with a major prospect that someone in leadership personally connected you to.
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Maybe it's a meeting where you're going to make the ask or test the waters on a significant gift.
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Maybe it's a conversation with a donor who you know is in a position to give at a transformational level, and you feel the weight of that going in.
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And so you do what we all do under pressure.
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You overprepare in ways that don't actually make you more prepared.
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You review every piece of research in the file and you rehearse your talking points, you think through the mission, the impact, and all the ways that their gifts could matter.
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And you still walk in anxious because you haven't answered the most fundamental question of all.
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What does success look like when I walk out of this room?
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Three different fundraisers, three completely different situations, but it's the same core problem.
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They all walked in without a clear strategy for the conversation.
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So here's what I want to give you today.
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It's three things, three things to define in writing before every donor visit.
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And I want to be specific about the in-writing part because I know a lot of us think through these things in our heads on the driveover.
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And I'll tell you from experience that thinking through it and writing it down are completely different exercises.
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When something lives only in your head, it stays a little fuzzy.
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Ambiguity hides there comfortably.
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When you have to put words on a page, the vague answers stop working, and you have to get specific.
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And that's exactly the point.
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So even if it's three sentences in your notes app in the parking lot before you walk in, write them down.
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That's it.
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It's not a complex framework.
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And it's not a system that requires a new tool or platform.
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It's a piece of paper and five minutes.
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And I want to walk you through each one carefully because the difference between doing this vaguely and doing it specifically is the whole ballgame.
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The first thing to define is the purpose of the conversation.
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It's not the relationship goal, and it's not the campaign goal, and it's not the general direction that you're heading with this donor.
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The purpose of this specific conversation today, I want to be honest with you about how hard this one is to get specific about because build the relationship feels like an answer, and it isn't.
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Check in is not a purpose.
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Keep things warm is not a purpose.
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Touch base before the end of the fiscal year is not a purpose.
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Those are intentions, and intentions are fine as fiery as they go, but they don't give you anything to navigate by inside of the conversation.
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A purpose sounds more like this.
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I'm here to understand whether their interest has shifted since we last talked and to learn how they're feeling about our organization after the recent leadership transition.
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Or I'm here to introduce the specific initiative that we're building toward and gauge whether it resonates with what they've told me they care most about.
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Or I'm here to move this relationship from cultivation to solicitation, and if the signals in this conversation support it, I'm gonna do that today.
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When you have a purpose like that, you know what you're there to do.
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The conversation can go in all kinds of unexpected places, and often the best things come from those unexpected places.
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But you have something to navigate back toward when you need to.
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You have a reason you're in the room.
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And the second thing to define is what you need to learn, because every donor conversation is an information gathering exercise, even the ones where you're doing most of the talking.
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The relationship only moves forward when you understand the donor.
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And there's always something you don't understand yet, or something you understood six months ago that might have changed.
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So before you go in, get specific.
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At the end of this visit, what do I need to know that I don't know right now?
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Maybe it's something about their timeline.
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You've been in cultivation with this donor for eight months, and you genuinely don't know whether they're in a position to make a decision this year or whether they're three years out.
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Today, you need to understand that because that changes everything about how you're going to structure the next phase of this relationship.
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Maybe it's something about their motivations.
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You know they care about the mission broadly, and they give annually, they come to events, they respond warmly to your outreach.
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But you haven't gotten clear yet on which aspect of the work connects most deeply with them personally.
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Is it the people being served?
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Is it the research or the innovation?
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Is it the community impact?
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You need to know that before you can bring them an opportunity that's going to feel designed for them.
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Maybe it's something about an obstacle.
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The last visit had a slightly different energy than usual, and you can't quite put your finger on it, but something felt a little more guarded.
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You need to understand what that was about.
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Was it external?
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Something going on in their life that had nothing to do with you?
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Was it something that you said?
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Was it something they've been thinking about regarding the organization?
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You need to surface that before it calcifies into distance.
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When you're clear on what you need to learn, your questions get better.
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Not scripted and not interview style, but genuinely curious questions from someone who has something specific that they're trying to understand.
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And your listening gets better too.
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You're not just tracking the conversation.
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You're listening for something specific, and that changes what you hear.
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The third thing to define is what forward movement looks like from this meeting.
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This is the one that most people skip entirely, and it might be the most important of the three.
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And here's why it matters, because forward movement looks completely different depending on where a donor is in the relationship.
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And if you don't define it before you go in, you're not going to recognize it when it happens.
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And you definitely won't know whether it happened when you're sitting in the parking lot after the meeting.
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For a first discovery visit, forward movement might be a clear signal of genuine interest in a specific reason to follow up.
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Not a vague, that was great, let's keep talking, but something more like they express strong interest in a specific program area.
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They asked a question that signals their thinking concretely about what involvement looks like.
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And they mentioned something personal that opened a door for a deeper conversation.
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That's forward movement.
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For a mid-stage cultivation visit, forward movement might look like learning that the specific opportunity you've been building toward actually aligns with what they care about the most.
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Or maybe it's getting clarity on a timeline or surfacing the thing that they've been hesitant to bring up, which gives you something real to work with.
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And for a later stage visit, forward movement might be a soft yes or an agreed-upon date for making a decision, or a direct invitation from them to come back with a specific proposal.
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Or honestly, a clear no, which tells you something incredibly important that you can act on rather than keep wondering about.
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When you define what forward movement looks like before you go in, two things happen.
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First, you recognize it when you see it, because you've already decided what you're looking for.
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Second, if you get to the end of the visit and it hasn't happened yet, your job isn't finished.
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You find a natural way to get there before you shake hands and walk out.
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And not in a pushy way, not by forcing something that isn't there, but by staying intentional about why you're in the room.
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Go back to that donor that I lost to their alma mater.
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If I'd walked into every one of those conversations with a clear definition of what forward movement looked like, including, is this person showing any signals that they're ready to be asked?
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I would have seen what was right in front of me.
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Instead, I was having visits without a clear destination for each one.
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And that cost me the gift.
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I want to talk about what changes when you do this consistently, because the shift is bigger than it sounds from the outside.
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The most immediate thing is that your meetings have more direction.
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And when I say direction, I don't mean pressure and I don't mean feeling like you're trying to sell something when you're supposed to be building a relationship.
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I mean that you know where you're going.
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The conversation can go off on a wonderful tangent and you let it because you're not quite knuckling the agenda.
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But you have a compass.
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And when a natural pause comes or when you sense the conversation is rounding toward a close, you know what still needs to happen.
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The second thing that changes is your post-visit clarity.
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When you're in that parking lot, you have something to check back in against.
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It's not the vague question of how did it go, but did I learn what I needed to learn?
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Did forward movement happen?
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And if yes, what specifically?
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If not, what does that tell me and what do I do with it?
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Your contact reports get better, your next steps get clearer, your portfolio becomes something you can actually see instead of something that you're trying to hold in your head.
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And the third thing, which took me the longest to fully recognize, is that this changes how you understand your portfolio as a whole.
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Because when you're doing this consistently across every active donor relationship, patterns start to emerge.
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You start to see who's actually moving and who's been in the same place for four visits in a row.
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You notice that for one particular donor, you keep writing, need to learn their timeline in your prep notes, and you never actually get to it, which tells you something real about either the relationship or your approach.
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And you start to carry your portfolio differently, not as a list of names, but as a set of relationships that you're actually understanding.
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There's also a confidence piece here that I don't want to skip over because it matters.
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One of the hardest things about this work, especially if you're earlier in your career or you're building a major gift program from scratch, is that the results timeline is so long.
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You can do everything right for months and not have a single closed gift to point to.
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And in the absence of results, doubt fills in the gaps really fast.
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Am I doing this correctly?
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Is this actually moving?
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Is any of this going to lead somewhere?
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When you're defining clear meeting objectives and checking in against them afterwards, you create a different kind of evidence.
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Not a closed gift and not big fundraising numbers, but actual proof that you're learning things, moving conversations, making decisions based on what's in front of you.
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And that's a completely different internal experience of the work, and it matters more than I think we give it credit for.
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So here's what I want you to do this week.
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It's just one thing.
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Pick one upcoming meeting, whatever is on your calendar next.
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And before you go in, write down these three things.
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What is the purpose of this conversation?
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What do I need to learn by the end of it?
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What does forward movement look like from here?
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Don't overthink it.
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Don't spend an hour on it.
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Five minutes.
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Get specific enough that you'd know it when you saw it.
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Vague doesn't help you here.
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Get to know them better is not useful.
00:22:20.220 --> 00:22:24.379
Understand whether they're considering us in their estate plan is useful.
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Get a sense of timing is not specific enough.
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But learn whether they're in a position to make a gift commitment before December?
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That's specific enough.
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And then after the visit, before you do anything else, spend five minutes in the parking lot checking back against what you wrote.
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What did you learn?
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Did forward movement happen?
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What's your clearest next step?
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And you don't need any technology for this.
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You don't need a system or a platform or even a template.
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You need a piece of paper, a pen, and five minutes before you walk in the door.
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And I promise your conversations will feel different.
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You'll walk out with more clarity.
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And over time, your portfolio will start to move differently because you'll stop accumulating a general sense that things are going fine.
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And you'll start accumulating real intelligence about where each relationship actually stands.
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One more thing I'd add to this is consider sharing what you wrote with a colleague or your manager before a big visit.
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And not as some kind of performance and not to look prepared, but as a discipline.
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Because when you say your strategy out loud to someone else, the soft answers stop hiding.
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I want to learn whether their interested doesn't hold up when another person is looking at it.
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I want to understand whether they've decided to include us in their estate plan or whether they're still weighing it against two other organizations.
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That's a sentence someone can actually respond to, push back on, and help you sharpen.
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That kind of accountability changes the quality of the whole exercise.
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And as a bonus, it makes your one-on-ones with leadership much more substantive because you're walking in with a real strategy rather than just updates.
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Now, here's where I want to be honest with you: defining your meeting strategy before you go in is the foundation.
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It's essential.
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It changes the quality of your preparation and your clarity coming out.
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But it doesn't prepare you for everything that happens once you're actually in the room.
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Because donor conversations, they don't follow the strategy that you wrote before you went in.
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They take turns you didn't plan for.
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And pivot gracefully.
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They push back on something you thought was settled, or they're significantly warmer than you expected, which means there's an opportunity in front of you that you didn't plan for.
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And now you have to decide in the moment how to handle it.
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In all of those situations, the question isn't whether you have a clear meeting objective, it's whether you've actually practiced what to do when the conversation goes somewhere you didn't anticipate.
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And for a long time, I didn't have a good answer to that.
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I could prepare myself with information.
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I could define my objectives, but the only real way I knew to prepare for the unexpected was to accumulate experience, which meant making mistakes in front of actual donors while I was learning.
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And in major gift fundraising, where a single relationship can represent years of cultivation and a gift that could genuinely transform your organization, that's an expensive way to learn.
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What changed for me was when I started using AI to build practice conversations before important meetings.
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Not a generic play the role of a donor kind of a prompt, but something much more specific where I'd take everything I knew about the donor I was about to meet, their personality, their history with the organization, their areas of hesitation, the topics I was most likely to navigate carefully.
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And I'd build a practice partner that actually reflected all of that.
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And then I'd make it harder than I expected the real conversation to be.
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I'd make the AI version more skeptical, more likely to raise the uncomfortable thing, more resistant to the path that I was planning to take.
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So that by the time I sat down with the actual donor, I'd already worked through the harder version.
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This changed how I showed up in ways that it's hard to fully explain until you've experienced it.
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I wasn't just more confident going in, I was more flexible inside the conversation.
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Because I'd already been surprised in our practice rounds.
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I'd already found my footing in the awkward moment before I had to find it for real.
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So when something unexpected happened in the real conversation, it wasn't entirely uncharted.
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I'd already been somewhere close to it.
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And that is one of the things we build inside of module three of the AI Advantage for Major Gift Fundraising.
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You walk in with your purpose defined, what you need to learn, defined, and what forward movement looks like, defined.
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And you've also practiced the harder version of the conversation before you get there.
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The full meeting strategy, the practice partner built around your specific donor, and a system for capturing what happened as soon as the meeting ends so you don't lose a single detail that matters.
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The tip today is yours.
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Define those three things before your next visit.
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That's free and it's real and it will make a difference starting this week.
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But if you've been listening to this series and you're starting to feel the shape of what a complete system for this work could look like, that's what we're building together in this program.
00:27:30.700 --> 00:27:33.980
And here's where I want to be direct with you because this matters.
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For several weeks now, I've been inviting you to join the VIP wait list at let's talkfundraising.com forward slash major gifts.
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And if you've been listening, you have a pretty clear picture at this point of what this program is, what it does, and who it's built for.
00:27:49.579 --> 00:27:51.500
We've covered a lot of ground together.
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The first cohort starts on May 4th, and enrollment opens this week.
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I'm not gonna manufacture urgency or tell you that the walls are closing in, but I do want to be real with you about what this moment is.
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This founding cohort is a small group, and it's the only group that's gonna be in the room while the program is being refined and shaped in real time.
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That's a different experience than what's gonna come later.
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The access is different.
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The investment in your individual portfolio is different.
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You're gonna have a direct hand in making this program what it becomes.
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If you've been on the fence, I want to ask you one question.
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Think about the thing in your major giftwork that you've been quietly telling yourself you should do something about.
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It doesn't have to be a big dramatic failure, just the thing that's costing you, week after week in small in quiet ways.
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Maybe it's clarity going into meetings.
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Maybe it's not having a reliable way to follow up with prospects over time.
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Maybe it's not being able to look at your portfolio and know with any confidence whether your work is actually moving things in the right direction.
00:28:55.819 --> 00:29:02.139
Maybe it's the way the administrative side of this work keeps pulling you away from the part that actually matters.
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Whatever that thing is for you, that's the thing that this program is built to change.
00:29:07.259 --> 00:29:14.460
And not in a theoretical here are some ideas kinds of ways, in a this is what you build inside your actual portfolio kind of way.
00:29:14.700 --> 00:29:19.420
I also want to say something directly to the people who have been on the wait list for a while.
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Some of you signed up months ago, back when I was just starting to talk about this idea publicly.
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You've heard every episode and you've been following along as the program took shape.
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If that's you, thank you.
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Genuinely.
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Your presence in the conversations has helped shape what this program is becoming.
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And I want you to know that the founding cohort is designed with you in mind.
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People who saw this early, who understood the problem before I'd even finished articulating it.
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And for the people who found this podcast more recently, you haven't missed anything.
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The first cohort is exactly the right place to start because you'll be building from the ground up with a group that's all starting at the same place, with live support every step of the way.
00:29:59.819 --> 00:30:05.579
If you want more before you decide, I have something coming next week that I think you're going to find really useful.
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Stay tuned for that.
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But if you're ready now, don't wait.
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Go to let's talkfundraising.com forward slash major gifts.
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The link is in the show notes.
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For today, for this week, write down those three things before your next visit.
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Your purpose, what you need to learn, and what forward movement looks like.
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Just once, see what it changes.
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Thank you so much for being here, my friend.
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I'll see you next week.
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Bye bye.