The Pain Point Was Never You
Scroll through LinkedIn and count how many posts promised to fix something you didn't know was broken. A free download that will solve your donor retention problems. An AI agent that will find you grants. A CRM that will bring in those major gifts.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with a new tool or a solution to a real problem. But what if the problem isn’t your fundraising, but how consistently we’re told that we aren’t doing well enough? What if all the promises of a fix are subtly undermining our sector by quietly eroding our faith in ourselves?
In my office I have a letterboard that quotes Toi Derricotte’s poem “The Telly Cycle”: Joy is an act of resistance.
It’s been my guiding phrase this year - for the last few years - actually. I’m a naturally upbeat person, but I don’t know if anyone can accuse me of being overly joyous. I skew towards stubborn conviction versus natural optimism. Embracing joy - and with it committing to finding the positive as often as possible - has become a personal and organizational challenge. And it has me thinking about what happens when we stay mired in the negative, what it could be costing the sector, and what might happen of we build the opposite way instead.
The Pain Point Is the Product
“No pain, no gain” isn’t just for the gym. “Pain points” drive us to look for solutions, so they’re a powerful sales tool. The sales training company Sandler published a piece explaining what they mean when they talk about "pain" in a sales conversation. Pain is "the kind of emotional distance between where someone is right now and where they know they ought to be." The goal of the salesperson is to find that distance, get the prospect talking about it, and keep them there "longer than feels comfortable, because that's where the sale lives." Pain is a blessing, they say. It's a signal to take action.
I keep coming back to that line. Pain is a blessing. Not for the person in pain. For the person selling the fix.
This is not a conspiracy theory about the nonprofit sector's training-and-tools economy. It’s the operating logic of the sales industry, and fundraising advice runs on the same fuel.
Assets don’t sell. A fundraiser who is doing great - with real skills and a system that works - isn’t a great sales prospect. But for companies to grow, they need sales. And so the loudest advice in the field isn’t built to tell us what’s working, it’s built to find out where we’re anxious and stay there until the credit card comes out.
Why It Works On Us
Fundraisers aren't gullible for falling for this. It's not exclusively a fundraiser problem. It's a human one. There's a well-established pschological finding called negativity bias, and the plain version of it is: adults display a propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information, across basically every kind of task researchers have thrown at us. We are built to notice the threat before we notice the thing that's fine.
Sales didn't invent that wiring. It found it, and it aimed at it. Which means the reason the "you're doing it wrong" pitch works isn't a bug, it's a feature.
The Actual Pain Point
Most fundraisers already know what needs to happen. They know their donor communications could be warmer. They know their board needs more than a spreadsheet update once a quarter. They know the plan they wrote in January needs revisiting. What they don't have is the staff, the hours, or the institutional will to do it. The gap was never knowledge. It's capacity.
And a nonstop drumbeat of "you need to learn this, fix this, buy this" doesn't touch that gap. It just sends people looking for the fix in the wrong place (one more course, one more platform) while the actual constraint, which is structural and resourced by people other than the fundraiser, goes unnamed. It becomes a loop: feel behind, look for a fix, the fix doesn't address the real shortage, feel behind again.
This isn't telling fundraisers to "have an abundance mindset." I've written before about how that inflicts its own harm.Telling nonprofit leaders they just need to shift their thinking is, functionally, gaslighting them about very real resource constraints. . You can’t “good vibes only” out of systemic inequity. but, the constant negativity aimed at individual fundraisers not only misdiagnoses the problem, it risks eroding our departments, organizations, and sector.
Confidence Isn't the Same as Faking It
So if the problem isn't fundraiser skill, what helps? It’s certainly not “just be more confident” which is as helpful as telling someone to be less burned out, or to lean in. But I have this pervasive idea of joy as the antidote to capitalism. Alok Vaid-Menon says it far more eloquently than I could:
“There’s a mistaken idea that joy is escapist. Joy is what allows me to sink in to the muck with my eyes open. Joy makes me confront how brutal and awful the world is unflinchingly and without dissociation. Because I know the world that I’m fighting for. So many of us are fluent and what is wrong, but not what is right and what our proactive vision of what we’re trying to actualize. This we have to keep close to our chest the kind of sensibility and feeling that we want to be diffused in the world.”
There’s research to back this up. Barbara Fredrickson's broaden-and-build theory, which has held up for two decades of research, describes positive emotion as something that broadens how people think. It opens up options instead of narrowing them, the way fear and anxiety do, and that broadened thinking builds real, durable resources over time: skills, relationships, resilience. Those resources make the next positive moment more likely. It compounds. It normalizes. It allows progress - and yes, joy - to flourish.
There's also research on confidence and how it's perceived. The status-enhancement account of overconfidence finds that confidence changes how competence is read by other people, not that it replaces competence, and I don't think the research supports "fake it till you make it" as a strategy, whatever the internet wants it to mean. But it means that a fundraiser who's been taught to distrust her own skills may be perceved as less capable than she actually is. That's not a personal failing. That's what a decade of "you're doing it wrong" messaging does to a person's presentation of their own expertise. How can we expect fundraisers to succeed if we keep telling them they're failing?
The Ripple Effect
None of this stays contained to one person, either. Sigal Barsade's research on emotional contagion in groups (a study she called "The Ripple Effect," published in Administrative Science Quarterly) found that mood spreads between people working together, and where a positive mood spreads, cooperation goes up and conflict goes down, measurably. Not felt. Measured, by outside observers watching the group work. On a more macro scale, the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy released a national study in February 2025 on the adoption of Community-Centric Fundraising. Of the organizations surveyed, 76 percent had implemented CCF-aligned changes, and 44.8 percent reported improved fundraiser morale as a result. More strikingly, 37.2 percent reported increased contributed revenue, not decreased, despite the sector-wide fear that moving away from donor-centric, scarcity-based fundraising would cost organizations money. The same report names "scarcity mindset about funding" as the biggest thing still holding back wider adoption. Which is the whole argument of this piece, confirmed at a sector level, by a research center, instead of by me on a blog.
I keep thinking about something adrienne maree brown writes in Pleasure Activism: that working for justice should feel good, and that joy isn't an indulgence you earn after the real work is done, it's fuel the work runs on. She's writing about organizing movements, not nonprofit management, but the gap between those two things isn't as wide as we pretend. It's part of why the history of grassroots movements like AIDS activism still has something to teach the sector about what collective action can do that institutions won't. A sector that's been trained to run on manufactured inadequacy is a sector that burns people out. A sector that starts building from what's already working, at the individual level and the team level and the interorganizational level, is one that might be sustainable enough to do this work for longer than five years before someone leaves.
What I'd Do With This
The next time a piece of fundraising advice lands in your inbox, or your feed, or a keynote you're sitting through, I'd ask one question before you take it seriously: what pain point is this selling me, and is it actually mine? Sometimes the answer is yes, genuinely, and the advice is worth having. A lot of advice is good. But some real percentage of what gets aimed at fundraisers exists because pain sells, not because it's true, and those two things get tangled together constantly.
We're not going to fix the funding shortage that's driving most of what's hard about this work by feeling better about it. I want to be clear about that, because I don't want this to read as one more version of "just believe in yourself." But I do think there's a real cost to a sector that's been taught, for years, to look for what's broken before it looks for what's working. And I think the fix for that starts smaller than we want it to: notice the strengths you're already building on, before you go looking for the next thing you're supposedly getting wrong.
