Why do I bother?
Howard Lake | 17 July 2012 | Blogs
After a little break for holidays and delivering some groovy client projects we’re off on a bit of a tangent with this blog. Sort of. I’ve had occasion to think about what we do at Bottom Line Ideas and why we do it. The magic ingredients of fundraising people features made me think about why we still ‘bother’ when things don’t always go our way.
Resilience is the obvious choice. Resilience to hearing ‘no’. Resilience when being laughed at during a presentation of what we think is a reasonable price for top-notch work. Resilience to hearing that others are charging two and three times as much for equal quality outcomes quite happily. Resilience shared with client charities when they see funding cuts bite deep into their service delivery. Even resilience in the face of miserable weather.
I’m being as honest and open as I’ve ever been on these pages and can honestly say that my resilience is being tested to its maximum right now, even though we still have some great causes to work with. But the rules of blogging state that I can’t complain because audiences don’t like to read about negatives (still not sure this is true as we’re all human and being a human is not always sweetness and light, right?).
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Instead, I’m going to sing the praises of resilience as the most under-rated trait I think any charity or just small organisation team can have. It’s the single most important quality we have to keep us going when the world feels like it’s kicking sand in our face. When that fundraising appeal doesn’t go to plan or the lobbying campaign doesn’t result in the change in attitudes we’d hoped for, what is it that keeps us coming back to improve things; to try again and do better or at least do what we intended the first time round? Resilience.
So here’s to everyone equipped with a rubber backside as it’s the single best thing we can have to help us bounce back up to where we want to be. I salute you all and consider myself simply human that I’m among your number.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.