Improving Listening: Baseline for Better Fundraising

Successful fundraising is interconnected with effective listening. The most successful major gift fundraisers have hundreds of stories of how they listened the gift. 

Listening is hard. The difference between typically speaking speed and our brains' capacity to understand creates the first gap. Distractions only add to the complexity. 


How do you develop listening skills to be more effective in your fundraising, and, by extension, in moving your mission forward? A few online resources for your consideration:

1. A Developing Listening Skills video from Cambridge University Press ELT. 


2. A blog post from Gaily Perry: A Fundraiser's #1 Skill: The Lost Art of Listening. 


3. A blog post from Vanessa Chase: Why Listening Trumps All Else in Fundraising. 


4. Tips for Active Listening are available on the Mind Tools website. 


5. Rick Goodfriend offers practicing better listening thoughts on this YouTube video. 


What are your favorite listening tips?


How has applying listening skills moved your mission forward?

Photo credit above: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baejaar/