Podcast: Embracing a Growth Mindset for Campaign Success with Dedee Wilner-Nugent

Season 3, Episode 64

In this insightful episode, Andrea Kihlstedt and Dedee Wilner-Nugent dive into the transformative power of adopting a growth mindset, particularly in the context of capital campaigns.

As fundraising professionals know, embarking on a capital campaign can be daunting, fraught with challenges and uncertainties. Dedee, a senior advisor at Capital Campaign Pro, shares her deep understanding of mindsets and explains how a growth mindset—characterized by resilience, adaptability, and positivity—can be the key to overcoming the inherent stresses of fundraising.

Whether you’re a seasoned fundraiser or new to the field, this episode provides valuable insights into how a growth mindset can enhance both your personal and professional life.

Listen Now:

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Do you have a growth mindset? Well, if you’re going into a capital campaign, you are sure going to need one. Welcome. This is Andrea Kihlstedt.

I’m excited to be here with you today and with my wonderful colleague, Dedee Wilner-Nugent, who is a senior advisor for a Capital Campaign Pro. My partner Amy Eisenstein, is winging her way across the country today because she has a talk to do on the West coast, but she will be back with me soon. And in the meantime, Dedee and I have a great topic for you.

Welcome, Dedee!

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
Thanks, Andrea. It’s a pleasure to be here.

The Power of a Growth Mindset

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So Dedee, you have a really deep-rooted understanding of mindset and how it works. You’ve looked into it a lot in many contexts. I wonder if you start out by explaining what do you mean when we think about a growth mindset.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
Sure. So first of all, let’s start with mindsets at all. This is something that’s really interesting to me when it comes to any sort of endeavor is like how are we feeling about what we’re doing while we’re doing it, right? And so if we’re doing something where we feel like we have a high degree of mastery, we’re going to be enjoying that experience of competence. If we’re feeling like we’re doing something that’s novel, we might have feelings of anxiety or uncertainty that would be normal.

So what is it that we’re assuming in the back of our minds, not even necessarily thinking through, but just sort of it’s showing up with us in that moment, what are we assuming that’s leading to those feelings? And so that’s our mindset. Our mindset is sort of the assumptions that go into whatever it is that we’re feeling in response to the world around us.

And so a growth mindset is opposite of a fixed mindset.

A fixed mindset is the idea that everything in the world is as it is you, as you are, I am as I am. If I am struggling with something today, I will always struggle with that thing. If I am skillful at something today, I’ll always be skillful at that thing. The world is fixed. A growth mindset starts with the assumption that the world is in flux, everything’s always changing. And with perseverance and courage, we can make an impact in the world.

We have agency and we can evolve over time by being open to the possibility that we could do things differently than we’re doing them right now with, again, perseverance and courage.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. Perseverance and courage, boy, are those ever two wonderful key words for capital campaigns, right? I mean, I know almost no one who goes into a capital campaign without a pretty big batch of fear and anxiety. And if you think you’re just stuck in that, if you have a fixed mindset for that, if you’re just stuck that way, you’re going to be in trouble.

How a Growth Mindset Fuels a Capital Campaign

So the issue here really is that is people go into capital campaigns and they know they’re going to be facing bigger goals than they’ve ever faced before. They know they’re going to have to ask people for bigger gifts than they’ve ever had to ask before, they know they’re going to be asked to do things they’ve never done before. The natural instinct is:

“Oh my goodness, I don’t think I can do this. I’m afraid I can’t do this. I’m scared I’m going to run away from it.”

And that doesn’t feel like a growth mindset.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
Exactly, exactly. Think about all the energy you’re putting into managing all those negative feelings and negative self-talk that could be channeled into productivity with your capital campaign.

And also when you embrace a growth mindset, there’s research, there’s good scientific research that shows you will feel more comfortable taking personal risks and striving for more stretch goals. You’ll be more motivated every day when you wake up in the morning, you’ll be more eager to work on the campaign. You’re going to have enhanced brain functionality because all of those stress chemicals are not going to be inhibiting your brain functionality and your relationships and performance are both going to improve with a growth mindset.

So there’s lots of reasons to embrace a growth mindset when it comes to capital campaign fundraising. In fact, I’d argue that the stress is probably the hardest thing that a capital campaign participant needs to overcome. More than finding the donors, finding the leaders, coming up with the plan, all those things are less difficult than overcoming the anxiety and stress that can show up if you don’t have the right mindset with a capital campaign.

How to Pivot to a Growth Mindset (with Examples)

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So Dedee is a growth mindset something people can learn to have, or do you think some people are just born with it and some people aren’t?

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
Oh, no, absolutely a learnable skill, and I encourage anybody who’s curious about this, there’s a vast amount of information on the Internet.

[A growth mindset] is something that is part of the pedagogy of many school curriculums because we know this is also important just for everybody — not just people doing fundraising and especially for children. And I can give you some examples in my own experience with capital campaign fundraising of when people have learned to kind of pivot from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Oh, good. Yeah. Let’s hear.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
Okay. So here’s one example. Two organizations I’ve worked with. I’ll give you a couple examples here.

Example One

In their campaign planning stages, both of them were confronted by real challenges in terms of a building. And in both cases they found multiple buildings, but there were obstacles in terms of the price or the timing for when they would have to pay a down payment and that sort of thing, or even just the space wasn’t quite the perfect fit.

In one case, one organization, the ED gradually became more and more anxious, and she was at the point of being about to quit when we convened a meeting with her campaign committee and just talked about how it was feeling to be in this moment. Hearing herself, sharing what she shared with all of them and then hearing them all react to this, what everybody in the room realized is that nobody was having the exact same experience.

And that opened the door to beginning to talk about how there are different ways to think about the same facts. One person can look at a set of facts and think the cup’s half empty, another person can look at the facts and think the cup’s half full. When you realize your point of view isn’t the only way to look at something that’s kind of the door opening.

Example Two

Another example is in the other project I was talking about, they did have a growth mindset from the very beginning. And so what happened is each time they found a site that wasn’t a good fit, they got clearer about what the right fit would be, and they never gave up. And ultimately what that did was lead to them finding the perfect site, which was way beyond their expectations because they just kept that attitude of positivity throughout the process.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, that’s so interesting. I mean, I just saw something about this that just struck me the other day, and it was an actor who was talking about using the challenge, use the challenge that when something is thrown at you that’s negative, turn it around and use it to good end. See it as a creative opportunity, see it as an opportunity to move forward.

And that’s really the difference between a fixed mindset, which is woe is me, this is a problem. And a growth mindset, which is look at this problem and how I can use it, how I can use it to move forward, how I can use it to learn from it, how I can use it to build a relationship.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
Exactly. Yeah.

Example Three

I have another example for you, Andrea, if you’re interested.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, please.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
So when we do feasibility studies at Capital Campaign Pro, our strategy is to have our nonprofit leaders do their own interviews. Our job is to train people to do those interviews. And so, one situation where I see this growth mindset emerging the most often is in this process of training people to conduct interviews, the first time that anyone tries practice interviewing somebody for a feasibility study, it usually comes at a big mush.

But by doing that in an open way where you can watch each other and practice together, you can watch somebody try, learn from their experience, and then when you try and they watch you, they have the same opportunity to learn from your experiences and so together by the time you’ve both operating at a higher level of functionality.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. In fact, it seems to me, Dedee, that the whole idea of practicing that we are always practicing rather than performing is a sign of a growth mindset.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
That is the essence of it, absolutely.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
And that often in solicitation training, and you know what? We do this solicitation training for Capital Campaign Pro a few times a year.

Another Example

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
So here’s an example of what Andrea is talking about, which is for another client of mine that is in the quiet phase of their capital campaign. They had been working on their campaign for over two years, had reached who were kind of easy to connect with and then had kind of run up against with the next group of donors that were in their portfolios that they were intending to reach out to.

People weren’t responding. People would take a meeting, but it didn’t really go anywhere. It started to feel very vague and the campaign felt like it was bogging down and stagnating.

By applying the growth mindset to that situation when I started working with this client at that point, we were able to revisit the notes from those meetings that had happened with those donors and start to notice where those missed opportunities maybe had been left behind that we could then follow up on and keep the campaign going.

And lo, within just about 60 days, we started to see the money start rolling back in again!

Looking at Your Capital Campaign in a New Way

So sometimes we can get into the habit of campaigning, we’ve been going for a while, it starts to feel like a rut, and that’s the point at which it’s time to take some fresh eyes to look at it in a different way. Because there are opportunities that we are missing. And that’s the great news is that there is an affinity of them out there and we just have to have the right mindset to notice them.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. Another time when mindset comes up and becomes so important is when a campaign and they do a zoning problem, there’s a donor problem. I mean, challenges just come up or questions that people don’t know the answers to:

• How do we handle donor recognition?
• How do we handle one thing or another?
• What do we do about this problem or about that problem?

And it’s often the case if you see the problem as an opportunity to ask donors and to involve donors in discussing the problem and helping to come up with a solution that you turn what started out as a problem into an amazing opportunity for a donor to feel engaged.

And that that’s the difference between fixed mindset, which is we have a problem and we don’t know what to do about it, to growth mindset, which is we have a problem and, yippee, now we have a chance to really go and invite people in to help us solve the problem, to help us figure out a solution. What a difference between those two approaches.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
Absolutely. And not only that, but in addition, people who are using a growth mindset are going to think, even when it’s going well, that this isn’t the only way this could be done.

It’s About Removing Your Limitations

So going into a campaign there’s one plan, it’s going to work one way, we can know that at the beginning, and it never changes. Even if everything’s going on track, when you realize that the journey is more than what you planned at the outset and that the surprises are actually supposed to happen and will benefit you when you have an opportunity to pivot, not just because it’s a problem but because it’s an unforeseen opportunity, you’re more likely to take it.

And actually, we’ve seen clients raise more money than the goal they set initially, and that’s another thing that can come out of a growth mindset. It’s not limiting yourself to that first goal that you had when by collaborating with your donors, you might be able to exceed your goal.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s so interesting how powerful mindset is, Dedee, and how infrequently we talk about it. I mean, I’m so glad you brought this topic up because capital campaigns are big and important and often frightening. And the mindset anyone brings to it will in large part determine the outcome. But most of our conversations about capital campaigns have to do with timelines and policies and who we’re going to ask next.

This higher-level topic of how we as people who are in the campaign mode are able to be adaptable, are able always to see the positive opportunity that somebody else might just see as defeating is everything in terms of the possibilities of success. It’s such an exciting topic, really. I’m so glad you brought it up.

Summing Up and Final Thoughts

Dedee, we could actually talk much more, but we try to keep these podcasts pretty short. I wonder if in wrapping up you could give people three things that they might do to try to develop more of their growth mindset.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
Sure. I absolutely have three great ideas for you, Andrea.

1. First, I recommend that everyone try optimism on, and if it’s not your natural state of consciousness, try faking it till you make it. Practice smiling, saying hello to people that you might not normally say hello to, use positive self-talk and set yourself small, achievable goals that can help you build confidence in your ability to grow and change. And if you do this in any domain in your life, it’ll be easier to do in a capital campaign context.
2. The second thing I recommend is think like a scientist when things go sideways, rather than playing the blame or guilt game. Instead, try and step aside, allow the space for those emotions, but also step outside of those for a minute to reflect on what you can learn from your situation and to celebrate the process accomplishments even when the outcomes are something of a struggle.
3. The third thing I would recommend is just practicing self-compassion and self-awareness. It’s hard to have a growth mindset when your body is tired, hungry, thirsty, not getting enough exercise, not getting enough downtime and breaks. So being able to have compassion for your body that helps us do the work that we do, recognize there’s a place for our emotions, but that they don’t have to control us and sometimes they can be the biggest obstacle to campaign success. So let’s take care of ourselves.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
You think people should think about mindset every day?

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
I actually do. I think it’s helpful across the board, and I think if you spent 15 minutes just trying to be mindful of what is your mindset in a given moment, maybe even one minute, spend one minute a day thinking about mindset. I think you’ll be surprised at how much it just benefits your consciousness and energy level and effectiveness throughout the rest of that day.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Dedee, I have a little story that just to exemplify one of your points, and I can’t let us go without it. I’m getting old, and as you get old your balance is less good. It really does get worse. It gets worse for most everybody, and my balance is getting worse.

So every week I go and I work out with a coach to try to keep my balance going. I step on and balance for a minute or two on this little round balance beanie thing, which I find incredibly difficult. And what I found is that if I make it a point to smile when I’m on it, my balance gets better. It really does.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
That’s what I’m talking about. That’s exactly right.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Mind you, I hate balancing on it. I don’t feel like smiling at all because it’s just very difficult for me. It’s very difficult to balance on that. But if I say, okay, now smile. There’s something about changing your facial expression that radiates through your mind and your body and things start to connect better.

So even just having a little smile practice every day, whether you smile in the mirror, whether you smile on a balance beam, whether you smile at people in your neighborhood, whether you smile at your boss, whether you smile at your donor, just something that little can have a massive effect in your developing a growth mindset.

Dedee, I’m smiling at you. Thank you so much for doing this with us today. It’s just a pleasure and I want to continue on with this topic. I want us to think about how best to do that. Maybe we could do a workshop.

Dedee Wilner-Nugent:
I love that idea.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
On mindset. Anyway, it’s a super important topic. If you’re listening to this or thinking about a capital campaign and you want to have more information, go to capitalcampaignpro.com and sign up for a strategy session. You’ll probably get Amy or me and we’d be happy to talk to you about your capital campaigns.

And if you have any questions about this topic or an interest in this topic, email me at andrea@capitalcampaignpro and let me know that this is a topic that interests you.