Recently, I released a three-part tip series on how to build a highly successful work environment; as a bonus tip for that series, I've decided to discuss some questions that will help you build a diverse group of people into a unified team. If you missed any of the tip series, Click Here to Read Them!

Now, this tip is not a tip just for team leaders but for team members, fundraisers, leaders, managers—anyone who is contributing to building a team and serving on a team. These are questions to ask yourself when building and strengthening your team. These are questions to consider for your career and the careers of those with whom you work.

1: Am I building people or am I building my empire? Or, even worse, am I using people to achieve my own goals? When talking about building people, I like to think and talk about impact. What impact does the individual have on the organization? On fundraising? On the people we serve? Impact motivates people to do their best work to change and save...

In my video Tip, Highly Successful Fundraisers Get Donors Excited To Meet With Them, I emphasized the importance of remembering your role as a fundraiser is to earn a visit with a donor. I strongly encourage you to watch the previous Tip if you haven't done so before reading this one. I've included it directly below:

Let me be clear right here. I am not writing about trying to make a “cold call” on a prospect that may not know of your nonprofit. I have written many Tips on getting an appointment to see prospects, making cold calls and trying to make cold calls into “warm calls.”

I am talking about a visit with a donor.

I see this more and more often, with long-time donors, and even with mega-donors I work with. Fundraisers I help talk about donors who give through an annual appeal but won’t connect for the rest of the year. There are donors who give regularly but never pick up the phone when you call.

The fundraiser wants to thank the donor and cultivate the donor to make another...

The other day at a meeting with hundreds of very wealthy donors and numerous influential nonprofits, I had the following conversation with a leader who has a non-fundraising role with one of the most successful nonprofits at this meeting.

This nonprofit has over eighty individuals that have each given $1 million dollars or more and are all members of their $1 million donor recognition society. Years ago, I successfully helped this nonprofit solicit many of these gifts, but for the last few years, we have had little contact.  

In our conversation, this leader lamented the fact that none of the $1 million donors had made a second $1 million-plus gift. That absolutely shocked me. I know many of these donors. Their commitment to this nonprofit has not diminished. Their wealth has not suddenly vanished. The nonprofit remains very effective in carrying out its mission.

“What do you think is going on?” I asked the leader.

“I have no idea,” she said. “I just know we give them every opportu...

There are many excellent quotes about habits, and one of Aristotle’s captures the essence of this tip very well:

 “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

It took me a long time to develop good habits for both productive living and success. As a teenager, good habits were not something I was concerned about. The results were predictable. If it were not for a good family somehow keeping me between the yellow lines, I am sure I would have never attended college. College can be a place where very bad habits are developed and deepened. I did plenty of that.

However, somewhere, somehow in college, life came together through the guidance of a few good role models and involvement in activities where I could experience success. Dr. Mel Levine, a doctor at the University of North Carolina, used to say, “Success is like a drug. The more you have, the more you want.” I had some success in college—and I wanted more.      

Early in my career, I was fortunate...