Strong Back, Soft Front

A note to my team on empathy as a driver of our work

I’m a huge fan of Roshi Joan Halifax, a Zen Buddhist teacher, who often talks about the Buddhist concept of “Strong Back, Soft Front.”

She brought it up during a TED talk about compassion and empathy:

“In Buddhism, we say, "it takes a strong back and a soft front." It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions. And that is the mental quality of equanimity.

But it also takes a soft front -- the capacity to really be open to the world as it is, to have an undefended heart.”

What this means in meditation practice: the strong back is what roots us in reality, and the soft front is being open to what is happening around us in the moment. The basics of mindfulness.

I can hear you thinking from afar: “Ok, Bout, what has this to do with fundraising?” Fair question, it seems quite out there, but let me frame it differently.

Together with Dr. Sara Konrath, I ran a study on empathy in fundraisers towards their donors and how it might affect their relationships and fundraising outcomes. Surprising to exactly not a single fundraiser, those fundraisers who expressed higher empathy towards their donors were also those who raised more money for their organization. There are some asterisks there, that I encourage you to dig into (blog post here), but empathy appears to be a factor in our work.

Empathy, being open to another’s experiences and emotions, sounds a lot like the Soft Front, doesn’t it?

To apply the concept a little more literally:

A Strong Back: Yes, it is necessary to have a complete grasp of the mission of the organization, what impact we have, where the giving opportunities are, how people can contribute, and how you feel about the mission. Know the answer to this question: why do you show up day by day to advocate for distancing our neighbors from poverty? This is our version of the Strong Back, the grounding in the mission and our own convictions that is needed to be an authentic, credible representative of the cause.

A Soft Front: As fundraisers, we broker the relationship between the donor and the cause, organization, mission, etc. We can’t broker a relationship when we are showing up to “tell and sell” (thanks as always to Jim Hodge for the language). Brokering the relationship means that we need to reconcile the donor’s needs, wants, desires, vision, mission with the work the organization does. This requires empathy. This requires us to listen more than talk. When we listen to the donor, we find out all kinds of things about how they feel about the organization, what their reasons are to be involved, why they give, and what they might be interested in supporting next. This allows you as a fundraiser to be more proactive in finding the right opportunity for them to give. In turn, this makes the donor an equal partner in the venture, because their voice is heard and included: you are co-creating the future.

Although there is a bizarre aspect to framing our work this way, it is just about undeniable that we do operate in the space of values. Roshi Joan works in hospice care. She guides people in the final stages of life, when they often reflect on the values they hold, and whether their lives were in service of those values. As fundraisers, we have the opportunity to guide people while they’re very much alive, in accordance with their values, and we can only find those values if we listen for them.

For that, we need our Soft Fronts as much, if not more, than we do our Strong Backs.