The right and wrong way to listen

Picture this: You’re sitting across from a donor who’s expressing concerns about your program. But instead of hearing what they’re really saying, you’re mentally scrolling through counterarguments, success metrics, and the perfect case study to change their mind. We’ve all been there. And we’ve all missed the opportunity hiding in that moment.

In her masterwork on leadership, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps, Jennifer Garvey Berger spends time distinguishing three different ways we typically listen:

1. Listening to win. For many, this is the primary listening style. When you are listening to win, you are parsing the other person’s words for clues for how to win an argument, or how to be right, or how to dodge responsibility for something. “Being right,” Jennifer teaches us, is almost ubiquitous in the working world.
2. Listening to fix. Also commonplace. Your friend comes to you distraught because of a relationship breakup or a conflict at work. You care about this person. You want to help them. So as you’re listening to their tale of woe, you’re formulating just the right advice you can deliver so the person can resolve the problem, or shift their thinking, or let go of whatever has hold of their nervous system.
3. Listening to understand (or listening to see). This is the path to attunement, to a meeting of hearts and minds. As you listen, you do so with a beginner’s mind and an open heart. You truly want, even if just for a few moments, to see the world through the other person’s eyes. The benefit to the speaker can be transformational. This is the rarest form of listening and one every fundraiser should aspire to.

So let’s apply this to our work as fundraisers.

When we are listening to fix our donors, it means we might think they don’t care enough about our mission or our cause, or they don’t care enough about the aspects of our work that we think is most important. We see this all the time, when our clients talk about the importance of “educating their donors.” That’s almost always a losing strategy.

When we listen to fix, we are probably message-hunting. What are the exact words, what is the offer or the call to action that will turn donors’ frustrations into more dollars? OK, admittedly, we all do that at least some of the time. It’s a legitimate part of our jobs. Up to a point. The problem is, we can listen to fix without the donor really feeling heard. And if you believe, as we do, that the key to long-term fundraising success is building authentic relationships, then listening to fix will fall short.

Listening to understand or to see is the path to building and sustaining relationships. It’s why when we survey or interview donors, we ask lots of open-ended questions. We ask those questions with frank curiosity. And if the survey happens to be part of one of our Sea Change Insight Panels®, we echo back the exact words the donors say in regular report back emails to the donors themselves. That is the foundation of attunement, the heart and mind connection that we believe builds lifelong donor relationships.

Listening to understand is a discipline. I am guessing I get it wrong as often as I get it right. But even the effort, the intention, can shift a relationship.

How to Begin

To start, begin by noting your own inner dialog when in conversation with another. Are you judging the other speaker? Are you rehearsing your rebuttal? Are you drafting copy in your head? It’s human to do these things, so no judgment here. And just noticing that pattern is a big step toward overcoming it.

The donors who will sustain your organization for decades aren’t looking for you to have all the answers or the perfect pitch. They’re looking to be truly seen and understood. When you practice listening to understand, even imperfectly, you’re not just building better fundraising strategies. You’re building trust, depth, and the kind of authentic connection that transforms transactions into partnerships. 

So in your next donor conversation, try this: silence your inner strategist for just a few minutes and listen as if you have nothing to prove and nothing to fix. You might be surprised by what you discover, and by how much that discovery means to the person across from you.