Winning Words for Raising Money

By Laura Fredricks

Many people hesitate to ask for money because they are searching for the perfect words to use.

From Laura Fredricks (the author of bestselling book The ASK) comes Winning Words for Raising Money, a new resource for anyone who is tasked with the nerve-wracking job of asking for money for themselves, their nonprofit or business. Winning Words focuses like a laser on the one crucial element that can make or break a carefully planned approach – finding the right words and saying them at the right time.

Winning Words will help you feel positive, charged up, enthusiastic, and empowered to find your individual asking words and know the right time to deliver them. As Fredricks explains, finding the right words takes concentration, presence, and focus because you have to take into consideration the words you are comfortable with as well as the words that will resonate with the person or people you are engaging. Rather than offering a cookie-cutter method, this piece is designed to help you tailor a persuasive approach that will get results. Winning Words is filled with more than 60 winning phrases from which to choose and 10 exercises that can help you define your individual style. Once you complete the exercises you will have your own hand-tailored asking play book that can be put into action immediately.

Winning Words’ five-step process includes everything you need to know in order to let the words and your own personality lead you to fundraising success. Sprinkled throughout are illustrative examples that clearly show how to put money in your hands if you follow and apply each of the five steps.

About the Jossey-Bass Short Format Series

Written by thought leaders and experts in their fields, pieces in the Jossey-Bass Short Format Series provide busy, on-the-go professionals, managers and leaders around the world with must-have, just-in-time information in a concise and actionable format.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781118634097

Laura Fredricks

The ask expert, LAURA FREDRICKS, JD, trains and coaches individuals, businesses, and nonprofits on how to ask. She comes from successful careers in industries known for making the toughest and biggest asks—law and philanthropy. Laura’s Five Laws on Asking and her prior six books have helped hundreds of global executives, industry trailblazers, marketing and communication leaders, boards, fundraisers, entrepreneurs, teenagers, artists, philanthropists, and everyday people get their best professional and personal life possible, just by asking. She is the recipient of the Ralph E. Chamberlain Award for extraordinary leadership in the field of fundraising and lifetime of service to the profession and the New York Nonprofit Network’s 50 Over 50 Award for excellence in media and philanthropy.

Book preview

Introduction

Selecting the right words and delivering them at the right time puts you on the runway, ready to take off and raise money. I share this with you because in all my years of traveling nationally and internationally, doing what I love most—training people and businesses to ask for what they need and deserve—I have noticed that many people do not actually ask for money, because they are searching for the perfect words to use that will convince and persuade someone to give them money for whatever they need. They tell me their own words sound shallow, trite, and scripted. In searching for an easy and quick way to raise money, they ask me to share the perfect asking words, or they ask whether they can borrow the language that other successful fundraisers use to get money.

I focused on these challenges for quite some time, which motivated me to write this piece. It is also a logical extension—the next chapter, as Oprah would put it—of my last book, The ASK: How to Ask for Support for Your Nonprofit Cause, Creative Project, or Business Venture (Jossey-Bass, 2010). In The ASK I covered every aspect of asking, from analyzing your views on money through dealing with all the responses you will get to your ask and how to handle each one. I reference The ASK throughout this piece because it can provide backup information for certain concepts presented here. In Winning Words I direct a laser focus on what I have discovered is crucial to asking success: finding the right words and saying them at the right time.

When I first started putting together the concepts for this piece, I wondered, Why does the process of selecting the right words come easily to me, and why do I have a passion to write about it? Believe it or not, the answer came to me while doing my legal credits so that I can maintain my attorney license. Yes, it is true, and here’s the story. The years I spent writing appellate court decisions, dissecting depositions, cross-examining witnesses by breaking apart their testimony, and then carefully choosing the most persuasive words I could use in my designated twelve minutes of oral argument (facing a timer with a flashing green, then amber, then red light) before the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals—all of these gave me the training, discipline, patience, and, at times, insanity to see how the right words can really make the difference in getting the results you want, every time.

My sole intention with this new piece is to help thousands of people worldwide feel positive, charged up, enthusiastic, and empowered to find their individual asking words and their right delivery time. The win here is for you, the reader, to put in the time and energy in the exercises throughout this piece; then you will have your own hand-tailored asking playbook that you can put into action immediately. You’ll find over sixty winning phrases you can use and ten exercises; in short, everything you need today to raise