A New Generation of Donors with Mariya Yurukova, CEO and Founder of Charity Search Group
Welcome to the latest episode of the Nonprofit Connect podcast, brought to you by Rogue Creatives, made to connect with and learn from people in the nonprofit hemisphere.
Our guest this week is Mariya Yurukova, CEO and Founder of Charity Search Group, a recruiting firm exclusively dedicated to the nonprofit sector, specializing in searches for development directors, executive directors, and major gifts officers. She also works as a consultant for her company Leapfrog Fundraising, where she is the CEO and Founder.
We'll cover the process of finding talent in the nonprofit sector, why startups shouldn’t fly too close to the sun, the new generation of donors, and why nonprofits need to invest to succeed.
What is your nonprofit focusing on?
Unfortunately, and for some very bizarre reason, nonprofits are held up to an unfair level of scrutiny. It often feels like nonprofits aren't allowed to spend any money on themselves or their marketing to improve; yet, if they’re expected to do marketing, they're severely limited on how much they can spend, making the entire thing futile.
And then, after all that, people wonder why they can't deliver on some of their promises.
However, Mariya believes their mindset is getting better. “I think that we’ve actually made some progress there,” she explains. “A lot of my startup clients and organizations – particularly organizations who are looking to advance equity and social justice in some aspect – tend to get it a little bit faster, and they’re not scared of investments because they come from a, ‘we’re just gonna try it and see what happens, because clearly what we’ve been doing so far hasn’t been working.’ I like that as a refreshing approach.”
Ushering in a new generation of donors
The nonprofit scarcity mindset partially stems from donors; they crack down on where their money goes and are more likely to criticize your every monetary decision, resulting in a difficult power dynamic.
“No matter how well intended a donor is, if they're your main source of revenue, that power dynamic is always going to be skewed, whether it's a big foundation, whether that's government grants, whether that's an individual, and so how do you change that dynamic?” Mariya says. I think it's more like you gotta be less beholden to only one source so that if you have to push a little bit, or if you think you're going to lose them, that's okay because you have other sources you can go to balance that out.”
The new generations of donors, Millennials and Gen Z, have completely different mindsets. Rather than being focused on the money, they’re focused on how many people they’re helping; they’re far more aware of what goes into a nonprofit than their predecessors ever were.
“I think these kinds of myths that we carry – and there are many of them – stem from wanting to be held accountable to donors. At some point, someone came up with this idea that we should be demonstrating the impact of the work that we do by these pie charts that say so much of your money goes directly to X, Y, Z, which is so arbitrary and makes no sense. We’ve trained a certain generation to think that’s a good indicator if you’re effective at the role or not, and I think that’s changing.”
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