Asking Styles Overview
Why Asking Styles?
Along with the Loch Ness Monster and the Perfect 10 is the myth of the ideal fundraiser.
Lots of people think one particular type of person makes the ideal fundraiser – and that this person exists! They have in mind an image of someone outgoing and friendly. Someone very convincing who knows exactly the right words for any situation and has every fact and figure at his or her fingertips. Someone comfortable talking about money and not afraid to ask. Someone driven to close deals and unafraid of rejection.
Ideals are just that – ideals. While we can fantasize about the Perfect 10 of a fundraiser, doesn’t it make more sense for each of us to embrace our own personality, and ask in a way that will work for us?
This belief led us to develop a system to help fundraisers discover their personality type and apply their unique strengths – and work with their particular challenges – to fundraise comfortably and effectively.
We coined the term Asking Styles, and determined four main Styles: Rainmaker, Go-Getter, Kindred Spirit, and Mission Controller.
How They’re Derived
The Asking Styles are based on two characteristics – how one interacts and how one thinks.
When we put the two together, we get the four Asking Styles:
This is not to say anyone fits neatly in one quadrant or another. We all certainly possess some amount of all of these Styles – some amount of strategic thinking, or the ability to engage people, or be empathic, or be organized, and so on.
But generally one of these sounds more like us than the other, and we can use it as a guide as we use the strengths of our personality to build relationships, which is at the core of fundraising.
The Asking Style Quiz
Make sure to take the 30 true/false question Asking Style Quiz to find out not only your Primary Asking Style but your Secondary Asking Style. This will give you an idea of which characteristic predominates – how you interact or how you think. This will give you a sense of your greater strength…but also your greater challenge.
For instance, if you’re primarily Go-Getter and secondarily Kindred Spirit, then your intuition predominates. This means you’ve got a good gut and are comfortable relying on it. But it also means you struggle with the analytics, which could be challenging if you’re courting a donor who’s very analytic. And so on.
