Hannah Inman, CEO of the Great Outdoors Foundation, has some advice for anyone who wants to work in fundraising.
Spend time in sales.
Prior to becoming CEO, she worked in pharmaceutical sales, among other experiences.
“It taught me to not take rejection personally,” she said. “It also taught me that no doesn’t always mean no. It just means not right now. And it also means that I’m not connecting with them on what their needs are.”
Inman and other leaders at the Great Outdoors Foundation say they operate the nonprofit like a startup, festooning it with whiteboards, seeking inspiration from startup culture and innovative solutions to conservation and water quality.
Among the organization’s innovative solutions is its Conservation Acceleration Fund, a funding mechanism it launched two years ago designed to activate key conservation initiatives through strategic investments.
“What I’ve learned from a lot of the people in the startup world is do you have a problem [to solve]?” Inman said. “But how do you actually get to the essence of what the real problem is? And a lot of times, it’s putting yourself in that person’s shoes and understanding what they’re dealing with.”
The following is an edited, condensed Q&A with Inman
How much has the Great Outdoors Foundation grown?
I think our first 990 maybe we had raised $150,000. Now, I think our most recent 990 showed that we’re sitting around $10 million, and every year we’re raising between $5 million to $15 million a year, just within the Great Outdoors Foundation. A lot of times our money is used to leverage for projects. So total conservation, we’re north of $250 million. A lot of times what we’re doing is we’re providing support and then funding, where we’re leveraging additional funding. So for example, we just did a project with ICON Water Trails. We helped ICON raise $33.5 million privately, but that has leveraged our total up to $100 million that we’ve raised, and that other money is public and private. So it’s definitely grown significantly.
How did you do that?
Well, at first it was finding those partners that needed help creating projects, or entering into projects where it had stacked benefits. ICON Water Trails didn’t have a home at the beginning. We knew it would be its own 501(c)(3) in the end, but we needed to start it so it was incubated within the Great Outdoors Foundation. In the beginning, our staff acted as the ICON staff. And slowly, we’ve started to grow where ICON has four full-time employees of their own, and then we have some shared resources. So as we’re building these projects, we’re investing in both organizations, and we do that all over with Polk County Conservation. Our first project was with Polk County Conservation. They paid us to do their fundraising for Jester Park Nature Center and some of their other projects, and so through those fees that allowed us to build our capacity, but then we’re raising $5 million here, $10 million here for their different projects.
What is the key to raising those big dollars?
I think it’s relationships. Events are more of a way to introduce or begin new relationships, meet new people. People meet the organizations or the projects, or to celebrate the completion of those projects and the things that we’ve done together. It’s really been relationships. And for the Great Outdoors Foundation, we partner with really great organizations that have great relationships or have benefited people in a way that means a lot. Polk County Conservation, the work that they do within the community, people really have an affinity for it, whether it’s Jester Park Nature Center or the Athene North Shore Recreation Area at Easter Lake. People just love having those jewels in their backyard. They love visiting. They have those really core family memories of going to the nature center, visiting with one of the naturalists, learning about the owls, or going kayaking or canoeing, no matter the ability, at the Athene North Shore. People have formed these great relationships, or have had really impactful experiences with the naturalist at Polk County Conservation, so when you start to talk about people, or talk to people about some of these big projects, it’s not because of me, per se, it’s because they care about the project, they care about what we’re doing, and they want to be part of that. They want to see it continue.
Our donors are really invested in the legacy of the community and the legacy of conservation, and it’s so admirable when we talk to these people, and they’re taking their hard-earned dollars and investing it, because they’ve had such a formational experience that they want to make sure others in the community do too. I think also the reason that we have such support, great financial support, is conservation, water quality, outdoor recreation — that matters to people. It’s something that they want in their community. It’s a priority.
So has your strategy been to seek out business leaders in the community to lead
the charge?
The Great Outdoors Foundation has always been project and mission first. When we work with our partners, whether it’s Polk County, whether it’s business leaders like Rick Tollakson for ICON Water Trails – he was working with the Des Moines Area MPO – he really saw the vision of what water trails could do for Central Iowa and activating our rivers. And he’s working with the Des Moines Area MPO, and it’s a great project, and it’s an ambitious one. It’s 80 access points and improvements over 150 miles of waterways you have within that community development. It’s over 17 different jurisdictions. So you’re developing the community. It’s economic development. We have lots of stats on what water trails, access points does for local businesses and the spending that happens. But you also have water quality built within that. Each one of those projects has water quality practices built within them and flood resiliency, so you have those stacked benefits. We see it as a great project, and then we go and test that project. Is this something that the community really, really wants? You go have those conversations with influential leaders and say, ‘Hey, is this a project that you see One, would benefit our state and our community? Two, is this something that you think is needed in the community?’ And we start to have that conversation and then they become part of the project. But it’s always project first.
What have you learned from your family members who are entrepreneurs that you take into this position?
I think one is just the biggest lesson I learned from my family is leave things better than you found them. And that can be little ways, like picking up trash. And it can be big things like, how is this world going to be better when you leave it? I think the other piece that I learned was just tenacity and grit – that things are going to be up and down. My husband’s a home builder, and has been a home builder in Des Moines for almost 20 years. There’s been a lot of ups and downs. But every day you get up, you go to work, you do the same thing, and you may have to do it a different way. You may have to pivot, but you just keep going. My grandpa was an electrician who had his own electrical contracting company. So whether you’re an electrician or a home builder or a fundraiser, you’re going to have days that are good and you’re going to have days that are bad, and you just have to keep going. As long as I’m sitting there and doing everything that I can, there’s a faith that it’ll work out.
Has there been a time where you’ve had to pivot in this organization?
Oh, certainly. I think that has been one of the calling cards of the Great Outdoors Foundation, being project first and having that spirit of being in a startup mode. We’re not married to process, per se. It’s more, what do we need to do to get the project complete? Obviously, during COVID, we were in the middle of a fundraising campaign for ICON Water Trails. We were finishing up the fundraising campaign for Athene Pedestrian Bridge. That was certainly a time that we had to pivot in a number of different ways. Right now, a lot of our partners are experiencing funding freezes or uncertainty about whether different government programs are going to continue or how they’re going to continue, and I think that we don’t look at those challenges as obstacles. We look at them as just a different way to do business. And where did those opportunities lie? When we were going through COVID, Tom Mahoney was on our board, and he just kept saying to me, ‘Out of times of chaos and challenge, there’s always an opportunity to make an organization better or to find a path forward.’ And certainly we’re seeing that right now with some of the funding freezes or trying to figure out how we’re going to do things differently for conservation.
We’re working a lot with farmers and co-ops and the USDA and Natural Resources Conservation Service. How are we going to work with our legislators? How are we going to work with our co-ops and our farmers to continue the work, but not only continue it, how can we actually use this as an opportunity to grow the work and grow the impact, specifically of water quality? The NRCS and most of our conservation – water quality, conservation practices and funding mechanisms – have been in place since 1930, out of the Great Depression, and although the agricultural industry has changed significantly, our delivery mechanism of conservation practices on private lands has not. This may be the opportunity to find a path that actually is more efficient and helps us get more done. We’ll see if that happens, but that’s our hope, and that’s how we approach things.
What else would you say that you learn from or emulate from startups?
One of the things that the Great Outdoors Foundation board did for me is they sent me to the executive MBA program at Iowa State. I’m so thankful for the board for doing that, because it brought another level of expertise. It taught me and exposed me to more things. But I was also in that cohort with people from very established businesses that allowed me access to knowledge and processes that I would never get. But really, in the beginning, I read a lot of books, listened to a lot of podcasts, followed a lot of blogs with startups, because I was doing the same thing, just in a different way: Starting lean, concentrating, focusing in on the things that mattered the most, working on the business, and then never being afraid to invest in something that you truly believed was going to make a significant impact in the ultimate bottom line of the business.
I read “The E-Myth,” I read “The Lean Startup.” “Atomic Habits.” I read constantly. But I also feel like reading those books, in the tech world, conservation seems old school. It’s farming practices, it’s wetlands. The technology kind of changes, but it doesn’t, but that’s not what we need to change. We know the practices that work. What we need to change is the delivery mechanism, and how do you do more with less? How do you get a bigger impact? And I think that other industries provide such an example of how to do that. One of my favorite podcasts right now is “Acquired,” and that has been great, because it’s essentially just a case study on all sorts of different businesses. And I love to take what other people have done really well and see how we can apply that to our organization or to conservation in general.
What’s your process of innovation?
If you look anywhere in this office, you’re going to see a ton of whiteboards. I very much have to whiteboard things out. I read a lot, I listen to a lot of podcasts, and sometimes I just have to let things marinate. So whether I’m on a walk, or a bike ride, or something like cooking dinner, I’m always thinking about these things, and then it’ll start to formulate, and I have to whiteboard everything out. Even now with the staff, we have whiteboard sessions and figure things out. I expose myself to as much information as possible. I go down rabbit holes on different things, and and then I do a lot of data analytics, and that’s been one of the best things of the last couple years, is data is more accessible at a lower cost. Some of the things that we have access to, data-wise, we wouldn’t have had. Only large companies did before, and it’s now being built into more and more of our software. I’m very much a data person, and I’m always analyzing data to try to identify trends or to try to spot obstacles before they happen. Those are my two main processes: spreadsheets and whiteboards.
What sort of data are you looking at right now?
After COVID, nonprofits as a whole had a huge increase in individual giving, and now it’s starting to fall off. Plus, we have an uncertain economic time, so how is that going to impact? And then, because we do receive funding from corporations, there’s been a shift in how corporations are thinking, or there’s conventional wisdom, or there’s people trying to predict what corporations are doing. So a lot of that is just analyzing what the industry average is, and then seeing what our internal averages are.
One of the things that we’re looking at right now is there are a lot of smaller nonprofits that aren’t doing as well. And if you think about it, the increase of demand on nonprofits over the last decade has been incredible. The more that we privatize government services, the more that nonprofits are expected to do within the space, and so you see an increase in the need and the sophistication of delivery of programs that nonprofits have to do, which means that the sophistication within any one nonprofit has to be significant, and that’s hard to obtain when you’re resource strapped. So how can we help other nonprofits as well? One of the things that we’re looking at is we do a lot of leased employee arrangements. We’ve built out HR, payroll, accounting services, back-end operations. We help with fundraising as well for other organizations, and we’ve always done that in fee for service, or at least employee arrangement. But we’re seeing an increased need for that, so is there another service that we need to provide at the Great Outdoors Foundation that helps with back-end nonprofit operations? And then how can we help with nonprofit fundraising?
Editor’s note: This article was updated Thursday, July 31 to correct the name of a project to Athene Pedestrian Bridge.