Let's Talk Fundraising Podcast: Putting your professional development first

Beyond the "soft skills" myth — why emotional intelligence is the fundraiser's most powerful tool

There's a phrase that gets thrown around in professional development conversations that Dr Mark Hughes, founder of MCH Positive Impact, simply can't abide.

"I can't stand the term," he says, without hesitation. "It's such a misnomer. Because the skills we're talking about are, in my view, the hardest ones to develop and master."

Dr Hughes is talking about soft skills.

It's a label that, however unintentionally, makes some of the most critical capabilities a fundraiser can have sound optional, supplementary, or somehow less rigorous than "hard" technical skills. As fundraisers navigate a sector facing rapid digital change, organisational pressure, and an evolving donor landscape - that framing may be doing real damage.

In episode four of Let's Talk Fundraising, Dr Hughes joined Claire Routley, consultancy director at Legacy Futures, and CIOF policy manager Charlotte Sherman for a conversation about professional development — and what it actually takes to build a sustainable fundraising career.

Emotional intelligence, they agreed, is where it starts.

What emotional intelligence actually means

The framework Dr Hughes returns to is Daniel Goleman's model of emotional intelligence which features five interconnected elements that together determine how well we understand ourselves, regulate our responses, and connect with others.

The first is self-awareness: the ability to understand your own emotions, recognise their impact on you and those around you, and hold an accurate but not arrogant picture of your own strengths and development areas.

The second is self-regulation: the ability to manage disruptive emotions and think before acting. As Dr Hughes puts it, it's about "displaying the right emotion at the right time for the right reason to the right person. As simple and as difficult as that."

Third comes motivation: not the kind driven by status or salary, but an intrinsic drive to grow and pursue goals with genuine purpose. Emotionally intelligent people, Dr Hughes notes, can also read what motivates others, and appreciate that it may be very different from what drives them.

Fourth: Empathy and compassion. Empathy, he explains, is about treating people according to their emotional state - seeing the world from their perspective, not as you'd like them to see it. Its close companion, compassion, allows you to understand another person's experience without losing yourself in it. A distinction, he suggests, that matters enormously in practice.

Finally, social skills: the ability to listen well, to know when to lead and when to step back, and to collaborate effectively.

"Hopefully you can see why they are so hard," says Dr Hughes, "relative to perhaps other supposedly harder skills. If you take learning a new CRM system — with the right training, within a few sessions, you can become pretty competent. But to become more empathetic? That can take months of practice. If not — that's a lifetime's work."

Where fundraisers are starting from

When Dr Hughes asks participants on CIOF's Future Leaders programme to honestly assess where they sit across those five elements, a consistent pattern emerges. Empathy and social skills tend to be the strongest starting points — which, he notes, probably reflects something genuine about the kinds of people drawn to fundraising in the first place.

The area most commonly flagged as needing development is self-regulation.

"Displaying the right emotion at the right time in the right way to the right person for the right reason - it rolls off the tongue very easily. But boy, is it difficult in the moment when things are hard."

For legacy fundraisers, the stakes around emotional intelligence are particularly high. Claire Routley, who works with charities across the legacy and in-memory space, points out that legacy fundraising sits at the intersection of conversations about death, money, family, and motivation. This is territory that demands exceptional emotional sensitivity.

"Legacy fundraising is really one of the areas of fundraising that requires the highest levels of emotional intelligence," agrees Charlotte Sherman, "because you are having these deeply personal conversations."

Routley adds that legacy fundraisers may draw on the broadest range of skills across the discipline - from events to direct marketing to face-to-face relationship building. "It probably is the one that requires the greatest breadth of skills," she says.

Why AI makes emotional intelligence more important, not less

The conversation inevitably turns to artificial intelligence and Dr Hughes is direct about what he sees as the stakes.

AI, he argues, is doing three things simultaneously: accelerating the pace of change, doing many things faster and better than humans can, and proving incapable of some things that humans do naturally.

"Connection, trust, vulnerability are at the heart of fundraising," he says, "because ultimately you are seeking connection between your organisation and donors."

He cites a definition of trust from author Charles Feldman: trust is choosing to make something that you value, vulnerable to another person's actions. "AI will never be able to do that," he says. "AI has a kind of operational vulnerability, but it doesn't have emotional vulnerability."

Routley had a striking exchange on exactly this point while researching the legacy space. She asked ChatGPT whether people might actually prefer to discuss end-of-life matters with an AI because it removes the emotional friction of a human conversation. The response from ChatGPT was surprising, and acknowledged that "you can never quite have a conversation about mortality with something that is not mortal."

"Those soft skills," says Routley, "will become perceived as less and less soft in a world where computers have a lot of those analytical, data-driven skills."

How to start developing your own emotional intelligence

So where should you begin? Dr Hughes is practical about this. The starting point, he says, is simply paying attention to yourself, and to the people around you.

Seek out people you trust who know you well enough to be honest, and ask them directly: how well do you think I regulate my emotions? How good a listener am I? When you've been going through something difficult, did you feel I showed empathy?

"They are the ultimate arbitrators," he says. "If I speak to someone who says they're much better at listening, but their manager and their colleagues say they're just as bad as they always were - I'm going to side with the manager."

Claire Routley's own experience of emotional intelligence coaching offers a useful reminder. She came to it describing herself as more comfortable with the analytical side and found that she wasn't emotionally unintelligent at all. The challenge was simply one of presence.

"Centring myself, stopping, and really paying attention - it's really hard to do in this online world, when emails and Teams messages are pinging.”

The books and thinkers most recommended by Dr Hughes as starting points are Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence, and Brené Brown's research on vulnerability and connection.

The advice from the speakers is to approach this as a long game, this is not a training course you complete and move on from.

Watch or listen to episode four of Let's Talk Fundraising now: