You don’t hear that phrase much. That’s kind of the point.
Every September, nonprofits do the same thing: a big fall push, a giving goal, a countdown. We’ll get there too, eventually — The Ties Foundation exists to give money away, not just raise it, and someday soon we’ll run a real, traditional fundraising campaign, because that’s how we get grant dollars into the hands of the adoptee community we built this for. But not yet. Not this month.
This month, I didn’t want to ask you for money. I wanted to ask you for something rarer, and honestly, something I think we need more.
I wanted to ask you for trust. And not even that, exactly — I wanted to ask if you’d be willing to build some with us, on your own timeline, at your own pace. Not because we demanded it, and not today. We’re not trying to earn your trust in one blog post. We just want the door open.
It’s not a fundraising problem
Here’s the thing about a brand-new organization: almost nobody knows you exist yet. Not because they wouldn’t care — because they’ve never had the chance to. I’ve spent 25 years in child welfare and intercountry adoption work, in 19 countries, and I still meet adoptees every month who’ve never heard of something like this. Not because they weren’t looking. Because nobody ever put it in front of them.
That’s not a fundraising problem. That’s a trust problem. And trust isn’t something you can buy your way out of needing — you earn it slowly, the same way anyone earns it in a real relationship: by showing up consistently, before you ever ask for anything.
Three things that actually build it
So we went looking at what actually builds that kind of trust between people and the nonprofits they come to believe in. Three things kept coming up, over and over, in the research and in our own experience:
- Communication that goes both ways, not just announcements. Trust grows when an organization listens as much as it talks. This fall we adopted something called RelationShift as our whole approach to donor relationships: curiosity before asks, invitation before requests, and stewardship that starts the moment someone shows up — not just after they give.
- Proof, not just promises — specific stories over generic claims. Anyone can say they’re making a difference. Trust comes from naming the actual thing: a real gift, a real name (when someone’s comfortable being named), a real reason it mattered. That’s why you’ll see us tell specific stories this year instead of leaning on statistics alone.
- Real financial transparency — not just numbers, but honest ones. People trust organizations that show their work, including the parts that aren’t finished yet. That’s why we pursued Candid’s Silver Seal of Transparency in our first month, and it’s why, when we shared our early fundraising numbers, we published the honest floor-target-stretch picture — including where we fell short — rather than only the wins.
Where we actually are
We’re a one-month-old organization. I say that plainly, not as a disclaimer but as a fact worth sitting with. We don’t have this figured out yet, and we’re not pretending to. What we do have is a founding belief that intercountry adoption is a lifelong story, and the support around it should be too — and a real, growing group of people who’ve already shown up for us in small and large ways since we launched.
If you’re already with us, thank you. If you’re new here, welcome — there’s no fee to join, no hoop to jump through, no ask waiting at the bottom of this page. Just follow along, on your own terms, and see what we build.
Trust doesn’t compound the way money does. It’s slower, and it’s better. We’d rather build a foundation people actually trust than one that just hit its numbers.
Not a fundraiser. A trust-raiser.
— Ian Forber-Pratt
Executive Director, The Ties Foundation
