What’s The Best Donation You Ever Made Through a Nonprofit?

Posted on August 18, 2010 by Pastor Foley

The folks at WiseBread are running a contest where readers write in to identify the best purchase they ever made in their life.

While I was initially simultaneously transfixed and unnerved by readers responses to date–“6 years of school” and “a small house during grad school” sit side by side with Sara3903’s note that her best purchase ever was “laser hair removal”–I eventually came to and found myself asking:

What’s the best donation I’ve ever made through a nonprofit?

Two realizations initially emerged:

  1. I could think of a lot of meaningful donations I’ve made. None of the really meaningful ones that came to mind at first were ones I made through a nonprofit, however. That’s telling, and not in a good way for us nonprofit fundraiser types.
  2. For the number, variety, and amount of donations Mrs. Foley and I have given over the years, it was pretty sad that this was a hard question.

I know the folks at GiveWell might cluck their tongues that I didn’t rank order my donations by their effectiveness and efficiency, but as I reflected on the giving Mrs. Foley and I had done, I came to the conclusion that I would consider effectiveness to be necessary but not sufficient, and I think efficiency is typically defined in cold and dehumanizing ways.

In the end, I concluded that there were three types of donations Mrs. Foley and I had given that were my most favorite:

1.  Donations of personally meaningful gifts-in-kind

I’m talking here about really good stuff we hated to part with, not  junky stuff on its last leg. I thought of two cars that my family and I had donated to different homeless shelters over the years–cars that ran well and that we could have used for several more years, but cars that we felt we were under-using at the time and thus were better used by people who couldn’t afford them. I also thought of one Christmas when I was a student pastor, and how I and the family had purchased and anonymously donated through our church a brand new Nintendo video gaming unit to a woman whose husband had left her high and dry with four kids. We were dirt poor at the time, would have enjoyed the videogame unit ourselves, and spent our Christmas bonus to buy it. I’m not sure if that was effective or efficient, but the memory of it has stayed with me for more than 20 years. Maybe that’s why I like With This Ring so much. They teach people to give away their coolest stuff in order to help dig clean water wells in Africa and to teach others to give radically, too.

2. Donations that made a strong statement about a particular way we felt like a cause should be addressed

Here I thought of the gift Mrs. Foley and I made in the wake of the Haitian earthquake. I wrote about that here. What made it one of the best donations I’d given wasn’t just that I feel like the gift was efficient and effective. It was that I prayed about and deeply considered all the possible options and then chose the way that I myself felt the cause should be addressed. It was a gift of affiliation, a concept about which we wrote recently.

3. Donations we made as part of an overarching plan.

What also came to mind for me were our efforts to think through and carry out an overarching plan for giving, one that moved beyond causes about which we were already passionate and into causes about which we knew we needed to become more passionate and involved. It wasn’t the particular donation in and of itself that was the best; rather, it was the sense that we were maturing in our giving, carrying out a thoughtful plan of involvement that was comprehensive, proportional, and maturing in terms of the causes it encompassed and how it encompassed them.

The most interesting thing to me about the list I created was its repeatability. I had thought that “best gifts” could only occur once in a while, and that expecting each gift to be a best gift would be an unreasonable standard.

But as I looked at the list, I realized:

  • I can regularly give away items of value to me.
  • I can regularly make thoughtful gifts that express affiliation and particular ways of addressing a cause.
  • I can regularly give as part of an overarching strategy that moves my giving in the direction of my involvement in causes becoming more comprehensive, proportional, and mature.

The other thing I realized about the list was that no fundraiser could have made any of those things happen for me. They were intrinsic to my life and to the meanings therein. The nonprofit served as the platform, but not as the solicitor or meaning maker.

And how about your best gift?

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Can’t Figure Out How to Get Your Donors Involved? Try Videogames!

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Pastor Foley

So if you ask people to volunteer in your cause before you ask them to give to your cause, you’ll double your donation dollars.

But what if your cause is helping the people of Argentina and you’re trying to reach people in the United States?

Solution: Try videogames.

Check out this 20 minute TED masterpiece by Jane McGonigal entitled Gaming Can Make A Better World. McGonigal’s bio summarizes her approach:

Jane McGonigal asks: Why doesn’t the real world work more like an online game? In the best-designed games, our human experience is optimized: We have important work to do, we’re surrounded by potential collaborators, and we learn quickly and in a low-risk environment. In her work as a game designer, she creates games that use mobile and digital technologies to turn everyday spaces into playing fields, and everyday people into teammates. Her game-world insights can explain — and improve — the way we learn, work, solve problems, and lead our real lives.

In the TED video she describes three games her team has thus far created. My personal favorite:

We did a game called Superstruct at The Institute For The Future. And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global ExtinctionAwareness System, of course. We asked people to come online almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team. You’ve got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world.

But in our game, instead of just having five peopleon the dream team, we said everybody is on the dream team, and it’s your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net. We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, if you Google “Superstruct”, and see.

What can you do if your cause is so impoverished that <sniff> it doesn’t yet have a videogame associated with it?

Try Googling the name of your cause coupled with the word “videogame”. I Googled “North Korea videogame”, for example, and discovered a half a dozen titles that immediately began to foster ideas in me about how they could be used to promote one of Seoul USA’s core causes, supporting the underground church of North Korea. You might be equally surprised to discover that a game exists that relates to your cause.

A fair question to ask:

Does videogaming lead to real world involvement with the cause…or does it preclude such involvement by virtually “scratching the itch” to make a difference?

McGonigal contends that if it does the latter–if, in other words, the game is more immersive than reality–then that’s an indictment of the reality into which we invite donors:

Instead of providing gamers with better and more immersive alternatives to reality, I want all of us to be become responsible for providing the world with a better and more immersive reality.

Another solution is to check out Blitz Bazaar, which incentivizes real world involvement through an intriguing game structure–making us “jealous unto good works”, as it were.

Last word to Blitz Bazaar’s Lloyd Nimetz (who, by the way, not only spotted the McGonigal post in the first place but also is applying these concepts to getting people involved in helping Argentina):

What would happen if organizations put more energy and creativity into recruiting people’s time and skill instead of their money?  More concretely, what if civil society and government did a better job of tapping into the power of game-mechanics to drive civic participation?  My proposal:  social leaders should step up and set goals for ourselves.  Community leaders should set operational goals i.e. 10% increase in volunteerism & civic participation, and we should keep clear metrics.  Every university, school, organization, corporation, church, etc. in the nation could be put to the challenge.

How about you join me in making this a two-player game?

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Research: Asking People to Volunteer Before Asking Them To Give Doubles Donation Dollars

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Pastor Foley

You know those conspiracy theories about how technology exists today that would enable cars to run on dishwashing soap but Big Oil and Big Automakers are suppressing its spread?

I have a similar conspiracy theory:

Technology exists today that would double the amount of donations the average nonprofit receives, but Big Fundraising is suppressing its spread.

The suppressed technology?

Voluntarism.

We’ve previously detailed the 2001 Independent Sector study that demonstrated that volunteers give twice as much to nonprofits as non-volunteers.

Twice as much.

Yet you’d be hard pressed today to find a book on fundraising where lesson 1 is, “Get folks to volunteer first. Ask them to give after that.”

So in an effort to bash through Big Fundraising’s suppression of this news and of this practice, consider this 2008 study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business Center for Social Innovation.

(Conspiracy theorists should note that the study had to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research. Did Big Fundraising manage to keep this out of the nonprofit trade mags?)

The research, conducted by Jennifer Aaker and Wendy Liu, consisted of three lab experiments demonstrating that when test subjects were asked to volunteer for a nonprofit and then only subsequently being asked to give, they gave twice as much money as those asked for a donation right off the bat:

According to a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in October 2008, asking supporters for their time, not for their money, is a better way to increase donations. Jumping straight in and soliciting potential donors for funds can, in fact, alienate them––making them less likely to get involved and less likely to actually donate. Asking them to volunteer first, however, can positively shift their willingness to give both time and money.

Question: Why? Aaker and Liu:

The reason, according to Jennifer Aaker of Stanford Graduate School of Business and Wendy Liu of UCLA, coauthors of the study, is that questions regarding time versus money stimulate different mindsets. When people are solicited for their time, they automatically think in terms of emotional meaning and fulfillment: Will volunteering for this charity make me happy? When tapped for money, they start thinking about the far more practical, boring, and sometimes painful matter of “economic utility”: Will making a donation make a dent in my wallet?

“The ‘time first’ approach therefore makes the emotional significance of what you’re asking stand out, which stimulates positive feelings and an increased belief that volunteering would be linked to personal happiness. That emotional mindset ultimately leads to greater giving,” explains Aaker, General Atlantic Partners Professor of Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Make sure to click through and read in detail about the three experiments that were conducted that led to the conclusion that connecting people to the “deep mission” of the organization through voluntarism made them “more inspired to be involved in that endeavor in every way”–including financially.

And just in case Big Fundraising blocks your browser window from opening to the whole post, make sure to contemplate the following thought from Aaker with regard to your nonprofit’s own practice:

What’s particularly interesting is that participants who were asked first about their time not only gave the most money of all, but also they donated the most time to the organization. This affirms for the researchers that what motivates people to give dollars when they are asked first for their time is not simply guilt; that is, they are not donating more generously as a way of “buying out” of having to give up precious hours. “If guilt had been operating, then those who were asked for time first may have given more money, but they would have given less time than any of the other groups. In fact, the reverse was true,” says Aaker.

Editor’s note: Thanks to Blitz Bazaar’s Lloyd Nimetz for breaking through Big Fundraising’s barricade to call attention to Aaker and Liu’s research.

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