Do the Word

Hooray to my bud Jason Dick at A Small Change for his interview with Adam Penenberg, author of Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves.

And hooray to Adam Penenberg for applying the concept of the viral loop to nonprofits.

(And hooray to Give and Take for calling the article to our attention!)

Since we’re in the midst of this series on sustainable fundraising practices for nonprofits, however, I’d like to suggest to Adam that we apply his concept differently. Sustainably, you know.

Here’s Adam’s recommendation:

Viral marketing relies on people passing on information they deem worthy–whether it’s a link to a funny video on YouTube, a political message, petitions, etc. If a nonprofit has a passionate core group of donors then the key would be to incentivize these donors to reach out to their social networks of friends, family, colleagues and neighbors. It would work well with a specific campaign. Ideally, the non-profit could create a Facebook application that could incentivize donations. Let’s say your organization is called Save the Cats (STC). I’d set it up like this: Create a Save the Cats branded app fueled by virtual currency. Just by downloading the you receive $100 in STC dollars. They can be spent at any number of retailers that donate inventory the retailer would like to sell anyway. You then get $30 off a shirt from the Gap, $20 off a rental car, $40 off a pair of rollerblades, etc. As your cash reserves dwindle you can earn more virtual currency–it doesn’t cost STC anything–by getting 5 friends to download the app and donating a certain amount of money. It should be small increments, say, $10 each. And so on and so on. Once you have a large enough installed base you can try al sorts of things. At the very least you gain thousands or even hundreds of thousands of new names to add to your donor lists. You raise money for your non-profit. And you spread your message. It’s a win-win-win for everyone involved.

What’s not sustainable about such an approach?

It makes the marketing campaign viral, not the cause.

That is, taken in isolation, Adam’s recommendation makes perfect sense. But envision two nonprofits doing the same thing and you’ll begin to see a challenge emerging:

Should I work for $20 in Save The Cat dollars? Or should I instead work for $20 in Save The Marmot dollars, since STM dollars are redeemable at Banana Republic, whereas STC dollars are only redeemable at Old Navy, which I like much less?

Multiply this by ten nonprofits, and then ten thousand–just a fraction of the 1.5 million or so nonprofits in existence today–and you bring to the virtual arena the very same kind of challenges we have in the physical world with fruitcake sales, nonprofit auctions, golf scrambles, and every other kind of fundraising event where we promote involvement through self-interest rather than direct, personal involvement in the cause: Commodification. As these kind of campaigns proliferate, we select our involvement more and more based on the self-interest reward and less and less on the cause.

Not sustainable.

The alternative?

What Lave, Wenger, and other Situated Learning specialists call Legitimate Peripheral Participation:

Legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) is a theoretical description of how newcomers become experienced members and eventually old timers of a community of practice or collaborative project (Lave & Wenger 1991). According to LPP, newcomers become members of a community initially by participating in simple and low-risk tasks that are nonetheless productive and necessary and further the goals of the community. Through peripheral activities, novices become acquainted with the tasks, vocabulary, and organizing principles of the community.

Gradually, as newcomers become old timers, their participation takes forms that are more and more central to the functioning of the community. LPP suggests that membership in a community of practice is mediated by the possible forms of participation to which newcomers have access, both physically and socially. If newcomers can directly observe the practices of experts, they understand the broader context into which their own efforts fit. Conversely LPP suggests that newcomers who are separated from the experts have limited access to their tools and community and therefore have limited growth.

In other words, rather than making a Save The Cat Dollars campaign go viral, find ways for people to save cats through social networking that are “simple and low-risk tasks that are nonetheless productive and necessary and further the goals of the community” such that saving cats itself becomes a viral cause.

For ideas on how nonprofits are already doing this, read Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus at the same time you’re reading Adam’s Viral Loop.

It may take you two books to learn how to do it this way. But, hey, at least then you’ll be on the road to fundraising sustainability.

Sustainable fundraising means embodying the cause in your, um, body:

In the 1980s, John and Leslie Miller owned several thriving retail businesses in Colorado Springs.

In 1992, the Millers sold their businesses to pay off their house mortgage and business loans, which John Miller said was to follow God’s directive to get out of debt. That same year they founded Crossfire Ministries, a [Colorado] Springs Christian nonprofit at 307 N. Union Blvd. that gives away food, clothes and toiletries to the needy.

Crossfire Ministries is within a sagging gabled house with loose and missing shingles. The building used to be a flower shop owned by the Millers….

The ministry averages 27,000 visits per year from thousands in the area, Crossfire records show. Its annual budget is about $90,000…

The Millers have no savings or investments. They live solely on monetary and in-kind donations made directly to them, John Miller told me. One person, for instance, pays the Millers’ home electric bill.

A no-frills kind of guy, Miller typically dresses in ministry-donated clothes and eats ministry-donated food. During my interview, he munched on a day-old Safeway muffin.

(Make sure to read the rest of Mark Barna’s article on Crossfire. In fact, make sure to sign up for Mark’s RSS feed. He’s a great local religion columnist–a genuine rarity, enjoyable and meaningful no matter what your locale.)

There’s something about restricting your diet to muffins donated to your ministry that is far more compelling to donors than handing them the most poignant brochure. You are the cause you eat, you know.

What would it look like for you to truly embody your cause, not just raise money to support it?

The practice is actually quite ancient. Check out poor Ezekiel as God speaks to him in Ezekiel 4:9-17:

⁹ “Also take for yourself wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt; put them into one vessel, and make bread of them for yourself. During the number of days that you lie on your side, three hundred and ninety days, you shall eat it. ¹⁰ And your food which you eat shall be by weight, twenty shekels a day; from time to time you shall eat it. ¹¹ You shall also drink water by measure, one-sixth of a hin; from time to time you shall drink. ¹² And you shall eat it as barley cakes; and bake it using fuel of human waste in their sight.”
¹³ Then the LORD said, “So shall the children of Israel eat their defiled bread among the Gentiles, where I will drive them.”
¹⁴ So I said, “Ah, Lord GOD! Indeed I have never defiled myself from my youth till now; I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by beasts, nor has abominable flesh ever come into my mouth.”
¹⁵ Then He said to me, “See, I am giving you cow dung instead of human waste, and you shall prepare your bread over it.”
¹⁶ Moreover He said to me, “Son of man, surely I will cut off the supply of bread in Jerusalem; they shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and shall drink water by measure and with dread, ¹⁷ that they may lack bread and water, and be dismayed with one another, and waste away because of their iniquity.

Man. Be thankful for those day-old muffins, John and Leslie.

In our next post on sustainable fundraising practices for nonprofits: Make the cause viral, not the marketing campaign.

Most nonprofit fundraising practices are not sustainable.

By that I’m not referring to the cost of reply cards and the stamps to mail them, nor am I referring to the salaries of development officers in comparison to most nonprofit budgets.

Instead, I’m referring to the well nigh universal nonprofit practice of attempting to grow by recruiting prospective donors totally unrelated to an organization’s existing donors.

Yes, I actually did mean what it sounded like I meant in the previous sentence. I’m questioning the sustainability of a fundamental practice of traditional fundraising. I’m suggesting that this practice, which we accept and employ uncritically and consider basic to our nonprofit survival, is:

• not sustainable given the staggering growth in the number of nonprofits worldwide
• a major contributor to fundraising anemia and mission drift among nonprofits
• a major culprit in why the average American is no more generous today (as a function of percentage of income donated to charity) than s/he was fifty years ago before the advent of modern fundraising.

This contention is likely to raise more than a few eyebrows, blank stares, and dismissive contempt. That’s OK. Let’s consider this the Silent Spring of blog posts on sustainable fundraising practices for nonprofits. And to that end, let’s summon some of the wisdom on sustainability in general from the environmental movement itself.

Gannon Sims writes on a totally different subject in Call & Response this past week, but his summary of Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow” is too good to pass up and eminently applicable to the topic at hand:

In “Jayber Crow,” Wendell Berry tells the story of Athey Keith, a farmer determined to leave his land better than he found it. A true conservationist, Athey never plowed more than he could fertilize — with the manure from his own animals. When Athey looked over his land he saw more than he needed and he had more than he used. Athey knew the land and the land knew him. No one element of his farm took priority over the other. Feed, cattle, crops — it all mattered. He couldn’t have one without the other.

Then one day everything changed. Athey’s son-in-law bought a tractor. He was tired of the old way. He wanted something new and wanted it now. The tractor had a headlight and he could use it to plow after dusk. If he maintained the engine, the tractor didn’t need to rest. It plowed more land and faster than ever before. He learned that he could make more money by planting more corn than anything else. In his quest to replace the old with the new, the son-in-law lost the balance.

Lost the balance.

If there’s a phrase that aptly describes the state of modern nonprofit fundraising, that’s it. Aren’t we yet totally disgusted with wealth identifier indices, acquisition campaigns that cost more money than they raise, and pandering to the affluent in hopes of getting a donation (or even just an appointment or a referral)?

What’s the alternative? What does sustainability look like in fundraising practice?

Simply put, it means three practices:

• Us being the lead giver to our cause (1) by percentage of our personal incomes, not total dollars given, and (2) comprehensively, meaning that our heads, hearts, hands, and pocketbooks are all fully involved in the cause. No more giving instead of volunteering or volunteering instead of giving, and no more delegating our involvement to professionals and experts “far more qualified” than we are to impact the cause;
• Us restricting our fundraising only to those within our sphere of influence, and only in ways that promote comprehensive involvement with the cause, i.e., no more letting people write checks to “support” us. No more giving in place of volunteering to personally impact the cause. Henceforth we only accept money from people when money is part of a commitment to comprehensive involvement on their part;
• All organizational growth deriving from us training those in our sphere of influence to spread the cause (1) only to others in their sphere of influence, and (2) only in ways that promote comprehensive involvement that includes but extends beyond financial giving.

What would be the result of the implementation of those three sustainable fundraising practices?

The end of the tragedy of the nonprofit commons, where a few nonprofits use bigger and bigger tractors to cultivate more and more acres in ways that make whole crops of human potential vulnerable to the diseases that prevent meaningful involvement in causes (i.e., “I did my part; I made a donation at the wine tasting event”) rather than building hearty strains of humanity personally and directly impacting the great causes of our time and being changed by that involvement in a sustainable nonprofit ecosphere.

In our next post on sustainable fundraising practices for nonprofits:

A husband and wife food pantry director team, formerly successful businesspeople, whose personal diet consists only of food items donated through their organization.