Do the Word

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.

Take a hard look at your donor file.

What is it, anyway?

For most of us, it’s a list of all the people who have given us money at some point in time.

Some donor files also contain lists of people who we think may give us money at some point in time. Other donor files are segmented into people who have given us money recently (“active” donors) and those who haven’t given money to us in a while (“inactive” donors).

What would happen if we ditched the idea of a donor file and instead created a community of practice–a list of individuals and organizations ranging from…

• Those who blog about our cause
• Nonprofit leaders from other organizations who share our cause
• Experts in fields related to our cause
• Churches, clubs, and service groups actively practicing our cause
• Individuals who have taken steps to become involved in our cause?

(That last category would include but not be limited to those who have given financially. And it might even exclude those who gave but did so in ways that did not reflect involvement in the cause, i.e., they gave because they knew the founder, because they participated in an auction or wine tasting or golf scramble or jog-a-thon where their giving was tied to the non-cause related event rather than the cause.)

What if, in other words, the glue that held our donor file together was a commitment to practice the cause and to grow in that practice with others of like mind and commitment rather than a financial transaction? 

McKnight and Block, authors of The Abundant Community, authored a recent post entitled Gifts, Skills, Interests and Passions: The Glue That Holds Communities Together that is ostensibly about neighborhoods but has at least as much applicability to donor files:

When we consider your block or neighborhood, if it is organized it is because something in common leads people to want to come together. Where blocks are not organized, it is because neighbors don’t know what they share or have in common.  Just living on the same block is not enough to pull many people out of their homes to join with neighbors except for an annual block party.  One step up is the block club created to deal with crime, safety and security.  But that is a community drawn together by fear — creating a fortress mentality.

There are some neighborhoods, however, drawn together because they have discovered the gifts, skills, interests and passions of their fellow residents.  This knowledge is the catalyst for all kinds of new relationships.  The connections may be between two neighbors who discover a mutual interest in jazz.  Or it may be several neighbors with an interest in gardening. Or it may be all the neighbors who discover their common interest in being a village that raises a child.

Whenever a neighborhood comes together in powerful and satisfying ways, it is because two things have happened.  First, they have found out about each other’s gifts.  Second, they have made new connections based on these gifts.  It is the sum of these connections that “glues” a neighborhood together.

Is your donor file a group of individuals “glued” to you because at some time in the past they wrote you a check? Or is your donor file a “virtual cause neighborhood” glued to each other with you in their midst because they have found out about each other’s–and your–gifts and made connections and commitments to grow together accordingly?

How would our approach to our donors change if we thought of them as fellow students of the cause rather than as supporters of our organization?

“Well, what if they grew in the cause but didn’t give to our organization?”

My question in reply: Is it really possible for them to genuinely grow in the cause without growing in their giving?

Change your identity. Stop being the recipient of your donors’ gifts and start being the vehicle for your donors’ maturing and comprehensive activity in relation to the cause.

To that end, rebuild your newsletter around your donors’ ability to answer the following five questions after reading each issue. These come from Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed, a great site on learning and instruction that doesn’t have anything explicitly to do with donor development only because, regretfully, we persist in thinking of donors as supporters and not students of the cause.

• Learn (What did you know? What are you able to do?)
• Understand (What is the evidence that you can apply learning in one domain to another?)
• Share (How did you use what you have learned to help a person, the class, the community or the planet?)
• Explore (What did you learn beyond the limits of the lesson? What mistakes did you make, and how did you learn from them?)
• Create (What new ideas, knowledge, or understanding can you offer?)

If we think that donors can answer these questions well and passionately without giving, we understand neither donors nor causes at all.

Sadly, that very well may be the case.