Do the Word

What is the magic moment in fundraising?

Tom at The Agitator points to this answer from Canadian fundraiser Fraser Green:

The “magic moment,” as I call it, is when the audience stops being an audience – and becomes a part of the story. Total involvement. Total engagement.

I am so passionately in agreement with this sentiment that it makes my toes curl. But what Green goes on to describe is something short of total involvement and total engagement:

The greatest filmmakers, novelists and playwrights have all mastered the creation of the moment – that singular page or scene where the audience’s attention gets pulled in so close – as if through a microscope….

Let me share three moments we’ve written for our clients that had magic in them:

• The surgeon describing the feel of a beating human heart in his hands – and the awful responsibility and power he knew he held over life and death in that moment.
• The international aid worker who describes the faint – almost inaudible – sound of a starving baby’s cry in the hours before that baby dies.
• The woman reaching for the phone on a Sunday afternoon to call her sister – as she’s done for years – only to remember that her sister is lost to cancer.

This is great copy writing, no doubt. But even an enraptured audience…

…is still an audience.

In real fundraising magic, the donor becomes part of the story. Literally.

Think of Habitat For Humanity. The engagement doesn’t come from the donor being able to smell the sawdust as they read the mesmerizingly moving appeal for funds. It comes from Habitat stuffing a hammer into your chest and challenging you to build a home, because we each have a personal say in making sure no one goes homeless in our sphere of influence.

That’s why Habitat is one of the fastest growing and most recession-proof charities of our time.

When the donor is transformed into the actor and the nonprofit is transformed into the platform for action–when, in other words, the donor smells like sawdust and doesn’t just smell sawdust in his mind’s nose, so to speak–that’s when fundraising magic has happened.

Which term in today’s title is less familiar to you–vuvuzela or SPP?

If it’s SPP–which stands for Signature Participation Project, the initial calling card of Transformational Giving–click here and check out our past posts on the subject to get up to speed. They tend to be the most popular posts on the blog, so perhaps they’ll inspire you even as they inform you.

If it’s vuvuzela, then likely you’ve steered well clear of the present World Cup Soccer competition.

The vuvuzela–defined precisely at Wikipedia as “a blowing horn up to approximately 1 m (3 ft) in length generally producing notes at the 465Hz and 235Hz frequencies”–has become the unofficial soundtrack of this year’s World Cup, drawing protests from athletes (the French captain claimed his team lost because his team couldn’t sleep the night before the match due to the noise) as well as, at last count, 87,523 voters at banvuvuzela.com.

Generally, not much love is lost for the vuvuzela at Wikipedia, which does not describe the instrument in the most flattering terms:

They have been associated with permanent noise-induced hearing loss and cited as a possible safety risk when spectators cannot hear evacuation announcements, and they may spread colds and flu viruses on a greater scale than coughing or shouting. Vuvuzelas have also been blamed for drowning the sound and atmosphere of football games. Commentators have described the sound as “annoying” and “satanic” and compared it with “a stampede of noisy elephants”, “a deafening swarm of locusts”, “a goat on the way to slaughter”, and “a giant hive full of very angry bees”.

Should you like to hear the sound for yourself without having to be subject to a soccer game, you can check out Vuvuzela Time!, which makes it possible for you to add the sound of the vuvuzela to any website you visit. (No mention is made of why you’d want to do this, but perhaps the answer is so obvious to vuvuzela fans that it would be silly and redundant to make it explicit.)

A fair question would be:

Why talk about the vuvuzela on a site dedicated to fundraising?

The answer has to do with a little-noted aspect of the vuvuzela controversy, namely:

Would you believe it’s intended as an SPP?

By some, anyway. The CT blog quotes Tinyiko Maluleke, president of the South African Council of Churches, as noting that the horn is “forcing the world to wake up and acknowledge Africa’s past sufferings”:

“In the 19th century, white missionaries sided with colonials and gave blacks the Bible, while they took the land. Now, we have created the vuvuzela, which is one of the most obnoxious instruments: very noisy; very annoying. It will dominate the World Cup,” Maluleke said recently in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the 2010 World Missionary Conference.

“I see the vuvuzela as a symbol — as a symbol of Africa’s cry for acknowledgement.”

The challenge–from an SPP standpoint–is that most spectators don’t quite see the symbol the same way:

Said one man, 26-year-old Hendrik Maharala of Johannesburg: “I feel like an African when I blow the vuvuzela.”

Said a woman, 21-year-old Jessica Dyrand: “I love the noise.”

Said another South African, 23-year-old Sazi Mhlwaitka: “It’s our way to motivate players, to express happiness and how do you feel in the stadium.”

From an SPP standpoint, the learning is this:

SPPs must be understandable without external reference.

That is to say, in order to be an effective SPP, you ought to be able to figure out–without even asking–what the guy next to you has in mind when he blows the three foot plastic trumpet so loud that you lose your hearing. (In this case, you really need to be able to figure out what the cause is without asking, since it’s hard to be heard over the roar of an earnest vuvuzela.)

The goal of an SPP isn’t ink or fame. It’s spreading your cause. And it’s important to remember that those two goals aren’t synonymous.

Moral of the story: Be slow to celebrate, vuvuzela organizers. You may have received heaps of press coverage about said horn, but when only one article makes any mention of your cause, that’s a PR tragedy, not a triumph.

Tedfellow Peter Haas asks a question always worth re-examining in his post entitled Show me The Money-Disasters, Restrictions, and The Future Of The Fundraising Industry.

The question: Why shouldn’t a nonprofit organization outsource its fundraising to a professional fundraising contractor?

Peter is not talking about bringing in a consultant to train the nonprofit to do a better job raising money. He’s talking about outsourcing fundraising altogether–that is, hiring an experienced pro on a commission basis to bring in the financial resources that a nonprofit needs to do its work:

If the mission of the NGO is the service to the community, and fund raising is truly something administrative (as most donors like to classify it in costs analysis), then it should be something an NGO can easily subcontract. NGOs subcontract back end services all the time, book keeping, accounting, payroll. I don’t hire somebody to tell me how to reach into my heart and find my inner book keeper, I hire a book keeper. Why not fund raising?

To make this feasible for small nonprofits, Peter contends, it has to be done on commission:

Aside from finding the right contractor the boutique fund raising pricing is out of whack with the resources of its potential customers. Contrary to common development director and contractor beliefs, to build a truly sustainable client base they need to work just from commission or fee on delivery of gifts. The barrier to entry for customers in this industry is that most the the small, effective and compelling orgs lack the funds to pay a fee up front to hire one of these contractors.

Compelling set of arguments, these, and no doubt persuasive to many nonprofit leaders who, like Peter, do not see fundraising as either a personal strength or joy. Peter’s own question is:

Why aren’t there more fundraising contractors out there working this way?

Perhaps, he says, it may be bad advertising on their part:

Where are all the big fund raising contractors? The professional solicitors? This is an industry with thousands of professionals yet none of them has a google adword? Interestingly similar fundraising term searches with adwords had hacker SQL injection attacks in the adwords. Hackers and scammers know NGOs need money, why don’t the pros?

What I have learned from this is that either A) the companies and private practices that should be good at this are thinking way too small and a market opportunity exists for a serious player to dominate B) These companies need to hire me part time to manage their SEO because they suck at it . . .really. I might not be so great at the fund raising but honestly folks your google results are pathetic.

Or perhaps, he suggests, it may be a growth industry:

This is an industry that is waiting for its day. Small orgs need the big gift the most. I have often lamented that impact philanthropy has strangled out all the institution building big gift philanthropy of the late 80s and early 90s. Most the groups I respect in terms of impact, Partners in Health, Echoing Green, Teach For America, City Year, all started with a major million dollar or more gift in the first year. For an entrepreneur that is pretty darn useful to start an enterprise, you can staff off of that, you can build both a program execution and a fund raising team. Starting with 50-100K it’s a bit more of a challenge. You are constantly just treading water to creep upwards with your budget.

I’d suggest three other reasons why outsourcing fundraising to contract fundraisers is not more popular:

1. It’s viewed by the largest professional fundraising society as unethical.The Association of Fundraising Professionals wrote a white paper on the subject, listing six reasons why they frown on the practice. My guess is that Peter won’t find much of their reasoning to be especially persuasive. From a pragmatic standpoint, the one that carries the most juice is the recognition of how rare it is that there is a 1:1 correspondence between a particular solicitation and a gift, or even between a particular solicitor and a gift. Big gifts especially are like fine wine; they mature with age, and their cork is best popped in the company of many.
2. It’s a strategy whose time has come…and gone.There may have been a day when wealthy individuals were looking for places to park their dough where their hands and their checks would separate. In fact, the whole of traditional transactional fundraising is still based on that elusive hope. Increasingly, however, as we document in this blog, there is an ever-strengthening connection between people’s money and their involvement. (As we noted recently, volunteers to an organization give 50% more than non-volunteers.) This goes even beyond the point made above that a number of non-financial activities go into a donor’s decision to give. (Were that the case, we could just say to the contractor, “Tough. That’s just the cost of customer development.”) What the stat recognizes is that donors seek to interact in a certain way with an organization, and the nonprofit must be permeable and amenable to that approach. A nonprofit that outsources fundraising is unlikely to develop the kind of corporate culture in which donors and potential donors feel welcome to volunteer and participate in meaningful ways. If it did, it wouldn’t need to outsource its fundraising.
3. Only bad fundraising is truly something administrative.It’s not like bookkeeping really, Peter. I supposed bookkeeping may in some circumstances be personally transformative. But good fundraising must be so. As Sean Stannard-Stockton notes and often laments, donors who say “I’m looking for a really good organization that’s making a significant impact that I can give a lot of money to” are as rare as unicorns. There’s just no way to take the transformation out of fundraising and have that be effective. And that transformation comes from personal participation, engagement, and ownership in the cause…not an encounter with a salesman for high end luxury goods.

What is an industry that’s waiting for its day are donor representatives who are more than financial advisors–individuals who work for givers, not organizations, and who are trained to scout out the nonprofits who want more than money and who can provide more than a good social investment.

Unfortunately, if you try to google those folks at the present time, you’ll come up empty, too.