Do the Word

It seems like daily I’m running across blog posts, articles, and books that tell stories about ordinary people committing to give to charity in unusual ways.

• George Crankovic turned me on to the story of Toby Ord, the philosophy prof at Oxford who has created quite a stir in England–though as I previously wrote, I think I’m far more excited about this than George is. Here’s an article about Professor Ord that describes how (and why) he is planning to give away “more than a third of his £33,000 salary this year (leaving him with £20,000) and then 10 per cent of his income for the rest of his working life, which should tot up to around £1 million” to combat poverty worldwide.
• I’m just about done reading The Power of Half, the story of the Salwens, the Atlanta family who sold their upscale home and gave half the proceeds to aid villages in Ghana, discovering along the way the power of giving away half of just about anything. I’m actively campaigning to get you to read the book.
• At Change.org, one of my perennial favorite bloggers Nathaniel Whittemore recently wrote about Betty Londergan’s pledge to give away $100 a day every day for a year. She writes about each day’s gift on her blog, Whatgives365.

A range of thoughts are percolating around in my brain as I read this ever-growing pile of similar stories:

• Wow do we nonprofits not make giving an adventure for donors! Our fundraising focus is far more typically on issues like urgency, need, and our organization’s credibility (and need; and, um, did I mention the urgency of our organization’s need)? How little creativity we put into thinking about how we can facilitate giving adventures for donors.
• Can you imagine a story about someone who makes a donation to a nonprofit every time the nonprofit asks? We’d (rightly, in my view) consider the nonprofit an exploitative bully…and we’d (rightly) consider such a giver a pitiful shill. We’d say, “Back off, you greedy nonprofit! Get a life, you weak-kneed donor!”
• It’s sad to think how most nonprofit fundraisers would think about the giving of Prof. Ord, the Salwens, and Betty Londergan: namely, as a curiosity largely irrelevant to our organizational development strategies…unless we could get each of the aforementioned three to be directing their extraordinary gifts to our nonprofits.
• Why do we fail to see the growing trend of donors wanting to do more than to react to our formulation of need? They clearly want to give through us nonprofits to meet important needs…but they (rightly) want to be more than responders to our formulations. They want to be thinkers actively processing how to solve the very same issues that vex us.
• If a church contained members who actually all tithed, I suspect a moving and powerful news story or book could be written about all they accomplished through their giving–and how their giving changed them both individually and corporately.
• Hmm… What about yours and my own “giving adventures”? Is our giving adventurous? In the words of Tom Peters, “Are you placing enough interesting, freakish, long-shot, weirdo bets?”

One thing is for certain: Ordinary people are a whole lot more interested in talking about the adventure of giving than we nonprofits give them credit for. It’s not adventures in giving that they find distasteful to talk about with us. It’s boring giving solicited to serve as fuel for our nonprofit’s tank (as we head to the moon while they are supposed to stand and wave on the launching pad) that they rightly find so objectionable.

That became exceedingly apparent to me in an airplane conversation I had with a guy who sat on the board of three family foundations in Long Beach. Brother is fairly begging to give money away…to any Long Beach organization who cares at least as much about helping him think through and process the social issues that are vexing him as they do about funding their own organization.

More on this man–and the growing army of donors that is exactly like him–in our next post. 

As a Christian development guy, one of my regular regrets and deepest pains is that Christian nonprofits are so intimated by immediate concerns of institutional insolvency that they rarely take the time to seriously consider–and implement, on the courage of their convictions–the radical ramifications of what the Bible  teaches about giving. “I’m definitely looking forward to exploring Transformational Giving,” they insist, “right after I get a couple of big gifts in here to get us back on an even keel.”

This they call “being practical”.

As a result, it is inevitably secular development professionals who are happening onto the concepts we Christian development professionals should already know and be championing and teaching, as Christian development officers are too busy feverishly applying the traditional transactional fundraising practices that the secular world is, um, now abandoning.

Case in point:

Great post by Dan Pallotta on Breaking The Least-You-Can-Do Cycle. Writes Pallotta:

Just 10% of the $300 billion given to charity each year comes from major institutional funders — the Fords, the Gateses, the MacArthurs, and the Rockefellers. Yet those funders have a monopoly on the term “philanthropy.” The billionaire who spends 99% of his time building his own wealth and 1% of his time thinking about charity is elevated to the status of “philanthropist,” while the poor bastard who spends 100% of her time serving as the executive director of a homeless charity and 0% of her time amassing wealth is called, at best, “staff.”

This narrow interpretation has infected more than our language. It has infected our imaginations.

“Philanthropy” comes from the Greek for “love of humanity.” Anyone who cares deeply about others and who demonstrates it in an important way has a right to the title. The bank teller who gives 5% of her relatively small income to charity every month is a philanthropist. The child who gives his allowance and collects money from his neighbors for Haiti is taking meaningful philanthropic action. But by applying the term “philanthropist” only to the rarified few who make outsize donations, we rob the average person of an important aspiration. Worse, we rob civil society of the potential of that aspiration.

“Infected our imaginations”–what a great phrase! Pallotta’s perspective reminds me of a parallel sentiment in James 2:1-6:

¹My brothers, as believers in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ, don’t show favoritism. ²Suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes, and a poor man in shabby clothes also comes in. ³If you show special attention to the man wearing fine clothes and say, “Here’s a good seat for you,” but say to the poor man, “You stand there” or “Sit on the floor by my feet,” ⁴have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?⁵Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him? ⁶But you have insulted the poor. Is it not the rich who are exploiting you? Are they not the ones who are dragging you into court?

Note that here the “regular donors” are viewed as subjects of real purpose–not objects of pity–and the “major donors” are revealed as having exploitative, litigious tendencies. It ought to color the way we approach the development enterprise…but does it?

Pallotta suggests it’s coloring our thinking in all the wrong ways:

Most charities approach individuals with a two-pronged fundraising operations: a “major gifts” group to service the wealthy stratosphere and annual campaigns to capture the $25 to $50 donor. The big space in the middle gets little attention. By and large, we don’t invest in making the $25 casual donor a $2,500 philanthropist. We don’t even think about it. We’re wired to think that philanthropy is the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Instead of asking the $25 donors to aspire to a life and lifestyle of more significant giving, we demean them with cheap prizes and the chance to vote on how Pepsi will make its charitable grants. Internet fundraising is exacerbating the problem. We’ve reduced activism to clicking. “Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10.” We ask people to do the least they can do, and we make it insultingly easy.

Sum it up and say, as Pallotta does:

People want their lives to matter. They want to make a difference — a big difference. We must rid ourselves of the patriarchal idea that the wealthy are the only ones who can change the world, and launch a new age of citizen philanthropy.

Sadly, as Christians, we ought to know that reality better than anyone–by chapter and verse, even. But we don’t. So our fundraising strategies still owe more to the world than to the Bible.

That’s why most of the fundraising books I recommend are written by secular authors. Christian fundraising authors are too busy spreading evangelical goofer dust over worn out traditional transactional fundraising (ttf) strategies and calling it “stewardship”.

So while the goofer dust settles, let me commend Pallotta’s article to you as the most truly transformational reading a Christian development professional can undertake this week (even though we are advocating very different causes), and let me draw your attention to Kathy LeMay’s The Generosity Plan: Sharing Your Time, Treasure, and Talent to Shape the World. It’s a great book designed to equip “regular donors”–the very ones we Christian development officers often aren’t addressing personally because it wouldn’t be good “stewardship” of our time–to put together a comprehensive (time/talent/treasure) generosity plan to impact the causes about which they are moved to care.

I can’t wait until 20 years from now, should the Lord tarry, when Christian development practices catch up with what LeMay writes, namely:

Don’t worry about adding more zeroes to your check; philanthropy is not about how much. Philanthropy is intention combined with focus and action. What makes a difference in one person’s life or in hundreds of lives is not merely a stack of checks; what makes a difference is you contributing your many gifts at your level and your capacity. The Generosity Plan will help you make the most of what you have to offer. It will not ask you to contribute more than you can, rather to contribute in a way that works for you and your life and, in doing so, benefits the causes you care about most.

I’m grateful that someone is taking the philanthropy of small givers seriously. I just wish it was us who were leading the way in doing so.

I was pleased to see Pamela Grow addressing Your First 100 Days As Development Director–great topic and a well-done post, though I would likely lay out a somewhat different agenda.

The main point I would make in regard to Pamela’s post is this, however:

There is one more set of 100 days even more crucial than your first 100 days as Development Director; namely, the 100 days before you take the job.

As Janet Levine notes in her excellent post, How (Not) To Hire A Fundraiser, the average tenure of a fundraiser is eighteen months. Why so short? Because individuals candidating for fundraising jobs do nothing to dispel the almost comically unreasonable expectations of the organizations that are considering hiring them. Writes Janet:

I once was asked in great detail—several questions in fact—what I would do in my first 90 days to connect with current major donors. Not a bad question except this particular organization had no current major donors. They had no individual donors at all. They had been largely federally funded and wanted to change that. The questions they should have asked me would have focused on how would I begin to identify major donors and what would I do—if I would do anything—to build an annual giving program.

She summarizes the problem nicely:

Too many nonprofits hire a development director and then expect that person to log in the gifts, send out thank you letters, manage the annual gala and the golf tournament, make nice to board members (but don’t for pity’s sake ask them for anything), keep the files up to date, get out a newsletter, arrange for the bus to pick up….and oh yeah, in your spare time, could you make sure you close the financial gap between our revenue and expenses.

All these tasks may belong in the development department. But not even superman could accomplish all and do any of it well. For starters, these all require different skill sets. Beyond that is the fact that most people who are not in the business of fundraising do not seem to understand that development is not a single thing with a single set of tasks that require a single set of skills to be accomplished in a single timeframe.

So the most important 100 days for you are the 100 before you accept the position. It’s during this time that you calibrate the expectations of the individuals who are considering hiring you, helping them to understand what’s realistic and what’s not, and why.

I have always told organizations that building a development program is like building a large building: After the first year, progress looks like a giant hole in the ground…but a hole with purpose! If you want something other than a house of cards, the hole must be well dug and the foundation must be well laid. In my experience that typically takes around 18 months…which means that right at the point that any structure would be about ready to rise up out of the hole in the ground, the organization fires the fundraiser for being ineffective, thus restarting the clock and setting back progress another 18 months.

The only way out of this vicious cycle is to address it head on in the interview process. That’s not the right time to say “yup yup yup” when they ask you if you are capable of posting big gains in a hurry. And if they say, “You know, we only have enough money to fund your position for the next 90 days, so that means you have to raise a lot of money between now and then to cover your salary and our organization’s needs,” that’s a sign that not only do they not understand development, they’re also smoking crack (i.e., exhibiting an alarming tendency to not take development–and nonprofit management and stewardship–seriously).

I know especially in today’s meager job market it’s tough for you to say no when you’re offered any job. But trust me: the only time you have to recalibrate expectations is before you take the job. After you take the job, even Pamela’s excellent 100 day list can’t save you if you’ve said yes to a development job with crazy expectations that are rooted in nonprofit fundraising fantasyland instead of reality.