Do the Word

Traditional transactional fundraising (ttf) is dying a slow and particularly gruesome death in this present recession. Stats on that later this week.

It still holds appeal, though, for some nonprofits who continue to bloody their knuckles clinging fiercely to the cinderblock of hope that the reason their fundraising is suffering is just because they haven’t yet pleaded loudly or urgently or emotionally enough with their donors.

Yet.

Somewhere today, in all likelihood, a nonprofit executive director is sighing, “Well, I’ve held off as long as I could. We can’t go on another month. I have no choice: It’s time now to send…The Letter.”

You know, the most urgent of urgent appeals.

The A-bomb (Appeal bomb) of institutional crisis fundraising.

The We’re-three-paychecks-and-rent-checks-behind-and-if-we-don’t-get-$50,000-by-month’s-end-we’re-going-to-have-to-close-and-I-mean-it emotional and heartfelt note (with enclosed reply card and return envelope) From The Desk Of The Executive Director.

Believe me: I certainly understand the temptation to pull the Appeal-bomb trigger, along with the desperate feeling that there’s nothing else you can do. But before you succumb to this approach, consider the experience of nonprofits who during this recession have already uncorked their A-bombs. What they’ve discovered is perhaps the scariest reality of all associated with this economic downturn, namely:

In the past, when you sent out an A-bomb appeal, donors responded by writing a check.

Today, when donors receive an A-bomb appeal from you, they still send a check…to another nonprofit.

It’s The Nonprofit Bubonic Plague Syndrome.

In plague-ravaged Europe of the Middle Ages, when your lymph nodes started to swell up and a few red spots started appearing on your skin, this was the sign for everyone around you to head for the hills. Once those spots turned black and you started breathing heavy and vomiting blood, well, at precisely the point you most needed the help, you’d find yourself very, very alone.

(Well, except for those saintly Christians who would be kind enough to bury you once you expired.)

That’s because with one third of the population of Europe dying, everyone who wasn’t dying was busy doing their best to keep it that way.

Same is true with the Nonprofit Bubonic Plague Syndrome:

Once donors learn that your nonprofit’s nodes are swollen, your social service agency’s skin has red spots, and your program personnel are three paychecks behind, donors’ reaction more than ever before is to flee.

Sure, they’ll make the Sign of the Cross over you and themselves before they go, wish you well, and leave you a damp washcloth. But don’t expect them to try to nurse your nonprofit back to health. Because when the world is steeped in plague, just staying alive is a big enough challenge to fill most donors’ days.

And who can blame them?

With their own ability to give significantly curtailed (see “Bust, Stock Market”, “Bubble, Real Estate”, and “Smithereens, Retirement Account Blown To” for more information), they’re wanting their gifts to do more than keep your lights on, your staff employed, and your rent paid. They don’t mean anything cold and heartless by it. They just want to actually feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty–which is why the outpouring for Haiti earthquake relief was so generous, and yet the average gift was so much smaller than in previous disasters.

So this is a paradox indeed:

• Traditional transactional fundraising (ttf) urges you to drop the A-bomb when you’re totally out of funds.
• But if donors see the signs of the plague beginning to blotch out on your nonprofit, they’ll excuse themselves–and their checks–from your bank account. (Check the file under “Bad, I Don’t Want To Throw Good Money After”).

Fortunately, Transformational Giving (TG) provides a distinct alternative to howling in pain or suffering silently. Stats on that later this week in Part II of our Nonprofit Bubonic Plague series. Then we’ll look at Solutions in Part III just before the weekend.

Until then, hands off the A-bomb trigger, OK?

Great post by Nathaniel Wittemore at Social Entrepreneurship on the story of ZURB, a San Francisco design house whose corporate philanthropy takes the form of an annual “coffee fueled marketing marathon” in which they do an entire pro bono marketing strategy for a nonprofit they select…all in 24 hours.

The way it works is that each year, the ZURBwired program selects one mission to accomplish for a nonprofit. It can be a new website, publicity for a new fundraising campaign or something else entirely. For 24 caffeine-fueled hours, ZURB, the nonprofit and participating partners rethink the project from the ground up. At the end of it, the nonprofit participant is left with both valuable outputs, as well as a new approach to the design process they can employ every day.

It’s the last part of the last sentence that makes the process so powerful.

Described in P/E/O lingo, the 24 hour marketing marathon is a Participation-level activity: short-term, high-touch, high-yield, and understandable without external reference.

But notice that one of ZURB’s goals is to train the lucky nonprofit intensively in a design process that the nonprofit can use with other projects in the future. This is an attempt to coach the nonprofit to E so that their view of design and project management is ZURBified, as it were. In other words, the one day marathon project is designed so that it breaks out into the ordinary ongoing life of the nonprofit organization.

But there’s a hint of O in here on ZURB’s part, too:

ZURB’s work isn’t meant to be a closed process, in which it’s only the nonprofit in question that benefits. Instead, they put everything online for all to see. For the ZURB team, this is a chance to introduce groups to a process of design as much as it is about applying that process in one specific instance.

Take a look at the process here. Really instructive.

What may be most interesting of all is that ZURB is coaching the nonprofit rather than the other way around.

What would happen if a nonprofit took it upon itself to coach a design house in its own area to undertake such an approach. Like, say, for instance, you?

Thanks to Joanne Fritz for the link to the story of the Salwen family, authors of the new book, The Power of Half, in which they chronicle their Transformational Giving style journey of selling their home, giving half of the proceeds to the poor, and–well, they didn’t quite complete the biblical trifecta, but life is a long time.

If you haven’t yet heard the story, you’ll want to at least read the article if not the book. For purposes of this blog, what I want to do is to parse that story for you into P, E, and O elements, since their story illustrates the progression so well.

The P stage (short-term, high-touch, high-yield, understandable with reference to itself, containing a foretaste of the whole enchilada):

Still, Kevin [the father] believes that generosity is not all nurture. A person’s nature plays into their willingness to give, and his daughter Hannah has that giving nature. Her nature kicked into high gear when they were stopped at a red light three years ago with a Mercedes on one side and a homeless man on the other. Hannah remarked that if the person didn’t own the expensive Mercedes, the homeless man could have a meal. That led to her fervent request that her family do more to help others.

So they sold their home, bought one for half the cost, and embarked on a year-long family study of where and how to give away half of the proceeds from the sale. They ultimately chose to give through The Hunger Project to aid Ghana. And they went to Ghana to see it all through.

(This is a good time to note that the aforementioned all falls within the P category. People sometimes mistakenly think of P, E, and O differing by degree of commitment, but nothing could be further from the truth. Most people stay at the P level in their giving. Some become super highly committed Ps, staying red hot and rollin’ all throughout their life for the projects they care about. What makes a person a P is simply that their relationship to the cause is mediated by a formal, structured project–in this case, even a radical project like selling your home and giving away half the proceeds.)

Our best estimate so far at Muppet Labs is that 70% of champions stay at the P stage. 30%, however, transition on to E, which is exactly what the Salwens did:

What the Salwens did is impressive; however, what has happened to them as a family is equally as impressive. Their project transformed the family in what Kevin says is “a magical way.” Without intending to, the family “traded stuff for a deeper level of connectedness, and trust, and togetherness.” What would seem like a difficult step to most people, downsizing from a luxurious home and giving away $800,000, is “just certainly an amazingly easy deal” when you realize what the family gained.

The move from P to E happens when the cause breaks through the project and into the person’s everyday life. It’s not necessarily that they stop doing the project but rather that their relationship to the cause extends beyond it. In this case, the process of selling the home, researching charities, giving the money away, and visiting Ghana transformed the Salwens. Giving broke out of its structured project bounds and remade the very relationships between family members. To wit:

Kevin believes that the process of digging into each of their deeper values as they went though the process of choosing where to invest the money opened lines of communication among the family that had never been there before. The teens saw their parents as more than just parents, and Kevin and Joan saw their children for who they really were at their core.

Of those who move on to Engagement, around 10% progress to the O stage. At O, the individual recognizes that it is their responsibility–not a nonprofit’s or a supposed expert’s–to spread the cause within their sphere of influence, recruiting those they know to P-level participation. Here’s what that looks like in the case of the Salwens:

The family realized that there was a book to be written about the transformative effect of their project. The Power of Half was written by Kevin and Hannah to “help inspire other people to just take a good look at their lives and recognize what they have more than enough of” so that they can get out in the world to help others and themselves the way the Salwen family did.

They don’t believe others need to sell their house. They want others to look at what is possible for them. “The book,” Kevin says, “provides a roadmap for how people can make that decision of what they have more than enough of” and figure out what their half is. They can get together with their family or their community and decide how they can be out there “doing a little bit of good in the world.”

And that’s what it looks like to go from P to E to O. Perfect. Enjoy the book.