fundraising Precepts

People give to people: not to machines, or apps, or videos, or text messages. Technology facilitates charitable transactions. It does not initiate, cause, or sustain them. 

Human relationships alone foster the conditions — care, empathy, reciprocity, transparency — necessary for building trust between people. Charitable giving is rooted in trust: a trust that fosters hope and an expectation that by making a gift, some vision for the future will come to pass. 

A fundraiser personifies the organization’s mission. She makes the organization real. When a donor gives, it’s not an investment in an abstraction. It is not an investment in humanity writ large. It is first a commitment to you — the fundraiser — and then, by extension, the people, organization, and vision that you embody. 

In fundraising, technological efficacy increases when it is predicated by real human relations and diminishes when it’s not. No amount of reporting or quantifying “impact” through data visualization or other technological gimmickry can make up for the absence of trust between a donor and an organization. 

Those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the human aspect of fundraising often see technology as a replacement for human interaction. Yet, there’s no replacement for the human aspect in fundraising. Fundraising, therefore, requires an investment in people first. 

Fundraising is foremost a humane activity. 

Fundraisers can learn a thing or two from business, we are often told, especially when it comes to closing a deal. Fundraising, it is said, is all about the art of “the ask.” 

To truck, barter, and exchange is not the sum of human experience, however. Not even close. 

The nonprofit world is rooted in the premise that there are things worth doing in this world — ways of being — that live outside of the so-called logic of the marketplace. 

Charitable giving is one of them. 

Fundraising begins in curiosity about other people: the lives they live; the challenges they confront; the ideas, experiences, and beliefs that animate their world. What do they care about? What brought them to you, to your organization? How can they be a part of the life of your organization, its mission, its people, its community? How can they help? 

Discovery rooted in curiosity, then, is at the heart of fundraising: What is it about your organization and its mission that others identify with it such that they wish to belong to it, support it, propagate it? 

When you listen, observe, and let others tell their story, they will tell you what they can do to help. Your investment comes prior to theirs. 

Humane fundraising recognizes that money is a derivative of successful institution building, not its cause. In other words, money is necessary but not sufficient for building and growing an organization. 

People matter before money. 

Curiosity about the human person standing before you, is the beginning of humane fundraising. A charitable gift is the beginning, not the end, of fundraising.

When relationship building is at the heart of your fundraising enterprise, money will begin to take care of itself. When it’s not, you’ll never be satisfied with the amount of money you raise. And you'll never stop asking for more. 

Many people find the very mention of fundraising uncomfortable. “I hate asking people for money,” they say, “I’m no good at it.” Some of these same people turn out to be the best fundraisers when they come to realize that while the ask is an important part of raising money, asking people for money is not the sum of fundraising. Humane fundraising is not about making calculated financial transactions. 

Caring for others, it seems, is an innate part of our nature — though this aspect of our nature is often downplayed in favor of a radical view of human beings as uniquely greedy and self-serving. We are social beings, we get by with a lot of help from our friends, family, and community. Every world religion and every culture have prohibitions against greed and self-love and admonitions encouraging charity and generosity. This aspect of religion and culture calls upon us to actuate that part of ourselves formed through the give and take of social relations. Too much self regard, the wisdom of the ages seems tells us, is contrary to our nature and, among other things, contributes to things like isolation and loneliness. 

Humans seek out ways to be helpful to others. Humane fundraising recognizes that this is a part of our identity, a feature of our being. Charity necessitates sacrifice for the benefit of others. Fundraising is thus one way to facilitate our desire to identify and belong to something that enables us to become more fully who we are. Fundraising speaks to our desire to be and to do good for others. 

A charitable gift, then, is not simply about money. It is about fulfilling a donor’s charitable purpose. It is a moral obligation to care for their gift as an embodiment of their hope to do good and to be of service. The monetary aspect of the gift, no matter how small or how large, is secondary to its moral purpose. In this way, fundraising is about stewarding the moral impulse of others to do good. Fundraising is thus vocational rather than professional. It is a call to serve others rather than to merely transact pecuniary exchanges. 

Fundraising as a vocation is a notion that has mostly been lost in the professionalization of fundraising. Nevertheless, the idea that charity has a moral purpose above a financial one animates, I believe, the generosity of most Americans.  

Is there a body of fundraising knowledge that requires formal mastery in order to become a good fundraiser?  

Many nonprofit organizations operate under the assumption that to be a good fundraiser requires special training, even a college degree, professional certificate, or license. 

This is understandable. 

Hundreds of college courses and degree programs in nonprofit management, fundraising, and philanthropy have sprung up overnight, like mushrooms on a Pacific Northwest lawn. Professional fundraising certificates from any one of numerous self-anointed fundraising credentialing associations can also be had for a fee. 

Does the practice of fundraising require a robust credentialing regime? 

Fundraising is, it has already been argued elsewhere, a humane activity. That is to say, people give to people. Human relationships alone foster the conditions — care, empathy, reciprocity, transparency — necessary for building trust between people. 

Charitable giving is rooted in trust: a trust that fosters hope and an expectation that by way of making a gift, some vision for the future will come to pass. 

Building human relationships is, then, the special body of knowledge at the heart of the activity of fundraising. To be a good fundraiser is to be humane. And any human has the ability to be humane, even without a college degree or license. 

Voluntary associations arise from our sense of shared and communal responsibility toward each other. They acknowledge inherently our dependency on others. Voluntary associations alone give occasion and warrant to fundraising, no other license is required. 

In other words, the freedom to voluntary associate also requires that the mechanisms for acquiring funding for our associations be free of interference, especially from the grinding tyranny of professionalization that comes with specialty degrees, certificates, and licensure.  

The rise of a credentialed and professional class of fundraisers diminishes rather than facilitates our ability to voluntarily associate. It creates, among other things, barriers to entry, advancing the credentialed while excluding the qualified non-professionals.  

Freedom to associate necessitates freedom to fundraise. Anyone can freely associate and raise the funds necessary to finance their association. 

Accomplishment in fundraising techniques is something quite apart from the qualities that constitute a good fundraiser. Both of those topics will be considered in later entries. 

News about charitable giving in America is mired in doom and gloom. Some have even called the supposed decline in generosity a “national crisis.” 

There is good reason to believe that nonprofit experts and journalists alike overstate the purported decline in charitable giving. 

Regardless of whether giving is in decline or ascension, nonprofit leaders should focus their fundraising on things within their control and ignore sensational headlines or the latest fundraising magic beans. 

With this in mind, there are two simple questions that every nonprofit leader can ask that will focus their efforts internally on practical steps they can take toward funding their mission: questions that should be asked no matter the current state of giving. 

First, nonprofit leaders should ask: How are we bringing new donors into the life of our organization? 

Some groups acquire new donors through personal and professional contacts, word of mouth, direct mail, events, social media, telemarketing, or digital solicitations. Some also apply for grants from charitable foundations or government agencies. Other organizations use board members, contract fundraisers, volunteers, or professional staff to acquire new donors. Many groups employ a mix of all of the above tactics. 

No matter what tactics your organization uses to solicit prospective new donors, knowing how you are introducing donor prospects to your organization will reveal the steps you will need to take throughout the year to raise your annual budget. In turn, this will allow you to assign costs, personnel, and time to each tactic. 

Even well-established organizations need a strategy for acquiring new donors. How many new donor prospects will your organization need to solicit this year to replace those who will leave? How many more donors are needed if you want to grow annual giving? 

Second, nonprofit leaders should ask: What are we doing to retain our current donors?

Organizations often put substantial resources into acquiring new donors but leave donor cultivation to haphazard and ineffectual legacy practices like incessant solicitations and meaningless membership levels and donor clubs no one can track. 

This is self-defeating, of course. It results in a fevered, expensive, and mission-degrading cycle of donor acquisition, turnover, and burnout.  

Bringing new donors into the life of your organization begins with the recognition that at the other end of every donation is a human being who, in one way or another, identifies with your mission. A first gift is like a petition to become a part of what your group is trying to achieve. I wish to belong, it says. 

A new donor’s gift is thus the beginning not the end of fundraising. 

What steps does your organization take to act upon the donor’s petition? How does it discover why the donor identified with your organization, its mission, its people? How does it make donors feel like they belong? 

How organizations enculturate donors into the life of their work is varied. 

What’s important is that your group identifies and puts into practice a donor cultivation plan that reflects your organization’s values and that honors the donor’s petition to belong. 

It should engage donors at every level of giving. And, finally, it should be replicable such that it can be applied consistently over time: nothing in fundraising is worth doing once.  

Focusing your energy on how your organization is acquiring new donors and enculturating existing donors into the life of your organization, will put your focus on concrete, practical matters within your control.  

Most nonprofit organizations take special care to recognize their biggest donors. 

Indeed, with major donors often times the charitable purpose gets lost in a sea of gratitude, recognition, plaques, gifts, luncheons, videos, awards, speeches, naming opportunities, and other laudatory gestures. 

The biggest donors always get an organization’s biggest and best efforts. 

The real test of a nonprofit organization’s fundraising program, however, is not how it recognizes its top donors, but rather how it brings its mid-tier and small donors into the life of its organization: how it recognizes those at the bottom of the so-called giving ladder whose charity is often overshadowed by those at the top. 

When the giving of small and mid-tier donors is acknowledged (and often it’s not), it’s frequently done transactionally: through an automated electronic receipt. There’s little or no human interaction. 

Is this your organization’s best effort? 

With an autogenerated electronic receipt, nonprofit organizations unwittingly honor the technological means of giving, not the human being who made the gift. The humane activity of fundraising is replaced by digital interactions: machines talking to machines. 

This is especially the case with the increase in recurring monthly credit card donations. Unless a credit card expires, recurring credit card donations are electronic gestures between computers sitting in climate controlled server farms. 

Eager to reduce fundraising costs by converting as many givers as possible into recurring credit card donors, nonprofits confuse charity’s means and ends. They mistake the transaction for the human being who caused the transaction. 

The human being behind the electronic gift — the donor — becomes secondary, even invisible to the organization. This is one reason why recurring credit card donors seldom increase their giving and often stop donating when their credit card expires. 

Now, every nonprofit has a story about an annual donor who gave fifty dollars every year for twenty years and, upon their death, left the organization a million dollars. And, the legend goes, that’s why you must pay attention to your mid- and bottom tier givers. 

That doesn’t quite get to the heart of the matter. 

The monetary value of a donor’s gift is secondary to their intention. 

When a donor gives, no matter the amount, they’re communicating to you that they believe in what you are doing, what you’re trying to accomplish, and that they wish to be a part of it through their charitable act. 

To accept a gift and not acknowledge the intent of the giver, is extraordinarily short sighted, even rude. It’s no way to build an institution or movement. The sum of many small things propels nonprofit organizations to achieve great things. You need many hands. You need donors at every giving level, including small donors.

There is a universe of human stories and potential lurking behind the collective intent of your donor base. Discover the why behind all of your donors’ giving, not just your major donors. Don’t let your small donors become gift level cells in a spreadsheet. 

Recognize their charity in a manner suited to your organization’s values. Pick up the phone. Talk. Write a handwritten letter. Invite them to lunch. Be a human being. 

When you see the human being behind the giving — not matter the giving level — you’ll discover a reservoir of unbounded wealth.

Many enterprises achieve greatness without a strategic plan, and a strategic plan is no guarantee of organizational achievement. If strategic planning, then, is neither necessary nor sufficient for institutional success, why do it?

As voluntary charitable associations became professionalized, strategic plans became ubiquitous. For many organizations, however, strategic planning never amounts to more than a box-checking “best practice” that makes homely charity seem more like big business. As an empty tribute that charity pays to commerce, most strategic plans sit on shelves.

That’s too bad, not because having a strategic plan is a good in and of itself, but because thinking strategically is the essential creative act at the heart of any successful enterprise: commercial, charitable, political, or otherwise.

Although strategic plans are mostly associated with the quantitative and rational trappings of management professionals — measurable goals and tactics displayed in eye popping charts through data visualization — thinking strategically is at root a creative, intuitive, and qualitative exercise.

Strategic thinking begins by asking how the world could be, not how it is. It’s not about asking what’s next but rather: What if? The practical, worldly matters associated with mission, in other words, follow the inspirational, intuitive, often irrational qualities of vision. Vision is generative.

Vision, in turn, is more often the domain of artists, priests, and poets: a matter of mind and heart.

Preoccupation with the analytical and quantitative results in uninspiring and drab institutions that can grow indifferent to the very people they serve. Thus, at the center of every struggling enterprise you’ll often find a failure not of bookkeeping but of the imagination.

Strategic planning, if done properly, is a creative act that begins by engaging the imagination. It asks difficult questions that sometimes make us feel uncomfortable, in part, because we’ve grown unfamiliar with thinking about institution building as a humane, visionary, even poetic enterprise. We like to think of it as a species of science, not art.

As a society, we’ve ceded care of our institutions, including our charitable, religious, and philanthropic organizations, to the extractive, rational ideology of finance in the service of profit. Strategic planning most often apes or serves this small, solipsistic world view. That faith in our institutions is in historic decline, is not at all surprising; they've come to reflect a quite limited view of what it means to be human.

The care of our voluntary charitable associations — as well as our business institutions, for that matter — is foremost a humane enterprise. The best institutions reflect the spaciousness, contradictions, and aspirations of our humanity — the humanity of those they serve and those they employ.

Most strategic planning, then, is too small: too narrowly focused on the analytical at the expense of the artistic. It obsesses with how and tends to gloss over why. Strategic planning too often takes refuge in spreadsheets and datasets and avoids getting to the heart of the matter by avoiding creative and emotional risk. This is why strategic plans frequently replicate, codify, and institutionalize the very problems that they set out to resolve. In this way, strategic plans, like charitable institutions themselves, often take on a deadening and mechanical sameness. 

Strategic planning cannot be risk averse, if it is to be worthwhile. It should plumb the depths of what is possible even if it risks taking the enterprise in a different direction with new leadership or, perhaps, even if it risks shutting down the enterprise altogether. To think strategically without inviting risk is a sign of entrenched leadership, institutional decadence, and, quite possibly, decline.

Strategic planning is worthwhile for any enterprise when it is anchored in the fullness of our humanity and when it begins by simply asking: What can we imagine doing individually or together that would make things better for others? The how and when will follow, they simply cannot precede the why, if your planning aspires to be strategic.