Living in the UK for these last nine months has given me a front seat in the recent storm of controversy over certain fundraising practices by larger charities here. You may have heard that there was an older British woman, Olive Cooke, who was portrayed in the media as having been induced to jump to her death because she was hounded by direct mail solicitations and phone calls.
That has since been put in perspective by her family (while they say the attention was a nuisance, they are not blaming the charities for her death). But the media frenzy and political pressure that has been swirling around this summer is serious. (If you want to know more about the Olive Cooke fallout, check out this page from Third Sector).
Indeed, some of the tactics of telemarketers for nonprofit causes around the world are not what they should be (to say the least). Cold calling, arm-twisting, and badgering in the name of charity does exist. Within the nonprofit sector here in the UK, there is a heated discussion about self-regulation and whether that is enough, or even feasible.
But the fact of the matter is that a lot of this is in fact driven by big nonprofits. Those that can afford to do huge direct mail campaigns and those that can afford to hire telemarketing firms. They are the ones in the headlines.
And while those organizations represent a significant amount of money raised, they are a small percentage of the number of organizations in the nonprofit sector. In the US, we have approximately 1 million nonprofit charitable organizations and just about 1% of them are raising more than $10 million and only about 4% of them are raising more than $1 million. The percentages are similar in the UK.
In “bigger” organizations, the problems of scale mean that donors become disconnected from the fundraising staff. Relationships become at a distance except for those with major donors at the very top echelons of giving. In order to communicate with those below, telemarketing and direct mail firms are hired. Most fundraising managers working at these lower levels never even meet a donor.
At the smaller end of the scale, organizations have it hard, too. They actually know their donors, but they lack the resources to put structures in place to effectively communicate with them and solicit them.
The best place is somewhere in the middle where you have resources to hire expertise, but the donors are still known to you. You still have a relationship with them in some way.
Still, what fundraising operation do you know that doesn’t aspire to be “bigger”? And is that really a function of programmatic need? Sometimes…but most of the time I think organizations get bigger just because they can, because they have found the fundraising magic and they just keep doing it.
I think we may be using the wrong yardstick. It’s just not right that the only real measure of success in fundraising is how many dollars you are raising and how much staff you have.
Surely we should be looking at other ways to measure success.
How about this? If your staff builds healthy, personal, authentic relationships with donors and if the donors continue to give and engage with your organization, then you are successful. (You’ll also raise more money over time, by the way).
Be careful what you wish for. Growing “to scale” or to be the next Charity:Water or becoming a “big dog” in your sector is not all unicorns and roses. The larger your organization grows, the farther it gets away from your donors and that’s a recipe for the Olive Cooke fallout, the cancer scandals in the US, Three Cups of Tea, and whatever fundraising controversy comes next – and there will be a next one.
Don’t look to be bigger. Look to be better. Build a fundraising program that no donor wants to leave. Build a fundraising program that aims to treat every donor like a major donor. Engage your staff in building real, authentic relationships so that they never want to leave either.
Now that’s the fundraising operation that should make the news.
