You’d think a $400 billion industry like ours would have empirically based standards and practices readily available and accessible to all.

After all, most sectors — ranging from apple growers to doctors and hospitals, and even zoos — have them. Fundraising doesn’t.

What we do have is mass of accumulated tribal wisdom, often conflicting, seldom empirically based. The result, as economists Gneezy and List note in their book, The Why Axis — the “the vibrant…important charity sector is driven by anecdote, not science.”

What an enormous waste of time and money. What an impediment to growth.

In the data driven world of direct response you’d think there would at least be a set of Data Standards such as exist in most other sectors. Standards that set the terms for format, definition, structuring, tagging, transcription, manipulation, use and management of data. Not fundraising.

The absence of a common Data Standard for fundraising is why online and offline systems are so seldom able to communicate. Why organizations become locked into one system or another, often gouged by the vendor, but afraid to change because of the pain and terror of conversion from one system to another.

The same goes for so called ‘Best Practices’. With the exception of Blackbaud’s Index of Charitable Fundraising, with its benchmarking of key metrics from thousands of nonprofits, and the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Imagination with its 300+ examples of the best fundraising campaigns, there’s really nothing out there—at least not in one place and readily accessible to everyone.

I’ve raised this issue before and many Agitator readers have thoughtfully commented on the reasons why and offered some suggestions for retrieving information.  ( See their comments here, then click on the image to enlarge it.)

Erica Waasdorp in her comment notes that the diligent among us can range out and about, like hunting dogs on the scent, in search of testing results and other ‘best practice insights.  The resources range from the winners of various industry competitions, webinars, blogs and reports issued by various agencies.

While possibly helpful, few or none of these sources is peer-reviewed so often the methodology is unknown and in the end we’re left uncertain as to whether we should be spending our organization’s money on implementing these third party findings and recommendations.  And so, we muddle along hoping for the best.

Chuck Longfield, Blackbaud’s Chief Scientist, has long preached the need for more research and documentation of best practices in our sector. A process by which the ‘best practices’ for procedures most organizations must perform — collection of monthly pledges, thank yous and acknowledgements, for example — are peer reviewed, documented and then made available to the sector.

At the same time, we need to find better ways to make the reams of quality academic research (sometimes far too dense) in the behavioral and neuro sciences more accessible and useful to fundraising practitioners.

Such efforts represent a monumental and expensive undertaking. But far less expensive than the endless waste that now occurs in our sector, where fundamental operational decisions — and costly mistakes — are based mostly on anecdotes and tribal wisdom.

Nearly 7 years ago, in October 2011, UK fundraiser Adrian Salmonresponding to the announcement of The Agitator’s Flat Earth Fundraising series summed up the need quite well:

“Roger and Tom, look forward to seeing the fantastic new things people are doing, BUT I also want to see great examples of tried and true fundraising discipline being applied!

“Who keeps a rigorous record of all their tests nowadays?  And knows what to test, and how to act on the results?

“Who really celebrates and inspires their telephone or face to face fundraising teams, whether in-house or agency — two of the most powerful tools any mass-market fundraiser has access to?

“Who’s using new media most effectively to capture those all-important phone numbers where real people can actually be reached, and where you can have a real dialogue with them?

“Who knows their cost per donor for acquisition and retention across all of their channels and demographics?

“Who’s really ‘developing’ their donors?

“So often a lot of what passes as ‘innovation’ seems to me to be a flight from the bits of fundraising that we think are beneath us – “Now that I’ve got this great new technique, I can stop bothering my supporters with those awful phone calls”, etc, etc.

“We mustn’t encourage that any further, surely….”

Adrian’s absolutely correct. And, here at The Agitatorwe’re attempting to answer those sorts of questions almost every day. And others are doing the same.

But, no one blog, no one nonprofit, fundraiser or agency can do it alone. If our sector is going to grow to meet the challenges of the future, we must find a way to more rigorously examine and identify ‘best practices’ and make this knowledge accessible to all.

Fortunately, ours is a trade willing to share information and insights. The key is to marshal the financial resources and skills to establish an independent information or knowledge center accessible by all.

Roger

P.S.  If you happen to have ideas on foundations or individual donors interested in capacity building and training for the nonprofit sector I’d sure welcome your thoughts.  Please drop me a note: Roger@theagitator.net.  Thank you.