Are You an ATM or a Fundraiser?
We don’t pay nearly enough attention to the issue of disrespect and the horrible price our sector pays for ignoring it or shrugging it off with a “well, that’s the way it is.”
Disrespect runs rampant in the nonprofit world. We see it every day, reflected in the actions and attitudes of nonprofit boards, CEOs and fundraisers. It has infected the way nonprofits deal with donors and the public. The disease of disrespect threatens us all.
The symptoms are all around us. Failure of boards and CEOs to pay for proper training, continuing education and reward success. Failure of fundraisers to educate boards and CEOs on the values and skills of our trade, and to demand proper compensation. Failure of organizations to recognize and treat donors with the skill and respect valued partners in a relationship deserve.
Five years ago the landmark study UnderDeveloped: A National Study of Challenges Facing Nonprofit Fundraising warned that more than 50% of American’s fundraisers wanted to quit and 25% of their bosses said they fired their last fundraiser. Only 41% of the development directors surveyed said the partnership between them and their executives on fund development was strong.
In a powerful, detailed and resource-filled three-part post, Simone Joyaux in Simone Uncensored weighed-in with a thoughtful distillation of the problems surfaced in UnderDeveloped.
“In summary, here’s the scoop: Development officers quit. Bosses fire development officers. Boards don’t play. Organizations don’t get it. This vicious cycle threatens financing of the sector. And, this has been going on for years and we aren’t really fixing it.”
Today, five years later, we’re no closer to a cure for this disease.
In fact, just three days ago, in his post Have You Lost Your Soul Tom cited some very worrisome figures from the NonprofitHR 2017 Nonprofit Employment Practices Survey: “Less than 1% of nonprofit funding has historically gone toward supporting nonprofit talent and only 0.03% ($450M) of the sector’s $1.5 trillion annual spending has been allocated to leadership development.” And feeling unwanted? According to this survey, only 19% of nonprofits have a formal program to retain their top performer
If that’s not a sure sign of disrespect topped off with a cherry of willful ignorance I don’t know what is.
No doubt every Agitator reader can t recall dozens of instances where he or she felt disrespected. And with a bit more soul-searching instances in which he or she demonstrated disrespect toward colleagues, bosses –and yes, donors.
The damage of disrespect for the public and donors, as seen by the tsunami of media revulsion over some UK fundraising tactics in recent years, and, in poor retention rates in many countries.
In a Third Sector post titled Fundraisers Are not ATMs Ian MacQuillin, head of Rogare the fundraising think tank at the Plymouth University Hartsook Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy tells the following story (with some details changed to protect the innocent and spare the guilty):
“ A couple of years ago, the curator of a London art gallery popped into the fundraising director’s office to say that an artwork had just become available that would be perfect for the gallery’s collection, so could she – the fundraising director – find the £35,000 required to buy it.
“With the intonation of someone saying ‘duh!’, the fundraising director replied: “No!”
“The curator was taken aback and asked why.
“The fundraising director’s response was threefold:
“The extra £35,000 wasn’t budgeted for (and besides, the curator had already spent all her acquisition budget…).
“The fundraising team was at full stretch and didn’t have spare resource to tackle it.
“Did the curator expect her to magic the money out of thin air?”
“Yet this is exactly what many at charities expect their fundraisers to do – conjure up money from nothing. If NGOs need money, all they need to is pop along to their fundraising department, enter a code, and withdraw the cash. In other words, they treat them like ATMs.
“It’s been postulated – with some justification – that one of the causes of the 2015 [UK] fundraising crisis was that fundraisers treated donors as ATMs: something from which to extract money. But if charities were treating their fundraisers like ATMs, demanding more and more money while simultaneously cutting their resources, is it any wonder things played out as they did?
“Last week I tweeted something along these lines and it got more than 125 likes and retweets. It’s clear this hit a nerve.
“Yet this isn’t new. For a long time fundraisers have spoken about the need to instil a ‘culture of philanthropy’ that will nurture and support long-term, donorcentred fundraising; and railed against the short-term targets foisted on them that can only be met through more transactional methods….
“And for years, we have known that others at charities view fundraising in terms of a ‘necessary evil’ and distanced themselves from their fundraisers, using pronouns such as ‘them’ rather than ‘us’. You could see this during the 2015 crisis, which was the result of what ‘they’ – fundraisers – did, not what ‘we’ – charities – did (partly by treating fundraisers like ATMs).
“What the response to my tweet is telling us – and we knew it anyway – is that there is something fundamentally wrong with the charity sector: the devaluing and disrespecting of fundraising.
“This won’t change simply because fundraisers point it out (they’ve been doing that for ages). But if nothing is actually changing, we obviously need fresh thinking and a fresh approach.
“The first thing we need to know is the extent of the problem. But more importantly we need to know why it is problem. We don’t really know what causes the ‘necessary evil’ attitude. Is it the result of organisational silos, fixable by a bit of integration? Or is it ideological – the use of us/them language suggests it might be – which could require re-engineering the way people think about fundraising?
“Rogare recently looked into the barriers to implementing relationship fundraising, hypothesising these reduced to two things:
- Lack of a culture of philanthropy at organisations that would allow relationship fundraising to take root.
- Fundraising is not sufficiently professionalised to generate the trust needed start building that culture – NGOs don’t trust the specialist knowledge fundraisers claim to possess.
“That identifies two possible routes to an eventual solution that will close the gap between fundraisers and the rest of the charity so that fundraisers are not treated like cashpoints.
“But moaning about it won’t fix the problem, however good that might feel.”
As all too many Agitator readers well know, and as our reader surveys show, there’s lots of “magical thinking” out there. And Ian makes clear some of the destructive results.
It’s time we all take a serious look at steps each of us can take to build respect for our donors, for those with whom we work and yes, for ourselves.
Roger
5 responses to “Are You an ATM or a Fundraiser?”
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I think a real problem is unrealistic targets imposed on fundraisers by senior management. Managers need to trust their fundraisers to set achievable targets, based in reality and on proper analysis of the donor portfolio. (By all means have a stretch target as well – but this shouldn’t be what budgets are based on). And fundraising directors need to push back on pressure from above, protecting their team rather than passing the pressure down. Unachievable targets are immensely demoralising.
In my current role I’m lucky enough to have the freedom to do this, and I hugely appreciate it and feel I am supported to do my job well. The lack of this positive attitude was a major factor in me deciding to move on from previous roles.
Great point from Hayley. In our white paper, Encouraging Longevity in Nonprofit Development, we identified these key factors: flexibility, a great leader, communication, the freedom to take risks, passion for the mission, and of course, the power of perks. You can download it here: http://www.pamelagrow.com/8849/take-keep-nonprofit-development-director/
Roger, while I agree with much of what you wrote about not being treated like ATMs, I’m afraid I disagree with the fundraiser in the art museum. This was a painting that had just become available, so it would not have been budgeted for – it was an unexpected opportunity to advance the museum’s mission. And the rest of the fundraiser’s reply struck me as bureaucratic, petty and a power-trip (yes, I realize this is sort of made-up dialogue). Seems to me that if you are the development person, you should be as responsive as possible when sudden opportunities or needs arise. When I was dev director at a regional animal shelter/vet hospital right after Katrina, we were as jammed-up as you would expect, having not budgeted to send vet teams to New Orleans or take on the care of dozens of animals from there, plus being in the midst of doing a pet calendar and the year-end campaign. In the midst of this, the dental machine in our animal hospital died. The head vet came to me and said, we have got to get another machine NOW or a bunch of these dogs are going to lose their teeth and may have to be put down. Imagine if I had responded like the fundraiser at the museum! Instead, we put out an emergency e-blast (although there had been daily ones going for a week and a half) explaining the situation and asking for the exact amount needed ($10,000 and change) for the machine even if you have already given to our also-unbudgeted Katrina efforts. Within 2 hours, we had raised almost $14,000 – twice our usual e-blast haul back in those days when we had very few email donors. And over 80% of the money came from donors who had given in the past ten days to our previous emergency e-blasts. So I think that fundraisers, while they deserve respect, collaboration, a seat at the table and so on, should also remember that they are there by choice to use the skills that they have to advance the shared cause. I did not know how to operate a veterinary dental machine, but I was the only person on the team that could raise the money for it and it felt good to do my part. Sorry for such a long post but the three responses from the museum fundraiser struck my nerves in the other direction!
Amen.
You’ve hinted at the problem with
• Lack of a culture of philanthropy AND
• Fundraising is not sufficiently professionalised
The lack of a philanthropy culture stems directly from the TOP. From leaders who view money as ‘filthy lucre’ and fundraisers as ‘money grubbers.’ As long as the CEO and/or Board view fundraising in this distasteful, almost taboo manner, there’s little the fundraiser can do to turn the tide.
Which brings us to lack of professionalism. It’s not just fundraisers who aren’t sufficiently professionalized. It’s also CEOs and boards. Anybody and their dog can found a nonprofit. Many do. Then they ask friends to join the board — folks who know next-to-nothing about the roles and responsibilities of board members. Then they hire someone to do fundraising, and put them in a corner with the admonition to “go raise money.”
It starts at the top before it seeps down.
Chip – the painting at the art gallery *had* been budgeted for, since the art gallery has an annual acquisition budget for new works. The problem was that all that money had already been spent, and, like everything in life, you can only spend your money once – that applies to art galleries too.
If you spend your cash on something and then something better comes on the market, well, your money’s already gone. Most people in that situation can’t simply pop along to an office somewhere and say: “I spent all my money but now I want to spend it again, so can you give me the money.”
Context is everything, and of course in a 500-word blog, I wasn’t really able to provide the context to that dialogue between fundraiser and curator. So here is a bit more of that context. The curator’s attitude was symptomatic of an attitude towards fundraising that devalued it and saw it only as service to provide cash but didn’t take much care or interest of what was needed to do that – the classic ‘necessary evil’ attitude. The request for the extra 35k was a bit of a last straw moment.
The failure of bureaucracy (let’s actually call this ‘process’) is not with the fundraiser deciding to do things by the book, but with the failure of the curator and other senior staff at this organisation to have read the book in the first place, or even have a vague idea what’s in the book, or even know on which shelf of which office the book is kept.
I’d also suggest, Chip, that the scenario you present is not comparable with the painting. Emergencies by definition require urgent, immediate action. The situation you describe had suddenly become the number 1 priority of your organisation for that short period of time and all other work was put on hold while you dealt with that. That was not the case at art gallery. The painting was neither an emergency nor a strategic priority, just something that would be nice to have, and all the other work the fundraising team had to do would have gone on concurrently. The only part of the organisation accruing extra work was the fundraising department, but they’d not be getting extra resource (human or time) to do it.
Sure, the fundraiser could have directed resources from other more pressing projects that had already been agreed as strategic priorities, which might then have fallen behind schedule/target; or she could have taken on this extra work by working longer hours and weekends (and asking her team to do the same). The question we need to ask however is: why should she, when the organisation she works for continually devalues and downplays what she does, implicitly criticises her and her team when things go wrong, but barely offers a word of gratitude or hint of recognition when they go well?
There comes a point – for the sake of your own quality of life – when you simply have to say: No, no more.
The art gallery scenario shouldn’t be read a story about what individual people did or didn’t do, but as evidence that something at an organisation or sector level is not working. Whatever that is needs to be identified and fixed. But fundraisers continually taking on more and more work – because the don’t feel they can say no – simply obfuscates and perpetuates the problem.