When something new comes along, it goes through fuzzy stages of naming:

1. We don’t know what to call it. Early names for our wired digital experience were “information superhighway” (peaked in 1996, according to Google nGram) and “cyberspace” (peaked in 2000).  Early references to the car/automobile included autokenetic, autometon, buggyaut, motorig, and truckle.
2. We define it by how it relates to what we know. Henry Ford wanted to call his original patent the quadricycle to distinguish it from the bicycle, but other distinguishing features were more popular with terms like motor carriage or horseless carriage.  The idea of “mail, only electronic” becomes electronic mail, then email.  We had touchtone, then wireless, phones initially.
3. We redefine the older generation based on the new thing. There’s even a name for this – the retronym.  We never used to have to specify broadcast TV or live TV or terrestrial radio or landline or snail mail or dumb phone or World War I.  Now we do.
4. The new thing is the new base word. “Car” has won the day; something horse drawn is referred to as such.  And now we stem off car: smart car, electric car, flying car (OK, not yet).

These stages are by no means inevitable: CDs never made it past “it’s like a record disc, only compact”; iron lungs, likewise.  Nor are there neat cutoffs – we talk about recording a TV show, which is the same term we used in middle English for writing something down.  When we save an electronic file, we do it to an icon that looks like a manila file folder (which is technically skeuomorphism but still fits nicely into the “it’s like a file folder, only electronic” category).

But this language both reflects and constructs our thinking: is this new thing worth us getting together and agreeing on what we’re going to call it?  And does this change how we think about the old thing.

This brings up the question – the lede I’ve so deeply buried – what are these changes that will or should affect nonprofits?  I have a few thoughts – I’d love to hear yours.

First is the obvious: the term “nonprofit.”  This is clearly in category two: we are like corporations except we don’t make profits.  But it doesn’t fully fit.  Because it’s defined in opposition, we have traditional social benefit organizations, advocacy organizations, and trade associations lumped together.  Secular and religious bump against each other.  Different rules – for membership, tax-deductibility, advocacy, etc. – abound.

Even if you look at the societal benefit organizations, the lines are blurring as to what fits.  In my book The New Nonprofit, I talk about 4Ocean, a for-profit company selling bracelets to fund ocean clean-up, versus Mindful Monsters, a monthly family-activity-card subscription from nonprofit organization Scope.  Both are selling a good to fund a societal benefit mission, making them close on the for-profit/nonprofit spectrum.

And adding in our mélange of organization types, where does the US Chamber of Commerce, a nonprofit organization advocating for businesses, fit in?  You could revert to legal definitions, but these feel wrong, like calling the Nissan Altima manufactured down the street from me as an import, but the Ford Focus manufactured in China as a domestic.

This leads to a larger discussion of what our sector wants to be as it grows up.  As we (hopefully) adopt more techniques to build our world-changing machines, will we get to a place where organizations are defined by what they wish to do in the world instead of their particular circumstances of creation?

I think we are in the middle of a shift from category two to three on monthly/sustaining/recurring versus one-time donations.  Right now, if someone says “we are going to ask for donations,” our default without knowing any other information is that it would be for one-time donations.  But there while there are channels where this is a safe assumption (mail), there’s a spectrum from almost no one-time gifts (door F2F, street F2F) to always monthly first (DRTV) to sometimes monthly first (digital, telemarketing).

If we want to get our internal folks to think consistently of asking for a commitment beyond this one, we need to consistently retronym “one-time donations.” These donations absolutely have their place, but that place should no longer be as a default.

Looking a bit farther into the future, I wonder if citizen journalist will move from #2 to #3.  Right now, if an individual reports on, say, atrocities against Kurds, that’s citizen journalism.  If CNN does it, that’s journalism with no qualifier.  (If a nonprofit does it, it’s content marketing.)

If someone applies journalistic standards (however those are defined), does it matter whether they are reporting on it on their blog versus a nonprofit’s blog versus as a freelance writer whose work gets picked up by a news organization versus someone working directly for that news organization?

And does the aim matter?  Is it the same whether it is the Washington Post or New York Post?  Or Reason or Mother Jones or Breitbart or Jacobin?  Somewhere in each of these we can feel a difference, but where it exactly lies is fuzzy.

This is relevant for us because (again, as I argue in The New Nonprofit) we are all becoming some form of media organization.  In fact, we can gain great advantage by being the source of news/content for the people who care most about our issue.  But that will increasing come from people whose job titles don’t have content or marketing in the name… and may not have a job title at all.

Finally, I submit that direct marketing should be evolving to be the default.  With streaming radio and television evolving toward streaming, the last few holdouts of non-addressable media (aka advertising) are coming into the fold where you can talk directly to a person about a thing based on their interests.

I like watching football, but I don’t drink beer and I don’t want a pickup truck.  Thus, 62% of ads during football are wasted on me (according to the National Association of Numbers I Made Up).  The idea that car and beverage companies could save that money and reallocate it where it could do them some good is a seductive one.  It helps us as marketers at the same time it demands more of our skills as we will soon expect a better experience.

What else will we soon have to rename?

Nick