Yesterday Roger previewed a new Agitator series with the theme, Starting Over.

To Roger, ‘starting over’ means going back to and addressing the most fundamental questions:

• What does our donor want?
• Are we delivering it?
• Why are they leaving?

As Roger sees it (watch for his rant on this tomorrow), if you aren’t focused on those questions, you’re doomed to fail. That’s the change in orientation you need to make if you’re serious about starting over.

I don’t disagree, but the question that occurs to me: Are the answers to those questions any different now than they would have been 10, 20 or 30 years ago?

If we think yes, then clearly a significant new approach in our fundraising is called for. We need to identify the nature of the changes in donor behaviour, attitudes, expectations, opportunities, tools etc, and then modify our practices to suit the ‘new’ donor.

If we think no, then we can merely go about the incremental business of tinkering with refinements to approaches we believe to be fundamentally sound … perhaps with a commitment to being better occasional listeners to our donors.

Where do I come down?

I think donors today want what they’ve always wanted — to act on their values, to express compassion, to be part of something bigger, to feel better about themselves, to have an impact and make a difference, to respond to fear, to be appreciated. Motives and needs like these haven’t changed and never will.

But some things have changed, mostly in reaction to the environment donors find themselves in. For example, I submit today’s donors are less trustful, harder to impress, less reliant on the ‘intermediary’ services nonprofits have provided in the past, less patient, much faster moving, with instant boundless access to the information they deem most relevant.

So there is a ‘new’ donor … not in the sense of why they give, but in the sense of how.

If that’s true, then a key challenge for ‘starting over’ and our Agitator series is deciding which existing fundraising practices to jettison, which to embrace, and discerning what must be invented.

We shouldn’t expect to change human nature, the why of giving, but we’ll certainly need to change and improve the ways we enable that giving, which brings us back to listening to our donors so we can address the core questions Roger poses.

Tom