It takes a mighty big catastrophe to break the stupor of complacency and take a hard, fresh look at the world around us—especially our world of fundraising.

Even an event as jolting as the Great Recession of 2008 failed to knock more sense into most nonprofits. Of course we aren’t alone. For nearly 50 years the American nation has ignored racism, poverty, a crumbling infrastructure and a diseased health care system. The pandemic has exposed the naked horror of all that.

Sadly, it’s all to easy to keep on keepin’ on fueled by the self-admiring belief that it’s always been this way, “we’ve always done it this way.”

For the 15 years of the Agitator’s history we’ve noted with more than a little dismay and concern the statistics of decline—our sector’s crumbling infrastructure of lower and lower retention rates, fewer and fewer donors, and more and more nonprofits chasing a shrinking base of trust and support.

This coronavirus pandemic may be the calamity that will save us. Unlike the more slow-moving problems and poor practices that slowly accrete like the proverbial frog incrementally boiling to death.  I believe we’re now just entering a major period of economic, physical and psychological crisis that will not only expose what’s broken but will give a new generation of nonprofits and their fundraisers a chance to build something better.

Yes, I believe we will need to start over.  I don’t mean begin from scratch—much of our knowledge

and experience will prove durable and improvable– but I do mean we’ll be forced to look at first principles which means challenging virtually every assumption we’ve taken for granted.

No area will prove in more need of reexamination and new thinking than the area of nonprofit leadership.  For it is the mindset of its leaders that forms the seedbed of an organization’s culture and its future.

Mediocre, same-as-before leadership won’t cut it for what I believe will be a vastly different and more difficult future.  And this need for change in the leadership mindset goes all the way from the board to the CEO to the fundraising and communications staff.

And this means tackling all the issues that have been avoided or glossed over: racial inequality, gender inequality, inadequate skill level, unrewarded training and piss poor accountability.

Only then will an organization be capable of meeting challenges we can hardly imagine today.

In short, we sure won’t meet the challenges we face by adding an extra three appeals, a couple of matching gift challenges, and an endless stream of digital goodies all pumped out by overworked, under-trained staff overseen by uninvolved boards intent on saving a buck.

I only wish I could work at this another 50 years because I’m convinced our sector will indeed build something far greater than ever.

What all of us here at the Agitator will commit to is shining a bright light on first principles and challenging the assumptions too many in our trade take as gospel.

And those challenges go to the way organizations spend—or don’t spend– money on donor research, on quality training and continuing education for staff, and on board recruitment. And also, to continuing our attack on the Volume Culture (ask more, make more) …on the dearth of rigorous testing and planning…and on the failure to understand how to measure value.

Of course we’ve tried doing that nearly 5 years ago (See our 10-part Starting Over series), but that was before the pandemic had everyone’s attention. Fortunately, since then there’ve been lots of developments in the fields of behavioral science, predictive analytics, and the psychology of giving –and in applying lots of that research with solid and notable results.

So, in many ways we’re far better prepared for what I believe will turn out being the Great Fundraising Comeback.

Roger

P.S.  We’d sure welcome your thoughts on current assumptions you think need to be challenged –assumptions worth of hard-questioning given what all fundraisers will face.