In another incarnation, I spend a lot of time trying to get farmers to adopt ‘best practises’ that would improve their productivity and profitability while at the same time lessening their environmental footprint.

What one sees is that there are basically three groups of farmers and growers out there:

• The top 20% ‘super farmers’ who eagerly embrace any idea that holds reasonable promise of improving their farming performance;
• The middle 60% who need  much more educating, demonstrating and persuading (and maybe additional incentives — from regulation to subsidy of one sort or another) before maybe they will adopt a new approach, method or technology. Even then, most of these will still lag the top 20% considerably.
• The bottom 20% who will never change, whether they are losing money, screwing the environment, or both.

And believe me the incentives for change are there! A recent report by the farm lobby here in New Zealand boasted that 55% of farmers said they had made a profit in the previous year. Your might reasonably react: ‘only’ 55%?! Yet the group was proud to announce that this was twice the percentage of the year prior.

I hope you see a parallel to the fundraising business, as it faces falling retention and acquisition rates.

Our top 20% ‘super fundraisers’ are the ones Roger encourages to challenge myths, look for evidence, and think for themselves. These are active learners who seek out the plentiful information out there and apply their judgment to it.

Then there’s the next 60% (quarrel over my allocation if you like), who are ‘too busy’ or too complacent or too satisfied with the status quo to be active seekers of improvement. Yes, they might go to a conference occasionally  or participate in a webinar hoping to find some ‘tip’ about matching gift ratios or perfect email subject lines … and eagerly adopt the ‘tip’ du jour that most appeals (especially if, as Roger warns, it’s been proffered by an ’eminence’ in the field).

So, with luck, maybe this group on balance improves its fundraising performance in bits and pieces.

I’d argue that maybe this group does need simplicity. Not oversimplification, but better, clearer, authoritative ‘packaging’ (if you will) of what evidence demonstrates is better fundraising practice. This group, I’m afraid, is simply not going to apply the diligence to sort things out for themselves.

As Tom Ahern commented the other day: “As Seth Godin has blogged, our target markets are often ‘lazy people in a hurry’. Let’s see fundraising research grapple with that reality.”

Unless we offer them something better, and more readily digestible, they will simply continue to be ‘tip browsers’.

In this regard, the work being done by the UK’s Commission on the Donor Experience, outlined by Roger here, is a huge step forward.

But even that might prove too daunting a treasury for many in the middle 60%. It still requires sifting and thinking.

In our profession, there must be broad agreement somewhere on some basic fundamentals of fundraising, each backed by consistent evidence, each representing a (forgive me) a ‘best practice’ beyond dispute, and each capable of plain and simple presentation.

Sort of a Ten Commandments of fundraising.

Can someone indulge my quest for simplicity and nominate a set of Ten Commandments?

Tom