“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

That is the opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. He then spent more than 800 pages cataloguing the many available routes to domestic misery.

Fundraising has adopted its own version of the Tolstoy principle: successful donor relationships all look roughly alike, while donors leave for countless mysterious reasons.

That belief explains a lot.

It explains the single donor journey, the universal cultivation stream, the campaign calendar, the fixed ask cadence and the assumption that anyone who gave to the same organization must have done so for roughly the same reason.

The result is a fundraising model built around sameness.

Our DonorVoice Relationship Commitment model identifies reliability, reciprocity and trust as essential conditions of a strong relationship. Self-Determination Theory adds autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Those conditions may be broadly shared but their expression is not.

One donor gives because supporting the organization affirms who she is. Another gives because the issue violates her sense of fairness. Another wants to protect a group to which he feels loyalty. Some want evidence and mastery. Others respond to possibility, urgency, belonging or duty.

A donor can feel competent through detailed proof of impact or through the simple knowledge that she played a meaningful part. Relatedness might come from connection to beneficiaries, a community of fellow supporters or the organization itself. Autonomy can mean choosing an area of work, setting communication preferences or simply feeling that the decision to give remains hers rather than the product of relentless pressure.

Successful donor relationships are therefore not all alike. Treating them as if they are may be one of fundraising’s most common and preventable failures.

Medicine has a useful concept for such failures: the “Never Event.” These are serious, unambiguous and preventable errors. Hospitals pair them with “Always Events,” specific practices intended to make the desired outcome more reliable.

Fundraising needs its own Ever/Never List.  Here’s a few.

Never Event

• Defining a donor by the channel through which the $ arrived.
• Calling a name merge or a different ask amount personalization.
• Interpreting last action (check written, link clicked, ad viewed) as proof the communication caused the gift
• Use faux urgency or pressure
• Use generic fundraising that any organization could send (matching gift, faux member card, nickel package)

Always Event

• Identify the Identity and Trait the communication is intended to activate
• Preserve autonomy rather than treating pressure, urgency and frequency as interchangeable with persuasion
• Always give donors a credible sense of competence by showing them how their action connects to an outcome they value.
• Use holdouts or another credible counterfactual when deciding whether a channel, communication or campaign created behavior rather than merely appearing near it.
• Measure donor experience as always-on, enterprise wide activity and use the data to change the supporter experience in aggregate and at the individual donor level.

Medicine learned to reduce failure by studying it closely, finding recurring causes and redesigning the system around them.

Tolstoy found hundreds of ways for relationships to fail. The Volume Model of fundraising has found one remarkably consistent method: assume everyone is the same and dial it to 11.

Kevin