Fundraising needs to embrace rather than resist constraints.
Before I share what is on my mind this week, I want to invite you to participate in a two-part conversation that begins next week with our friends at Women in Development of Central MA. I have enjoyed getting to know this group of fundraisers for several years; they hosted our roadshow in May of 2019, and I am grateful for the friendships that have continued to grow and evolve since. I’m going to start next week’s conversation by distinguishing between the competing cultures that I see undermining the fundraising efforts of so many organizations. If you’re interested in attending, be sure to check out the registration information below.
Two decades ago I was at a fundraising conference where I happened upon a direct response company whose messaging centered around the simple idea that the more donors an organization acquired, the better. Their messaging said nothing of the donor profile, the expectations surrounding these donors, or the quality of relationships formed with them. All this company wanted a young, naïve fundraiser to believe was that there was always another donor to be had and that, as long as one set their career on a course of constantly acquiring what was supposedly a limitless supply, the more successful they would be. While I was aware of the underlying flaws in such thinking, I knew they were onto something; they were framing their client's problem and its solution rather well.
Several weeks ago I was reminded of this observation by my friend Jim Langley who described one of the traps that so many of us fall into early in our careers. This trap fosters the belief that, in order to raise more money, one must first acquire more donors. Langley reminded us of what so many organizations have been doing for decades: acquiring more donors than they can foster meaningful relationships with and becoming increasingly reliant on the wealthy few with whom they can. As those being overlooked went elsewhere, those we were increasingly dependent upon started wondering why we were coming back to them so often.1
Rather than ceaselessly acquiring donors with whom we don’t have the carrying capacity to establish meaningful relationships and getting ourselves stuck in the trap that he describes, Langley wants us to appreciate the advantages that emerge from “smaller, more stable, and more personal communities of shared purpose.” In much the same way that Lewis Hyde describes the upper limits of a gift community2, Langley wants us to create right-sized communities, in which donors who seemingly go missing are “immediately noticed, missed, and sought back.” Once we reach this point of growth, every new relationship comes at the expense of a relationship we already have and the need to raise more money becomes a matter of higher expectations rather than a limitless database.
Implicit in the belief that to raise more money one must first acquire more donors is our faith in what author Wendell Berry refers to as the doctrine of limitlessness: a belief that assumes there is always more of whatever we’re looking for available to us. Berry explains that this doctrine has been deeply ingrained in the American way of life since the Industrial Revolution and that, if we look around with a critical eye, we can see how it informs our thinking about practically everything. Contemporary fundraising practices are certainly no exception. 3
Our belief in limitlessness convinces us that we’re entitled to pursue, without restraint, whatever it is that we find desirable. In the fundraiser’s case, it’s not only the assurance of limitless donors, but also the belief that these new donors will be more generous and have lower expectations than the donors we already have. In our pursuit of more, this doctrine allows for what Berry describes as a type of moral minimalism wherein efficiency trumps all other values and in which we’re embarrassed when a solution doesn’t “involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine.”
In his 2008 essay, Berry suggested that there was growing awareness that our constant pursuit of more had reached its peak and that we were “entering a time of inescapable limits.” As I suspect many others have been doing in their respective fields, this is where I’m beginning to see a growing number of my colleagues. As the illusion of limitlessness fades, they find themselves, “under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.” But, without first-hand experience of how to raise more dollars without the adding additional donors to the database, how does an organization feel anything other than constrained by the communities of shared purposes that Langley encourages us to create? Quite simply, we have to embrace the constraints.
Berry explains that “our human and earthly limits, properly understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.” He suggests that “we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within bounds that are accepted prior to the work.”
Berry reminds us that it is the artist, not the scientist, who has to embrace constraints. Whether the medium is a painting, performance, or story, an artist must reckon with limits imposed by a frame, the attention span of their audience, or the memory of a reader. While such limits are self-imposed, they help to ensure a certain depth to our work that we wouldn't otherwise find. Coincidentally, I have employed constraints with clients who are setting off on a fundraising endeavor. We have found that our recommended constraints are an effective way of ensuring that a client not only accomplishes their goal but also finds greater meaning and purpose that is otherwise hard to find.
In difficult times like we are currently experiencing, we begin questioning whether some of the beliefs we embraced early in our career are flawed. When new donors aren’t so easy to come by, when four out of five of these donors don’t give again, and when their level of support doesn’t budge beyond what offers them a momentary warm glow, we begin to wonder whether our investment could have been more effective elsewhere, perhaps in strengthening the bonds among an existing community of shared purpose as Langley describes. We begin to ask whether acquiring yet another donor from a presumably limitless supply actually works. We wonder whether our beliefs did not actually fix our problems but in fact made them more ingrained and increasingly difficult to correct. We ask ourselves whether it was the allure of a limitless supply of new donors that forbade us from creating the kind of high-context donor community upon which we could always rely.
If you’d like to join us next week for the first session in a two-part conversation hosted by Women in Development of Central MA, feel free to register here. I’m going to begin this conversation by deconstructing why so much of what we understand about contemporary fundraising lets us down and sets us up for failure and disappointment. In our second conversation, we will resume right where we left off by reconstructing our thinking with a simple yet elegant framework designed to increase our fundraising capacity and to ensure that the fundraising experience is uplifting and meaningful for everyone involved. If you’d like to join us, we would be delighted!
If your organization wants to understand how to raise extraordinary levels of support by way of meaningful relationships and higher expectations, our team at Responsive would welcome the opportunity to help you do that. If you’re interested in learning more, email me and/or our managing partner, Michael Dixon. We will be happy to volunteer an hour to get to know you and to explore with you what a partnership with our team might look like.
Want to host the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow?
We would welcome the opportunity to host the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow in your community. Since 2014, our team has been organizing high-quality, one-day roadshows in partnership with nonprofit leaders who want to showcase their space and champion thought-provoking and highly-interactive fundraising training for their nonprofit community.
Our hosts have included the Children’s Defense Fund in DC, the Henry Ford Health Center in Detroit, Cause Leadership in Toronto, Mission Capital in Austin, North Texas Food Bank in Dallas and The Gateway School in New York City. Most recently, in partnership with the Nonprofit Association of the Midlands, we hosted our most successful roadshow to date in Omaha. If you’d like to explore the idea of hosting the Responsive Fundraising Roadshow, email us today.
Hyde, L. (2019). The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. United States: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.