Has Giving Tuesday lost the ability to produce its intended effects?
Several years ago I read Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms' book, New Power, which begins with a quote from Bertrand Russell who described power as the "ability to produce intended effects." Published in 2016, the book is an exploration into the kind of thinking that has informed Giving Tuesday since its inception. The book provides insight into the reasons behind the movement's success as well as its challenges. As participation was down this year, and giving was flat, I felt inclined to grab my copy of New Power in order to make sense of how organizers might be dropping the ball on Giving Tuesday’s intended effects, and what this might mean for the movement in the future.1
In many ways, Heimans and Timms “participation scale” aligns with the same continuum that we see in all contemporary fundraising practices. There are those that aim to do little more than exploit our consumer impulses, while there are others who engage the donor as an active citizen. At the one end of this continuum we find the “old power” telethon which consisted only of picking up the phone to make a donation versus the Ice Bucket Challenge that dared to make the donation an afterthought. Heimans and Timms don’t overlook the fact that the telethon had a very successful run; they simply want their readers to grasp that, in a highly-connected world, where everyone has an innate inclination to participate, such old power tactics are going to increasingly let us down.2
If I were to guess what conversations will sound like among our colleagues at Giving Tuesday in the months ahead, I suspect they will be asking whether their movement is being overrun by two groups that Heimans and Timms describe in their book: those they call cheerleaders who genuinely subscribe to these participatory values yet don’t know how to execute them, along with those they refer to as co-opters who are loyalists to “old power models” and want nothing more than to exploit the participatory values while having no desire whatsoever to relinquish control to an enthusiastic crowd.3
I don’t know that many of us understand just how high a premium the champions of new power put on participation. This was evident in remarks from Asha Curran, Giving Tuesday’s CEO, who expressed concern about the decline in participation and reminded us that Giving Tuesday’s mission isn’t just about raising as many dollars as possible.4 Rather than delivering on its intended effects, that of ensuring that Giving Tuesday is a highly-participatory experience, it’s become increasingly obvious that most charities are choosing to rely on their old power playbook.
If there’s anything that feels like a betrayal of the spirit of what Giving Tuesday is supposed to be all about, it’s the overwhelming volume of emails that have become the centerpiece of the Giving Tuesday experience. These email campaigns are increasingly orchestrated by third-parties who pat themselves on the back for the volume of emails they are able to move in a matter of hours. It’s hard to imagine a less participatory, more “consume and comply” approach than a handful of profit-making companies in far-off places bombarding our inboxes with well-crafted messages, conveying little more than “give now.”5
In order to help their readers make sense of what Giving Tuesday and other highly participatory endeavors should feel like, Heimans and Timms direct a lot of our attention to the Ice Bucket Challenge. They remind us that this worked, not because it was executed by a bunch of experts, but because it created a compelling environment in which as many of us as wanted to could play an active role. It was a “blueprint for action” that made room for everyone to “add their own agency.” Heimans and Timms want leaders to understand that, in our hyper connected world, the more participatory the experience, the more success an endeavor can achieve.6
Having once again studied up on “new power models,” I suspect that, if Giving Tuesday is to sustain itself much longer, it will need to find new ways of unlocking “new power behaviors”; and, instead of being overrun by cheerleaders and co-opters, it will need a new army of crowd-builders who are exemplary of President Obama during his first election campaign. Just as Obama was able to do with his volunteers, these crowd-builders will need to reinvigorate the movement with an “explosion of new power energy” that emerges from a highly-participatory campaign.7
Sustaining this new energy is where it will get tough. Just as the Ice Bucket Challenge was unable to achieve the same results in year two, Heimans and Timms remind us that, during his presidency, Obama quickly slipped into old power mode. While adequate for ensuring his reelection, it did not prevent the political opposition from winning back the White House in 2016.8
As early as the 2010 midterms it was apparent that Obama had evolved from a crowd-leader to a cheerleader. His once highly participatory crowd was now viewed as little more than a cash machine. When the time came for Obama to run for re-election in 2012, big data had replaced the participatory energy, “back-room data whizzes replaced volunteer organizers,” “clickbaity emails flooded our inboxes,” and Obama himself became the “friend who always seemed to need to borrow money.”9
In much the same way that Obama was unable to sustain the new power energy throughout his presidency, I believe Giving Tuesday is suffering from a similar lack of mobilization. In order to regain its participatory energy, Giving Tuesday will have to become much less about raising money and come into line more with what we observed during the Ice Bucket Challenge and Obama’s first campaign. This charge will begin with conveying clearly that crowd-leaders relinquish control to an enthusiastic crowd and don't see participants as merely “an asset to be strip-mined.” In short, this new army of crowd-leaders will have to see to it that everyone has an “inalienable right to participate” in multiple and meaningful ways, ways that extend much further than to “give now.”10
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.
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Heimans, J., Timms, H. (2018). New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--and How to Make It Work for You. Canada: Random House of Canada.
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Heimans, J., Timms, H. (2018). New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--and How to Make It Work for You. Canada: Random House of Canada.
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