Are we making sense of fundraising’s default settings?
Just three years before his suicide, author David Foster Wallace gave an address that TIME Magazine called the “Greatest Commencement Speech of All Time.” For the class of 2005 at Kenyon College, Wallace offered a rare glimpse at how he saw the world. Wallace began his speech with a now-famous tale about two fish.
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ’Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’
The two fish knew how to swim and may in fact have been quite good at it. However, being really good at something doesn’t guarantee that we have made sense of the environment that we’re in or that we have completely made sense of what we’re doing. Wallace explained, “[T]he most obvious, important realities in our world are often the ones hardest for us to see.” He said the value of an education had less to do with knowledge and that most important is our “awareness of what is real, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over that it’s there.”
Wallace impressed upon the students that this awareness would keep them from relying on their default settings—their automatic, unconscious beliefs and assumptions. These beliefs tell us a story and position us at the center of it; and, regardless of whether we have any idea where it came from, like the two fish, it’s the story in which we become comfortable swimming.
Wallace warned the students that comprehending “the water” was hard work and that no one expected them to do it automatically. It took practice, determination, and effort; and “some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.”
This is certainly the way it is with our work in the nonprofit sector: weary, and always short on time and resources. It can be difficult to set aside time for introspection and critical thinking. A lot of us don't fully understand the water we’re swimming in, and too few of us have the courage to question our default settings. It’s just easier to keep operating as usual and hope that everything ties up tidily in the end. When it comes to fundraising, far too many organizations are on autopilot, letting outsiders dictate how the story is told and how funding is achieved, rarely questioning whether it’s true. The thought of slowing down to examine that story is difficult. Questioning its accuracy—and whether a more meaningful, sustainable story might be available to us—can be uncomfortable, scary, and exhausting.
Most of my colleagues understand how to raise money. However, like the two fish, I suspect many of them are unaware of the water that they’ve been swimming in and unfamiliar with the default settings they’ve inherited. They also lack the necessary time and resources that would allow them to figure it out. I believe it is this lack of awareness, rather than a lack of ability, that keeps so many of us from addressing our most enduring challenges.
Someone asked me recently what I thought the most significant barrier to organizations increasing their fundraising capacity is. I replied that, for many organizations, fundraising efforts aren’t hindered by limited resources or opportunity but fall short because people don’t fully understand the water in which they’re swimming. Throughout my career, I’ve observed that it is this lack of awareness that leads to the greatest disappointments.
When people are unaware they make the wrong assumptions about what is and isn’t working in their favor. For example, they might be quick to draw conclusions about why one donor continues to support the organization or another had taken her support elsewhere, without the benefit of meaningful conversations to learn what actually informed their decisions. Far too many organizations are entrenched in arms-length fundraising practices that ensure that those most responsible for cultivating and stewarding donor relationships remain unaware of what’s going on in the lives of their donors and what matters most to them.
This lack of awareness of what's really at play is why boards and bosses are notorious for having unreasonable expectations and why they often scapegoat those with fundraising responsibilities for the organization’s financial problems. With greater awareness, perhaps boards and bosses would understand why a donor might give less predictably yet more significantly, why placing blame is of little value in a highly complex environment, and why professional turnover and donor attrition are merely side effects of an entrenchment in dysfunctional fundraising practices.
When raising questions about the fundraising’s default settings, I have come to expect that some will become defensive or angry. As my platform has grown, I’ve managed to stir up some individuals, and more than a few have accused me of betraying traditions that have, in their opinion, served us well. Important to note, it hasn’t been those in the field doing the work who were quickest to defend the status quo; more often than not, it has been the experts who, like the two fish in Wallace’s tale, have been swimming in the same water for too long.
At Responsive Fundraising, when working with clients who want to make better sense of the water that they have been swimming in, we often encourage them to have a roundtable conversation that surfaces some of their default settings. We suggest they start with three questions such as:
Who does your donor understand themselves to be?
What is the nature of your relationship with the donor?
What is it that you are exchanging with the donor?
At first glance, the answers to these questions might seem rather obvious; however, we have found that when our clients contemplate questions like these in light of their actual practices, what once seemed obvious isn’t so clear anymore. In a group exercise such as this one, what our clients often discover is that, when their practices are speaking for them, not only do they arrive at different responses, they can also begin to make sense of the water in which they have been swimming.