Seven Faces and the Sorting Era
This is the next essay in Taming the Gift. Here we continue to reflect on the relationship between the gift and the encounter. To learn more about the project, visit here.
I have always been drawn to a good framework, the kind that helps us make sense of ourselves and others like the Myers-Briggs or the Enneagram. I read them the way other people read horoscopes, half skeptical and fully absorbed; and I never once left one without feeling I understood someone better than I had that morning.
I’ve come to appreciate these tools enough that I built one of my own. In my first book, working from McClelland’s theory of needs, I sorted fundraisers into three categories according to the needs they most often exhibit in a fundraising effort. I named my three personalities Let’s Work Together, I’ll Lead the Way, and How Am I Doing.
Knowing this about me, you can imagine that when I found a book on the required reading list in graduate school promising to sort major donors into seven types, I was intrigued. The Seven Faces of Philanthropy introduced me to the Communitarian, the Devout, the Investor, the Socialite, the Altruist, the Repayer, and the Dynast. Once I knew them as well as I knew an ENTP from an ISFJ, I spent a great deal of time fitting the major donors I met into their categories.
Despite my enthusiasm for categorizing, the field was always telling me something else. As helpful as these frameworks can be in making sense of ourselves and others, nobody wants to be understood first as a category. Donors, leaders, and the fundraisers they employ each want to be met as a particular person with a particular need; and particularity is the one thing a category cannot supply. I have watched many times as a person pushed back against a description I or someone else offered, not because they were refusing its accuracy but because this was not how they wanted to be known.
Seven Categories
To understand the appeal this genre had, you have to grasp the field from which it emerged. Direct mail was beginning to wane; the machine Viguerie built had run for decades and the returns were thinning. The Boomers were entering their peak earning years, major gift fundraising was becoming a lucrative niche, and a generation of fundraisers was moving upmarket with one commandment above the rest: know your donor. What nobody could quite say was how. Why a person gives was still a mystery you worked out one relationship at a time, slowly, and mostly by getting it wrong.
The field went looking for the answer, and the books came one after another. Jerold Panas compiled twenty-two motivational factors and asked a thousand professionals to rank them. Francie Ostrower sat down with ninety-nine wealthy New Yorkers and listened. And Russ Alan Prince and Karen Maru File, a private wealth consultant and a marketing professor, studied hundreds of affluent donors and came back with something the others didn’t. They came back with seven kinds of givers, assigned them names, and offered insights into how to speak to each one and how to compel him to give.
The question no one thought to ask was whether organizing givers into discrete categories is what the gift sets out to do. The book did for a donor’s motives what the wealth screen would do for his money. It made the interior of a person legible without anyone having to know him.
Prince and File tell us how common each face is. Communitarians are a quarter of major donors; the Devout a fifth. Real research was carefully gathered, and I have no reason to doubt any of it. But notice what the percentages cannot hold. There is no room for the man who is a Communitarian on a Tuesday and something nearer the Devout after a death in the family. There is no space for the year a person’s reasons for giving changed and no one around them noticed. The table was built to be referenced rather than revised.
There is a reason a book like Seven Faces can be entirely accurate and still leave you having never met anyone. Martin Buber, whom we met earlier in this project, wants us to be careful about what we call knowing a person. A description can be complete before the person ever walks in; an encounter cannot happen until she does. The description is assembled in her absence, but the encounter is impossible without her; and no amount of the first will ever add up to the second.
When I think back on the many times I sat with a donor over lunch, Buber would ask who, exactly, I was relating to. The honest answer, far too often, was the Communitarian. Not Mrs. Patterson, sitting right across from me, enjoying her chicken salad and telling me how well her grandson had played in the golf tournament.
The List That Kept Growing
For Viguerie’s list to do what he wanted, it had to grow; and to grow, it had to be carved into categories. That is the whole story of what followed. The categories were never incidental to it. They were the condition of its working at all.
Viguerie started with twelve hundred names, few enough that a person could imagine holding them in his head. But the list grew the way lists do when they work, and before long he and the pioneers who followed him were mailing to millions. Nobody can hold tens of thousands of names in his head, so the era of the list gave way to the era of the sort. And the sort had a signature, a triad every fundraiser now knows in his bones: the zip code, the wealth screen, the donor score. Where you lived, what you were worth, and how you had behaved. The donor score is something akin to a credit rating and increasingly common in today’s data-informed shops. Together the three now decide who is worth the postage and who gets assigned to a gift officer’s portfolio.
As computers reached the development office, the sort became a science. A database could rank a donor against every other name in the file, and the score answered the sorter’s question better than any human could. The list taught the sector to want categories; and eventually the only thing left uncategorized was the why behind the donor’s decision. That was the appetite Seven Faces arrived to feed.
The change was easy to miss. Early on, a category was something you wrote down about a donor you already knew, a shortcut to remembering who you had just met. Then, over time, it became the first thing you reached for; and the system had it ready. The file could compare her to a hundred thousand donors who had behaved like her. Nobody chose this. The list had grown larger than any mind could hold, and the boards and bosses always wanted more from Mrs. Patterson than the year before. The bigger the list, the more the work depended on categories, until sorting people was no longer a shortcut. It was the job.
A Vital Human Need
Charles Taylor helps us grasp why the sorting has greater implications than we might have imagined. Recognition is a vital human need, not just a courtesy. We work out who we are in relation with others, and their picture of us becomes part of who we are. Taylor describes this as the dialogical character of human life, and it does not stop in childhood. It runs the length of our lives.
This is what makes Seven Faces the harder case. The category does not stay on the page. The moment a fundraiser acts on it, treats Mrs. Patterson as the Communitarian, speaks to her as one, asks of her what Communitarians want to be asked, the category becomes part of a relationship; and a relationship is exactly where a self is formed. Mrs. Patterson doesn’t even need to know the category exists; she has likely never once thought to call herself a Communitarian. It doesn’t matter. The people on the other side of the interaction have found it useful, and they have built the relationship around it. She relates to them through it whether she can see it or not.
Here is the part that should trouble us. We do not simply receive the picture others hold of us; over time we take it in, and it becomes part of how we see ourselves. Show a person the same narrow picture long enough, in every visit and every letter, and she may begin to live up to it, until the picture and the person are hard to tell apart. This is not a neutral act. Taylor goes so far as to call misrecognition a kind of harm, a way of imprisoning someone in a smaller version of themselves. And the picture need not be false to do it. Even a true one, if it is the only one ever offered, crowds out everything else Mrs. Patterson is. Relationships are meant to fulfill us, not define us entirely. But a person can only be met as fully as she is seen, and too many of us are seeing no one but our beloved Communitarian.
What the Category Wants
I pigeonholed a great many major donors over the years, a fair number of Investors in Austin, several Communitarians here at home. And, in more cases than I want to count, the donor was affirming my category rather than the other way around. I wonder now how many of those conversations I spent listening for confirmation, waiting for the part that would fit. The picture was finished before I sat down. I was not there to see who Mrs. Patterson was. I was there to watch her fall into place.
The category is rarely wrong, often getting more right about us than it gets wrong, and that is exactly what makes it so hard to see past. The category wants to stand in for the person.
- Jason Lewis, Partner & Chief Innovation Officer at Seed
This was the fifth essay in the second half of Taming the Gift, where the project turned from naming what has tamed the gift to recovering what might set it free. To learn more about the project, visit here.