What story should your organization be telling?
Experiencing nonprofits as more than just a highly-competitive marketplace.
Last week I read an article that was a breath of fresh air. Rather than tales of big, scary donors; forecasts about the collapse of philanthropy; and an urge to confess sins we didn’t know we had committed, this story presented something different. This wasn’t a story about everyone in our sector going at each other’s throats as if we exist in a highly-competitive marketplace. This was a story of nonprofits functioning as citizens to better their communities, to achieve goals, and to live up to philanthropy’s full potential.
Evidently DonorsChoose is having a banner year; and, along with recently attracting support from The Gates Foundation, they are not having any trouble also rallying the support of millions of smaller donors. In addition to assisting teachers in 88% of America’s public schools, DonorsChoose has mobilized nearly six-million citizens who have contributed over 1.5 billion dollars. DonorsChoose isn’t just a great example of direct giving; it’s also a great example of an organization betting on a different story - one that centers on our being citizens who share common interests rather than consumers whose self-interests are always putting us at odds with each other.1
Gamboa’s article concludes with a story about Erick Odom, a social studies teacher in the Bronx who said DonorsChoose has helped him turn his classroom into a place where his students feel safe and comfortable. Instead of a story about donors whose aspirations are pre-determined by some expert as incompatible with his, Odom’s is a story of gratefully aligning with citizens who, despite being strangers, genuinely care about his and his students’ success. 2
DonorsChoose is by no means the only example of an organization that is betting on the story that emerges when citizens help other citizens. For example, The Change Reaction, the largest direct giving platform in Los Angeles, provides rapid relief to those who share a common place. The way it works is similar to what happens between donors and teachers at DonorsChoose. A small staff work directly with the city’s thousands of helping professionals who are able to quickly get money into the hands of those in need. Wade Trimmer, the president of The Change Reaction, previously spent more than 30 years navigating traditional philanthropy which he insists is “outdated, often inefficient, expensive and unnecessarily competitive.”3
As more nonprofit leaders attempt to make sense of why organizations like DonorsChoose and The Change Reaction are growing at a time when everything else seems to be in decline, I have found that author Jon Alexander offers a helpful framework in his book Citizens. Alexander explains that our organizations have always had the opportunity to tell different stories. Unfortunately, the most familiar story is the one that categorizes us as either producers or consumers and assumes that “selfish humans can be driven to act only by the competitive imperative.” A lot of us justify this story to ourselves with some bogus idea that somehow betting on self interest adds up to collective good.4
What Alexander refers to as The Consumer Story is what philosopher Charles Taylor would describe as our modern social imaginary - a story that we implicitly, collectively, tell ourselves. Like the water in David Foster Wallace’s fish bowl, our modern social imaginary encompasses our common, implied, unquestioned views, which often contain moral or religious claims about a society, its values, and how it should be organized. We don’t make sense of the social imaginary in the classroom but through our lived experiences in a particular culture. It gives us a sense of who we are, how we fit together, how we got where we are, and what we might expect from each other in carrying out the collective practices that constitute our way of life.5
The world as a competitive marketplace has been our social imaginary for more than a century. It’s the story that Robert Putnam warned had crept too far into our sector during the latter half of the twentieth century. In Bowling Alone, Putnam explained how our sector abandoned its Tocquevillian ideals in order to become “mailing list organizations” headquartered in far off places and run by experts who were deemed most qualified to set the agenda. Instead of ensuring that our communities had the benefit of collaborative, citizen-like relationships, we chose instead to focus on exploiting the impulses of self-interested consumers in order to win the competition for charitable dollars.6
What Putnam didn’t point out in his book is that this competitive way of thinking had gained a foothold in our sector’s fundraising practices more than a century earlier. Historians explain that, in the later half of the nineteenth century, fundraising pioneers began embracing the marketplace’s mounting influence. Authors Roddy, Strange and Taithe explain that these pioneers “created, in effect if not in intent, a charitable fundraising ‘market’. This charity market was characterized by competition for consumers (i.e. donors) among charity entrepreneurs. It involved conscious adoption by them of surprisingly up-to-date marketing techniques and strategies to ‘sell’ and distinguish their particular brands of compassion from those of rivals with similar relief remits.”7
What organizations like DonorsChoose and The Change Reaction are essentially asking is whether trading on each other’s consumer impulses has lived up to its promises and whether it’s time to begin exploring different ways of relating to each other. Similar to how author Genevieve Vaughan distinguishes between the gift and the commodity8, and how historian Natalie Zemon Davis distinguishes between “gift mode” and “sales mode,9” has the time come to remind ourselves that we’re citizens rather than consumers; that we can collaborate rather than be in competition with each other; that we can cultivate relationships centered on persons rather than products; and that, despite whatever selfish genes we have, we all have an innate desire to meet the needs of others.
For those looking for explanations to the myriad of challenges we are facing in our sector today, I would suggest we start by asking whether betting on a competitive worldview has really worked and whether some of our donors are a step ahead of us in realizing that it hasn’t. Author Flora Michaels explains that, while extremely powerful and persuasive, no story is inescapable and all human experience diverges over time from those who let us down. Events like September 11th, the Great Recession, and Covid-19 are often disruptive to the prevailing story and give us reasons to question it. Michaels says we eventually become hungry for something other than what the dominant story affords us.10
I believe it is this desire to break free from our society’s dominant story and the opportunity to feel like more than just a passive consumer in a competitive marketplace that makes organizations like DonorsChoose and The Change Reaction such an appealing alternative to the status quo. These organizations are not afraid that offering their donors the chance to experience a different story will put them out of business, make them irrelevant, or violate all kinds of ethical rules for charitable giving. Instead, it may set them up for even greater gains in what authors like Alexander foresee as a complete societal shift - one in which our governing story shifts from being consumer-driven to citizen-driven. This shift, I suspect most would agree, is long overdue.
I don’t suspect that the part of our identities that function as consumers in a competitive marketplace will go away anytime soon. I would, however, venture to say that, given the context in which we find ourselves, we will increasingly find other ways to exist in the world. I believe many will go looking for this alternative first in relationships with charitable organizations. Like it or not, we can’t change much about the way we relate to Target and Amazon; we can, however, insist that our relationships with the local food bank don’t work the same way.
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.
Ibid.
Alexander, J., Conrad, A. (2023). Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything Is All of Us. United Kingdom: Canbury Press.
Taylor, C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. United Kingdom: Duke University Press.
Putnam, R. D. (2001). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. United Kingdom: Simon & Schuster.
Roddy, S., Strange, J., Taithe, B. (2018). The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870-1912. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Difference Worldview is Possible. (2007). Canada: Inanna Publications and Education.
Davis, N. Z. (2000). The Gift in Sixteenth-century France. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Michaels, F. S. (2011). Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything. Canada: Red Clover.