The time to get here was always five minutes ago. Or last month. Or last year. Kids in college were always remembering “that dude who graduated last year, man he was cool. Things are lame now that he’s gone.” To parlez in the old style, “Things are not like they used to be.” 15 years ago, when I was but a Padawan among Jedi Fundraisers, I was warned that an era was coming to an end.
This was the era of the “undesignated gift” for “general support.” Back then your organization’s name and reputation meant everything. Big, old organization with a national reputation? here’s your check! The “greatest
generation” gave because they believed it was their duty to support “good work.” I believe that people need to give, that it is part of what makes us whole as human beings. Giving freely with no demands for how a gift will be used may be the highest expression of charity, the closest we can get to living fully.
But it also presents a corrupting opportunity for organizations which receive these gifts. If your donors take your intention to fulfill you mission as a matter of faith, they may rarely bother to scrutinize the effectiveness of the work (or whether or not your organization is, say, keeping “perversion files” and sheltering abuse of the very people it was nominally serving.) Some of us in the non-profit world became so used to receiving these gifts that we felt entitled to them and bristled at any form of questioning as to how gifts were being used. In doing so, we betrayed our donors and ourselves.
Donors, and the government, acted accordingly by demanding “accountability” and “outcomes.” Donors led the charge, most notably through organizations like the United Way. Rather than being a sinecure with reliable annual funding, status as a “United Way Agency” began to mean trying to break down everything we do and assign it a cost. In the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley, the IRS’s redesign of the form 990 (what non-profits file instead of a tax return) further drove a nit-picking mentality as the government looked for a sound rationalization for organizational tax exemptions and deductibility of charitable gifts for donors. The resulting measurements have served to increase anxiety for both funders and the funded. As a result, we have engaged in misleading or downright dishonest practices in the attempt to keep the wheels from falling off.
I heartily believe, however, that we are not trying to keep the wheels on because we are afraid to get out of the truck. We want the wheels to stay on so that the truck can deliver services to the people who need them. It’s those people, at then end of the line, who need to be the focus of our efforts and our gifts. (No shit, right? We can be a little slow sometimes.) The article linked to above is one of several I have seen recently that point to a second generation in the non-profit accountability movement. In this stage, we as fundraisers are not asking donors to fund specific functions (“we’d like you to consider funding 28.4 hours per week of case management time for our organization.”) We should be asking donors to help us achieve specific outcomes (“we’d like you to become a partner in helping young people break the cycle of poverty.”)
As a donor, I want to help and I don’t want to feel like a fool for having tried. Scrutinizing a non-profit’s every expenditure does not feel helpful, but simply trusting a name and a logo feels foolish. As a fundraiser, I want my donors to know how their dollars are being used, but it is more important that they see the end toward which these efforts are being made. My donors and my organization will be better off when we are focused on the people we want to serve, not on each other. Things certainly are not what they used to be, and they never were. This is, I believe, a great time in the evolution of the non-profit sector when we can really work with donors to implement innovative programs which achieve transformational change in our communities.