philanthropissed

I received a solicitation letter in the mail today that was pretty well done – well executed, easy to read direct mail format and great storytelling. Except, it way, way overused the italic and bold and underline. Sometimes even bold, italic  and underline at once.

I like what the organization does. I’ve given to them before (in fact I still have a balance on a pledge I’m supposed to be paying). But when I stepped back from my knowledge of direct mail tactics and shed the fundraiser identity, and just looked at it as a donor – I felt insulted. Yes, I have limited time, and you want to use bold and italics to call my attention to THE MOST IMPORTANT STUFF in case I decide to skim. I get it.

But the letter made me feel like they didn’t trust me to read it – or care. Now, trust is the single most important thing an organization can establish with its donors. But it has to start with the organization – showing that you’re trustworthy, but also that you can extend trust right back.

Donors are your investors, not playground kids who you can condescend and trick into giving you money with strategic bolding. We don’t blithely throw money at you, especially in this economy. So treat us with respect. If I have enough affinity towards your organization that I opened the letter, trust that I will read it and make an informed choice.

I live in Seattle, and I love the alternative news weekly The Stranger. Mostly because I have a penchant for mouthy liberals who openly acknowledge and cherish their slant. Their blog the Slog is my #1 most read feed in my RSS reader.

Right now,  the Slog is doing  a series call Notes from the Unemployment Line, following the experiences of several individuals in different fields who have been laid off and are trying to stay afloat. Today’s installment rang a bell in my head about a potential upside to this down economy.

Sophia, the focus of the article, wrote about her interaction with a homeless pregnant teen living in her car.

Yesterday I limped my oil-hungry car past a teenage homeless girl, her hood pulled down low against the rain, her hand holding the requisite cardboard sign. The sign said: “Pregnant. Live in car. Need money for food and gas.” I couldn’t give her anything besides my Trader Joe’s Mixed Nuts, but I did feel blessed that I’m not in a situation like hers. And why is she not getting help somewhere?! Being unemployed and seeing all this stuff makes me want to go into social services.

Come to think of it, I see two potential upsides. First, the recession means that many people are accessing social services for the first time, or like Sophia, finally able to put themselves in the shoes of social service recipients. When they get back on their feet 6 months or a year or two years from now, they’ll have a much greater empathy for these folks, which is the starting point for them becoming a donor or a volunteer.

Secondly, people like Sophia are beginning to think about working in the nonprofit sector. There are so many barriers to being a happy nonprofit worker – low pay, long hours, minimal resources, the uncertainty of funding – that anything that motivates people to consider working at a nonprofit is a huge win for the sector – even if right now, we’re all complaining because our funding has gone down the toilet.

Keep it up, Slog. I hope someone else saw Sophia’s quote and thought about volunteering or donating to a social service organization because of it. I know I did. But then, I always am….

Today I submitted a grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts for my organization’s hopeful chunk of the $50 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding for the arts. The NEA will make grants of $25,000 or $50,000, which means that only 1,000 – 2,000 organizations will receive funding. Not that many if you think about it, especially considering that industry insiders believe that 10,000 American nonprofit arts organizations may close in the next year.

The purpose of this funding is to preserve jobs in the arts sector. Great. So why did the sentence below appear in the application instructions?

REMINDER: Salaries, wages, fringe benefits, and fees that are incurred in connection with fund raising (e.g., development staff) are not allowable project expenses.

This is really short-sighted. For many organizations, the only thing that will help them create jobs in the future is money raised from the community. You need fundraising staff to be able to raise this money in any kind of intentional, sustained way. A short-term infusion of cash for artistic staff will help in the immediate, in the RIGHT NOW, but refusing to fund development staff at all means that organizations who want to use the arts stimulus money to insulate themselves from even greater future economic damage are shit out of luck.

Part of me thinks that it’s related to the general stigma around fundraising. But if the current economic crisis has taught us anything, it’s that our society as a whole can’t continue to function through models that are unsustainable in the long run. We have to have foresight, and we have to use it. This applies to the nonprofit sector as much as the finance, banking, insurance and auto manufacturing sectors.

Shame on the NEA. I know that because it’s a Federal agency, it would take an act of Congress to change this little point that taunts me so,  and there was no time to do that before the application process needed to start. But it’s short-sighted, and provides disincentives for organizations that actually have their act in gear and have a sustainable fundraising program to keep them growing.

I signed up for a NYTimes online account last week. It takes you through one of those generic demographic quizzes before allowing you to sign up, ostensibly (hopefully!) so the NYTimes can better cater to its audience if it knows them better. Who are you? How old are you? What is your income? What is your occupation? I have no problem answering any of those questions until the last one.

That’s because these kind of information gathering forms rarely seem to include nonprofit occupation options. Usually there will be a “nonprofit” option under industry, but that’s about as far as it goes. You won’t see Board Liaison or Program Assistant or Development Director as an option on most of them. Perhaps you’ll see Executive Director.

This points to the larger issue the square-peg for-profit world and the round-hole non-profit world. There are many parallels – sure, we both need accountants – but you can’t stuff for-profit perspective on the social capital sector. It’s frustrating that no one seems to be willing to to take the time to capture accurate, segmented data about nonprofit workers in these marketing surveys. Given that nonprofit workers make up 10% of the United States’ non-agricultural workforce, I hope that they get their acts in gear.

I want the right to be harassed and annoyed by companies I give my information to in a way that will genuinely harass and annoy me, not in a way that would harass and annoy a business development professional at a for-profit company. God. Get it right, people.