Lemmings, goats, and sustainable fundraising

Article by Joe Saxton

November 2007

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There are two tensions at the heart of fundraising, tensions on which hinge the future of fundraising and its sustainability. The first tension - the big scary issue - is how do we make fundraising sustainable? The second tension is that most people want to be good citizens, they want to appear generous nice individuals, but what they want to be, and what they are, are not one and the same.

Fundraising needs to be sustainable. We need to have techniques and ways of raising money that can last for today, tomorrow, next year and next decade. However, this is neither easily achieved nor the fundraising sector’s normal modus operandi. Fundraisers are like lemmings: unwilling for the most part to embrace innovative high risk techniques until the track record is proven. But the moment it is, the lemmings pile in and within the blink of an eye a fundraising technique goes from zero to hero in a space of months.

I remember how telephone fundraising took off in the early nineties and amongst the hubris and excitement of this new successful fundraising technique charities were ringing up cold prospects and encouraging them to leave a legacy. Challenge events and face to face fundraising followed a similar meteoric rise and then hit stormy waters and negative PR as overuse set in. The list of fundraising techniques goes on and on: survey packs, DRTV, pen packs, wristbands, fundraising weeks, ribbons. Fundraising has a long and not very glorious history of taking a technique and driving supporters and the general public to distraction with it in a short space of time.

The result of this boom and nearly bust cycle of fundraising is that the public are both deeply annoyed and deeply suspicious of many fundraising techniques. In nfpSynergy’s research, around 40% of the public say that they find telephone fundraising, direct marketing, face to face and doorstep fundraising ‘very annoying’ (the public are much less annoyed by less effective techniques like TV advertising). At the same time the public think that on average charities spend around 35% of their income on fundraising and 35% of administration.

But despite this annoyance at some of the most effective fundraising technique, people still give and they still feel they ought to give (as witnessed by those who lie about their giving patterns when asked). The causes which charities represent is still something which the vast majority of the public are inspired enough by to give their own money to.

The irony is that people give not despite modern fundraising techniques but because of them. For the most part people give because they are asked and charities use the techniques that work, and the techniques that work are those that stop people literally or metaphorically in their tracks and ask them. Some people are outraged and annoyed while others give (and some are both).

This is the crux of the dilemma for the fundraising community. If you were to make a list of the ten most successful fundraising techniques from individuals, three-quarters would also be on the list of most annoying techniques.

This ‘annoying technique also equals successful technique’ is exacerbated by what anthropologists called the ‘tragedy of the commons’.

This metaphor comes from the use of common land by a community of goat herders. As the number of goats increase the pasture is feeding more than it can sustain. It is a collective problem to which there are no individual solutions: if an individual goat herder reduces his number of goats on the common land he gets no benefit from doing so as the other herders will simply use up the vacated pasture. But by grazing more land an individual goat herder gets benefits – even if they can see that what they are doing is unsustainable.

This metaphor fits the fundraising community well. Each charity that uses an ‘unsustainable’ fundraising technique is absolutely right to do so. They can see the money they raise by using incentives, using the telephone, mailing the trading catalogue, or employing a team of street-fundraisers. Indeed fundraisers can show that these techniques work: test after test proves that pens raise more money. So an individual charity will raise more money by continuing to use fundraising techniques that collectively may be unsustainable – and it is unlikely that an individual charity’s withdrawal of the use of these techniques will derive them any benefits.

It isn’t even as if we can rely for support on those who give via a technique that is annoying or unsustainable to appreciate the fact. Just because somebody gave via a pen pack or a street fundraiser doesn’t mean they will appreciate the fact that the technique works. A famous case study in the US asked 1000 Americans if they would ever buy life assurance through the mail. 80% said no, yet the only thing they all had in common was that they had bought life assurance through the mail.

So without collective action, and with a fundraising community of results-driven utterly rational lemmings, the future can only hold, more techniques which have a shorter boom and bust cycle and a public which finds factory-farm fundraising increasingly unpalatable.

In the last few years we have seen the launch of three initiatives which hold some of the clues as to how we can respond.
• The PFRA has shown that it can provide a voluntary framework which ameliorates and limits the use of specific sites so that they don’t become over-saturated.
• The Impact Coalition has come together to improve the way that charities communicate their impact and their work: a pen is always a pen but if donors understand that pens raise more money they are much likely to be sympathetic.
• The FRSB has been created to channel the feelings and complaints of donors and the public about fundraising, so the response of an angry donor is to complain rather than simply to stop giving.

The research in this report demonstrates the challenges we have in creating sustainable fundraising. It is a challenge which every fundraising team has a part to play: through better explanation, through more donor choice, through more innovation in new unproven techniques and through collective action which responds to, and ameliorates the fundraising world in which donors live.

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