Clear-eyed analysis of why nonprofit fundraising succeeds, why it fails, and who’s responsible.
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The Day Is Not the Strategy
GivingTuesday is a cultural success. It is not a fundraising strategy I have never hidden my disdain for GivingTuesday, and I am not going to start now. Let’s be frank: I loathe it. Plenty of people in this sector agree, but most of them either can’t say so or won’t, because criticizing a day of…
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Community-Centric Fundraising Is an Orthodoxy, Not a Model
An orthodoxy doesn’t ask for evidence. It asks for conformity Every orthodoxy starts as a diagnosis. Community-Centric Fundraising’s diagnosis was mostly right: an organization shouldn’t treat its biggest donor as its most important stakeholder. Beneficiaries, volunteers, and staff are supposed to matter as much as the person who wrote the largest check. That’s the entire…
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Philanthropy is Not a Culture
Donors don’t care about philanthropy. They care about doing good. Every strategic plan in this sector says it wants to build a “culture of philanthropy.” Almost none of them can say what that means. Ask five development directors and you’ll get five different answers, each vaguer than the last: buy-in, board engagement, a mindset, a…
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Guessing is Not a Strategy
Nonprofit leaders who never learned to read their own numbers are about to find out what it costs. Ask a nonprofit leader what their own numbers actually mean, and half the time you’ll get a vision statement instead of an answer. That’s not because they can’t read a spreadsheet. It’s because sounding strategic has always…
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Manufacturing A Moment
Giving days have multiplied for over a decade. Giving Tuesday launched in 2012, DAF Day joined the calendar a few years back, and corporate “vote for us” contests have run in some form even longer than that. The nonprofit sector didn’t just tolerate this growth; it built infrastructure around it: toolkits, playbooks, matching-gift platforms, a…
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Chasing Money is NOT a Strategy
Somewhere right now, an organization is twisting a program to fit a funder’s interest instead of a community’s need. A mentoring program starts calling itself workforce development, because that’s where the money moved this year. A food pantry adds a wellness component, because a health funder likes the word. Leadership calls this being flexible. It…
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Nobody Owes You a Gift
The work being important is not a claim on anyone’s money. Many nonprofits believe, deep down, that a good cause is its own argument for support. The need is real. The money should follow — and when it doesn’t, the donor is the one who got it wrong. They’d never say it that plainly, but…
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The Cowardice a Board Calls Caution
The nonprofit sector calls it prudence, collegiality, not wanting to micromanage. Usually it is fear. A board can choose otherwise. The sector has a dozen words for it. Prudence. Collegiality. Respect for process. Not wanting to micromanage. They all describe the same behavior: a board declining to do the hard part of its own job.…