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| Path: Main Street : Resources & Library : Research Articles : Feature Article |
Fundraisers eye the web: out there in donorland
the Internet Sits Quietly, Waiting for the Fundraising Onslaughtby Doug Jamieson
November 23, 1995; The Nonprofit NewsMany good people labour behind the scenes in most charitable organizations, motivated by the best kind of desire to improve the quality of life for others. This kind of altruistic volunteerism is the backbone of the nonprofit community.
However, the muscle is nourished by money, and fundraising has become a highly sophisticated profession with many tools at its disposal. In the current climate of government cutbacks, and near-panic in much of the nonprofit sector, the fundraiser who can deliver in a big way is king.
This marriage of the altruistic volunteer and the hard-hitting fundraiser is not entirely comfortable, amounting to a kind of unspoken co-dependency. As in every marriage, a certain amount of personal space is essential, and partners require a measure of mutual tolerance in order to keep the relationship intact.
That's all very well, but out there in Donorland , the traffic is heavy. With rare exceptions, the notion of neighbour helping neighbour within the community, with personal acts of kindness, is part of another time. We have now handed this kind of thing over, almost entirely, to organizations that have clients and market themselves to donors.
This sort of industrial approach to good works was, we suppose, inevitable, given the enormous sizes of the populations to be served and the problems to be solved. However, it has long been a principle of marketing that the vendor must develop a relationship of trust with the customer, a belief that something of genuine value is being delivered in return for money. In the unforgiving enterprise sector, customers go elsewhere if they cease to feel this way about a company, or its products and services.
Surely this applies in the nonprofit sector, as well. In truth, most charities do deliver excellent value for money, and our society is much the better for their efforts. Understanding this, most donors have, over time, constructed a small list of organizations that have earned their trust and receive their financial support. There is a relationship, of sorts, with each of them.
However, each charity must maintain its share of the donor pool, and therefore must keep its fundraising machine at full throttle. Telephone and direct mail appeals are received by most of us almost continuously, and with increasing frequency as our names find their way onto more mailing lists. It is not unusual to find two or three fundraising appeals in our mailbox on a given day. Most include a computer-generated letter and a page or two of information about the charity's programs --- inoffensive stuff, usually, but rarely compelling, relationship-building stuff.
While digesting this direct mail, we are frequently interrupted by telephone solicitations from yet more fundraisers. These are often inept, transparently uncaring, impersonal attempts emanating from some contract boiler-room operation. Penny-stock peddlars work harder at relationship-building than do some of these folks. Both play the same numbers game.
We make our Saturday trip to the beer store and find that it is a tag day for another couple of organizations. We are invited to attend various dinners, auctions, casino nights and other fundraising events. Canvassers appear at our door, looking for a few dollars. Finally, a human face! The drumbeat continues.
We know that this is fundraising in the 1990s, that it is necessary, that the new technologies and techniques are effective tools, that the end result of all this is that a lot of good things happen. We are also increasingly aware that we are prospects that fit a profile in someone's marketing strategy . The cumulative impression is one of an impossible array of causes, most worthy, but collectively overwhelming as they are shoved at us from every quarter in an often-impersonal manner.
For most, the response is a retreat to one's comfortable list of organizations with which there is a sense of connection, shared goals and trust that value is being delivered --- a sense of relationship.
Now fundraisers are turning their attention to the Internet, with its vaunted reach and cost-effectiveness. What fundraiser could resist a medium that reaches somewhere between 30 and 50 million people for a few hundred dollars per year. There will be plenty of disappointments, if these efforts aren't executed with sensitivity and an understanding of the online culture. A World Wide Web site offers an organization a powerful new relationship-building tool to engender a sense of connection, shared goals and trust. Used intelligently, it can deliver valuable services and compelling messages that will undoubtedly earn the financial support of visitors.
However, putting the cart before the horse, by making fundraising the principle purpose and focus of a Web site, will produce little, and certainly will not serve to expand the organization's support base. We can only hope that thoughtful planning, and the integration of the Internet into overall communications and service delivery strategies, will keep organizations from squandering the Internet's enormous potential.
Doug Jamieson is President of CharityVillage Ltd., and Webmaster for CharityVillage. You can reach him by e-mail at doug@charityvillage.com.
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