Just now, watching the PBS fund-drive, and reflecting on some other things that have happened to me in the past few years, I thought maybe I figured something out.
The non-profit sector is pretty ineffectual these days by my reckoning. It's a problem. I think I might know one of the causes.
The people who generally end up running non-profits are fundraisers. They're good at getting people to donate money, particularly -- for 501c(3) and c(4) organizations -- in large-dollar incriments. I think this is problematic for a number of reasons:
- Good fundraisers do not tend to be executives, leaders or managers. They are more akin to salespeople.
- The emphasis on the fundraising/survival cycle diverts resources from accomplishing organizational goals.
- The typical fundraiser's mindset is fundimentally risk-averse, wary of alienating potential donors.
- Because fundraising (again, like sales) often hinges on relationships, there is an organizational resistence to turnover which allow bad managers to remain in leadership positions because they can bring in the dollars that keep the organization alive.
All this adds up to ineffectual leadership, a lack of vision, and most importantly a drought of results from the non-profit sector. Bad times.
The rise of small-dollar fundraising (especially online) offers some potential rays of light. However, it's unclear at this point what potential population of donors exists, whether existing non-profits have the savvy to tap them, or whether channels can be created to connect potential donors with budding social entrepreneurs who are willing to go where estabished non-profits fear to tread.
In my experience, small-dollar donations tend to come when someone is able to present a clear and credible value proposition. Small-dollar donors don't do it for the ego strokes a big fish recieves, and no one really needs that tote-bag. Small-dollar donations come because people are convinced, one way or another, that they're making an investment that makes sense for them.
This is something the political establishment has yet to comprehend, but it's very clearly the motivation behind most micro-donor fundraising phenomena. Wikipedia can raise a million dollars because wikipedia provides value. Wes Clark, Dennis Kucinich, Howard Dean (and I should mention John McCain in 2000) could all raise big money online because they were making an appeal to actually do something, and in a way that -- like Wikipedia -- offered people various entres to participation.
Most political consultants fail to comprehend this. It's outside their field of vision. Most candidates, likewise, are not strong or willful or communicative enough to create similar value propositions for their constituents. To be fair, the majority of constituents would rather watch this week's episode of Lost, so it's an uphill battle all around.
Until we discover ways to easily create new non-commercial enterprises, effectively connect regular people with these new entities, and do so in a way that promotes accountability on the organizational site, the culture of participation will remain nacient. If we can discover mechanisms (legal, technological, entrepreneurial) which can accomplish the above, the sky's the limit.
