You want results? Fundraising staff are the only producers of measurable results.
People complain all of the time that there’s no way to measure what nonprofits are really accomplishing.
Take a recent annual report from a certain nonprofit which I shall not name. I looked at their staff page and then at their annual report. They seem to have an education program, with a big picture, and not a lot of text, without seeming to have any actual education staff. They claim to have served X number of people, but how could we possibly measure what “serving” really did for these people? And who served them? Ghosts?
Who is holding nonprofits accountable for actually trying to fix social ills?
No one.
They say it’s too nebulous to expect actual metrics. They say they don’t have the money to measure real results. They say there’s too much noise in the system. And their efforts can be made to LOOK like things are working, even when they aren’t. But that’s okay. Management will protect them. It’s a good cause. What they’re doing will work, somehow, someday.
The only one with any pressure at all to perform is the fundraiser. No wonder charity fundraisers are so stressed out all of the time. If no one else in the nonprofit is helping them fundraise, they have to do it all on their own, and keep the nonprofit afloat. How is this supposed to make sense?
How could I have missed this before?
Everyone else can make up things that they did, but there’s only so much money in the bank thanks to what the fundraiser produces. If there’s not enough to pay salaries or other organizational expenses, we have to look to them. No one else has a metric they are tied to producing.
If you’re an educational director and serve 10 kids instead of 1,000, no one is going to fire you. Even if you interact with 1,000 kids but the kids don’t actually derive any benefit from this, no one will fire you for that either.
If you sit in your office as an executive director and play Farmville all day, no one is going to say, “Why didn’t you get those 10 grants out the door and meet with those 3 major donors?” In most nonprofit job descriptions, metrics are not built in, except for fundraising.
When a fundraiser raises $10,000, people are happy, but when they raise $100,000, people are really excited. This means that there’s a future for the organization. And yet even if fundraisers do raise the money they were asked to raise, their job is still in jeopardy. They are still shown the door, for absolutely no reason at all. (Thank you very much, At Will Employment. Your contracts certainly make a lot of sense for employers, and really screw over honest workers.)
Why are fundraisers put under so much pressure, and everyone else can ride on their coattails?
Perhaps we should take a page out of Dan Pallotta’s book, Uncharitable, when he says that 50% to 100% of a nonprofit’s money should be going to fundraising. Seriously. Why can’t all of our money go to fundraising? What I mean is, it’s not that all tasks should be fundraising, but that everyone should be involved in fundraising, even as they are program directors or senior staff.
And how do nonprofits thank the fundraisers? Nonprofits fire them or make them leave every 8 to 18 months. Charities put so much pressure on fundraisers to stop spending money to raise money, urge fundraisers to stay late into the night, try to hide their expenses, try to pay them as little as possible, and for all of this, nonprofits expect fundraisers to thank them.
How crazy is this system?
What can we do to fix it?
I think a nonprofit union is in order. What do you think?
