Ugh. Giving Days.

Gives Day is over. What now?

There are certain days on every fundraiser’s calendar that require a little more caffeine than others. These days are long. We hold our breath until we meet a specific  goal– sometimes this is a dollar goal and sometimes it’s in regard to the organization’s reach and unique donors. Regardless, it’s a lot. Imagine being a consultant with multiple clients – all with their own goals – on a day of giving. Brew the biggest pot of coffee, and cue the anxiety! 

In St. Louis, the fundraising community experiences this online day of fundraising twice a year. The local community foundation organizes a yearly giving day each spring - Give STL Day. Worldwide, Giving Tuesday happens five days after Thanksgiving. Nonprofits around the globe use this day to ask for donations, piggybacking on the spirit of thankfulness and generosity around the holiday season. 

I’m Leaving ‘em on Read: The Message is Fleeting.

Nonprofit organizations and donors are beginning (or continuing to) loathe these days of giving for many reasons. Donors expect the email and social media onslaught to begin WELL before each giving day happens. Reminder emails, texts, and posts are distributed to solicit gifts toward the organization’s goal. Now, you can even make gifts before the official date, lest you forget on the actual day or cannot make it to an electronic device for some reason. Personally, I lose track of how many reminders I receive. I also ignore the day of “asks.” Is it because I am a savvy donor? Perhaps. In anticipation of “gives days'' I have my budget pre-determined and the organizations for which I plan to give mapped out. For the local giving day, I even know the time periods in which I’ll give because there are prizes for “power hours” and other special time slots. 

And with all this experience, I still dread this day as both a donor and as a fundraising professional. I dislike the amount of messaging I receive from the organizations I currently support, have supported, or dream of supporting. Cue the donor fatigue. No matter how clever your marketing is, it is nearly impossible to stand out of the crowd with hundreds (thousands) of other organizations all vying for attention and money. We know that fundraising comes down to relationships. A flashy email does not bring in the big bucks and if it does, it won’t be sustainable over time if you don’t do the work to steward that donor. 

They are Promoting Competition in the Nonprofit Sector.

These giving days are doing more harm than good. They are perpetuating a nonprofit hunger games mentality– a slippery slope that guides fundraisers and donors to a scarcity mindset that is harmful to our sector. There’s a lack of community-centrism and collaboration. 

Each individual nonprofit is a part of an ecosystem filled with many organizations with interconnecting missions serving individuals who envision a future that can not be achieved through the work of any single nonprofit alone. The communities and individuals we seek to serve are best served when we view our work and our institutions as part of a larger ecosystem working collectively to build a just society grounded in liberation. 

Giving days are grounded in competition. They encourage damaging beliefs, including that there is a scarcity of resources available and that we must act with urgency to ensure that our organization receives funds before another organization does. Instead of encouraging collaboration and thoughtfulness in fundraising approaches, giving days ask us to rapidly beg for each dollar from as many donors as we can so that our competitors (and partners) don’t get the funds first. 

Small Orgs are Left Behind.

The Goliath’s of the nonprofit world can easily pull at the heartstrings during these giving campaigns. However, most nonprofit budgets are actually around $500,000 in size, and NP Quarterly shows recent data that only 13% of revenues come from individuals. Small and young organizations often do not have the knowledge, skill set, and/or resources to manage individual giving programs. Yet often, fundraisers uphold individual giving as the gold standard. While this may be true in terms of being less volatile and easier to manage because of fewer hoops to jump through and less reporting, it is not necessarily easier to obtain. Building relationships takes time, and the amount of time depends on the person. Landing a new donor is much, much more difficult, time consuming, expensive, et cetera, than keeping an existing donor. For smaller, grassroots organizations, which are typically the size and makeup of organizations run by People of Color, most funding comes from grants. 

It’s about Transformation, People.

Giving days promote transactional fundraising, which is not doing our sector any good. St. Louis raised $4.2 million dollars during its Give STL Day campaign. Considering the resources required for stewardship and cultivation, how much of these giving day transactions will translate into recurring or additional gifts throughout the remainder of the year? And so, these dollars raised from a one time event may not even be repeated on the next giving day, much less as a sustained giver or active supporter of the organization. 

Is there a way to promote transformative relationships instead of transactional exchanges? This would potentially decrease donor fatigue and reallocate resources to solving the actual problems nonprofits exist to tackle in the first place.

The Solution. Or at Least, One of Them.  

Instead of a day of giving, we need to promote a culture of philanthropy year long. Realistically, no change happens overnight. Why are we expecting to change our communities in one day of giving? Let’s shift our thinking from the one day transactional gifts into making lifelong transformational change, which takes more time, energy, and other resources to accomplish. Instead of encouraging each organization to write the best headline to stand out amongst the crowd of emails, let’s host educational sessions for potential funders to learn about what work is being done by each organization, and the collaboration models between them.  Call it nonprofit speed dating, call it a public sector infomercial– but here’s what will remain true: We all win when organizations are successful.

Perhaps we can encourage volunteering with an organization. Time is the only resource we cannot create more of, and we should value it at least as much as we value money. There are some organizations who are run solely by volunteers, which is no small feat. Valuing time as much as treasure is important.

Another non-monetary treasure might come in the form of activism. We can ask our constituents to take up an advocacy action: write an email, phone a politician, or sign a postcard. We can help make these actions a habit by focusing on them rather than making it all about money. And, these are typically the bigger issues that many organizations can rally around together. It’s an opportunity to do something impactful and move beyond a simple cash grab for nonprofits.

 Can we move beyond a day of giving and promote real change for our region? 

This was written by Amie Bossi. Read more about Amie here.