Born With The Urge

“Biologists see in humans a natural willingness to help,” The New York Times pronounced earlier this week. 

Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist and co-director of the German Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, writes in a recent book, Why We Cooperate, that “Children are altruistic by nature” – and naturally selfish.  Parents’ job, as those who’ve been there know, is to reinforce the cooperative behavior so as to tip the balance toward socially empathetic norms.

There’s something to this.

In Cause Effective’s 28 years of working on fundraising in the grassroots, we’ve been lucky to stand in support of hundreds of different cultures.  From immigrant money-lending circles…to childcare cooperatives…to African street vendors taking up a collection to send a deceased vendor’s body back to his country of origin…we have never come across a culture without a deep-seated norm of coming together to take care of its own.

The notion of a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation may be unique to the United States, but the urge to help others is embedded in basic human biology.

What lessons can we take from this?

The most important, for me, is to dig deep, past the rhetoric, the program descriptions and statistical statements of need, to connect with this fundamental human drive to lend a hand.  How does your organization help people?  And what is the tale you’re conveying to the donor that helps him/her fulfill this impulse toward altruism?

In other words – fundraising for mission, not for the scaffolding (program structure) that allows you to accomplish your mission.

The second lesson, interestingly enough, is connected to the idea that the innate human capacity for cooperation “seems to have evolved mainly for interactions within the local group,” as Dr. Tomasello writes.  It’s the notion of enlightened self-interest – that donors need to see the benefit to themselves, their peer group, their values, their social structures – before they’ll be moved to give. 

It’s why we place such an emphasis on story-telling in fundraising; we need to establish a foothold through which potential donors can find the comfort of “we’re all in the same clan.”  It’s the eternal search for the “we” of fundraising.

Altruism.  A term coined by Auguste Comte in 1851, to denote the benevolent, as contrasted with the selfish propensities.

Sounds like the basis of most nonprofits’ reason for being, doesn’t it?