The Networked Fundraiser

Just finished The Networked Nonprofit by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine – started reading it a couple of months ago, put it down but kept thinking about it, then picked it up to finish it this weekend.

The book’s subtitle is: “Connecting with social media to drive change.” But I’ve spent the past months thinking about how Kanter and Fine’s premise – the transparency and engagement of a networked nonprofit vs. a stand-alone organization – is related to Cause Effective’s entire approach to fundraising, not just with social media.

Here’s The Networked Nonprofit:

Networked Nonprofits are simple and transparent organizations. They are easy for outsiders to get in and insiders to get out.

Networked Nonprofits…engage in conversations with people beyond their walls — lots of conversations — to build relationships that spread their work through the network. [They] incorporate relationship building as a core responsibility of all staffers….

Sound like Cause Effective’s fundraising methodology?

A fundamental principle of our work is to open the organization up – to broaden the core of people who are invested in its survival. It’s that pyramid – the more people you have raising money for you at the bottom, the higher the total dollars raised. That old core question: it’s not “Who can I ask for money?” but “Who can I get to ask for me?”

Now I understand that the premise of The Networked Nonprofit is not just “getting people to ask for us” – that the very dialectic of “them” and “us” is in play.

But the subversive fact is, it’s at play as soon as you open up responsibility for the organization’s fundraising outreach – the more diversified the asker base, the more dependent on a multitude of actors an organization is.

In fact, one of the characteristics we look for when we’re assessing an organization’s ability to build fundraising-savvy is how porous it is – how much it interacts with different vested bodies like volunteers, constituents, donors, board. The more porous, the more successful it will be at building a diversified funding portfolio.

So – we’ve been working on building networked nonprofits after all. Who knew? But there’s one premise of Kanter and Fine’s that I take issue with:

“Working this way is only possible because of the advent of social media.”

I believe that working this way is an essential component of any and all community organizing – building social movements committed to broad-based social justice, equity, and compassion.

But, granted, working this way is EASIER since and with the advent of social media.