The Courage to Ask

Many nonprofits I know are sending out e-appeals this year along with their postal missives.

The question is – how much is too much, and how much is not enough?

There’s a fine line between making giving opportunities accessible; and being “in your face” in an aggressive way.

Many groups I know are erring on the cautious side. “We don’t want to annoy people,” they reason. But then they’re missing out on the implications of this remarkable phenomenon:

“22% of giving happens on the last two days of the year between the hours of 10am and 6pm.”

That startling fact comes from Allyson Kaplan’s December 14 compendium of year-end hints titled Best Practices for Year-End Fundraising.

There’s a stereotype of the overbearing huckster that often horrifies the kind of person who enters the nonprofit sector. “We’re here to change lives, not to be salesmen,” goes the thinking.

And, somehow, even for people who can get past that in 1-1 asks, appearing in someone’s in-box feels like having one’s hat out right on the steps to the subway – like you’re in their face…in the way of someone’s real business.

This is no time to be shy.

The world is a mess. Let’s not pussyfoot around that.

Unless we, as nonprofits, have as much impact as we can, it’s only going to continue to get worse.

And money is one part – an important part – of what enables us to get our work done.

So I say – within the bounds of taste (it doesn’t help if your donors-to-be turn away from your return address line, saying “Oh man, not again!”) – we need to be out there making our constituencies’ needs known.

It’s our moral imperative to get our job(s) done. And year-end fundraising is too important a component of that to let false decorum stand in our way.