A Moment of Thanks

Thank you…


    Thanks so much…


          For your continued support…


                For your help which enables us to make an impact…


                        For everything you do and continue to do for us…


                               Thanks for “paying it forward…”


                                        How can I count the ways?


A little woozy, just came off writing 100 personal notes on our annual appeal letters.

And it’s almost Thanksgiving, to boot!

But it is a moment for acknowledging what a village we are…as in, it takes a village to create social change.

Scrolling through our list, I see vendors, consultants, clients. Former staff and former board members. Personal friends and, yes, relatives. Fans and colleagues and advisors. And that’s just my list – each of our board and staff members have their own similar lists.

The request? To enable Cause Effective to be there for the nonprofits who need us. It certainly makes it easier to ask for help for others – rather than simply for ourselves.

But isn’t that what we all do – ask for help for our beneficiaries, our clients, our communities?

And so I wear out my hand muscles penning thanks – on behalf of everyone working for community-based change, to everyone who might be part of this family, this village toiling together.

Ownership begats responsibility.

Act as if.

And give thanks – for the gift, for the intention, for the communality.

The Paper Bag Appeal

It's Appeal Time!

All over town, nay all over the country, people are folding and stuffing - and exhorting their board members to write inspiring, heartfelt notes at the top.

What an engine this is... well-oiled and rolling.

And Yet.

I was at a meeting last week where a development director remarked "I could send out an appeal on a paper bag and as long as I got it out early, it would be effective."

Well, kinda sorta.

It does matter that there's white space, and a catchy opening, and that the organization's impact is personified. And that there's a note so the letter is from a person to a person.

But, yes, it could be a note from my board chair on a paper bag, and if she sent it to someone who mattered to her, the equation stops right there.

Should that discourage those wordsmiths among us from carefully crafting a compelling case? No, because that inspires the asker - those note writers - as much as it does the recipient.

But it does mean that inspiring the asker, all year long, needs to be as much of a focus as gathering the names and addresses come mid-November.

The Canary In The Coal Mine

Last week we were sitting with a group of board members, would-be board members, and nonprofit staff…whose boards don’t work.

(Could that be any nonprofit? Nah… But I digress.)

We were talking about what happens when an individual joins a board and is enthusiastic, responsive, ready to roll up their sleeves – and then finds there’s “something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Or not rotten, perhaps, just flaccid.

Sometimes that new member’s energy and vitality points up something you knew but were pushing to the back of your mind – that there’s something wrong here, and that that something has to get fixed.

But without being invited on with that specific request – to be a change agent – the new board member sits there bursting with energy…puzzled.

“Where’s everyone else at this table?” she wonders. “How come they look as pale as ghosts?”

And the moral is – it’s better to be honest. To explain to a board candidate that you are embarking on a board transformation, that they’re one of the first steps in that process (subtext: and that’s why they’re so important to the organization!); and that they have to be patient, purposeful, and determined – to create a new board climate.

Otherwise you end up with a canary in a coal mine – someone who points out how toxic the air is, and who ends up dead in their cage from breathing the atmosphere without protection.

Not to be melodramatic, or anything…

Of Gentrification and Fundraising

We were sitting with a grassroots board last week that’s doing a yeoman’s job of addressing the ever-creeping specter of gentrification in their neighborhood. Hardly a neighborhood in New York where that’s not the case…

This group had actually done an excellent job of defining its values and welcoming those newcomers who shared its ideals into the fold. In fact, several had taken seats on the board and were eager to start a fundraising committee to raise unrestricted funds from their contacts. What’s not to like about that?

And yet…

There was a neon red flag, to mix metaphors, going on here.

First off, to relegate fundraising to the “new folks on the block” was to mimic the larger society’s denigration of the neighborhood as lacking in value. By setting up two classes – the old and the new – and assuming one had the capacity to raise funds and the other was too poor and too lacking to do so…well you can see why we saw that as a set-up for trouble.

Secondly, that fed into a growing segregation on the board, also of the old and the new, where the new delivered and the old talked. Yipes!

Third, by assigning the fundraising duties to the “gentrifiers,” the board was implicitly linking fundraising with “dirty money” – again, shedding the idea that everyone is responsible for the organization’s financial survival.

And finally, and most importantly, this entire organization was founded under the predicate that diversity – economic diversity, ethnic diversity, professional and class diversity – is what makes the neighborhood a wonderful New York pot of stew. Why couldn’t it fashion a board that acted that way as well?

And the fact is, it could.

The board asked two long-time members, fearless organizers from the old days, to serve on the fundraising committee, and appointed one as a co-chair. They brought in Cause Effective to do some board training and work with the fundraising committee to draft a multi-faceted board fundraising plan – this ensured that the whole board spoke the same language around fundraising and that no one was more privileged by their prior experience with fundraising.

Finally, the board devised a set of metrics for success that included factors such as number of new donors brought into the fold, range of donor backgrounds, and variety of solicitation strategies – so the prize didn’t simply go to the one whose asks raised the most immediate cash.

We learned an important lesson with this group, about gentrification and values and fundraising. And that is, that while fundraising can be associated with gentrification and all things bad – hey it’s about the power of money to make things happen, isn’t it? – that fundraising can actually be a tool, a magnifying glass, to integrate the best of the old and new.

And that fundraising can, indeed, be about values, when practiced in a mindful way.