The Value of Snow Days

There was a lot of groaning in my household this morning, at the decision to keep the NYC public schools open.  And while I pushed my kids through their disappointment and out the door, I realized that I, too, was a little chagrinned.  I was looking forward to having a day to catch up, reassess, and think strategically.

Maybe, I thought in the shower, this is a sign that I need to build in some reflection time.

I know one nonprofit that does Thank You Thursdays.  And another that does Friendraising Fridays.  Without carrying the alliteration too far, maybe, to be successful fundraisers, we need to build in a Strategic Snow Day – oh, about once a quarter. 

What might we do on a Strategic Snow Day?

Reconsider friendraising lists and think about who’s grown closer who could now be asked to become an asker…examine key written materials and decide which ones need freshening up…analyze appeal returns to pinpoint minor shifts which could portend potential major donor interest…et al. 

There are so many ways in which we get into the rut of “the usual,” as we try to carry out a development function in which the tasks – and the need – are overwhelming and never-ending.  Assumptions that we made a year ago – or several years ago – may no longer hold, and not just in a negative sense:  it may be that someone’s exhibiting increased interest and we’re not picking up on it because we’re not paying attention.

Strategic Snow Days.  A chance to pay attention out of the ordinary – to pick up a piece of the puzzle and turn it over to see if it might now fit in a different way.

In late 2008, at the onset of the recession, Dr. Paul Light, Professor at New York University's Robert Wagner School of Public Service, and a nationally prominent commentator on the public sector, made a dire prediction.

“More than 100,000 nonprofits will fail within the next two years,” Dr. Light pronounced.

One hundred thousand was a nice round number, and it got picked up by the media everywhere. Funders and nonprofits alike reacted in hushed and horrified tones.

Soon it didn’t just sound like a prediction – it sounded like fact.

Did this statement move the nonprofit sector towards resiliency?

To me, that’s the central question.

The number, Dr. Light now explains, was actually picked out of thin air at his frustration that nonprofits were whistling past the graveyard, in denial at how bad conditions for the sector were going to get.

And while it certainly got bad (and looking at the New York State cuts, we’re not nearly out of the woods yet), 100,000 nonprofits haven’t gone under – not by any stretch of the imagination.

Nonprofits have struggled and cut (and hemorrhaged) and affiliated…and retreated into semi-dormancy…but there hasn’t been a mass extinction.

In fact, the evidence is that the number of real nonprofits folding/merging is nowhere near Professor Light’s number.

[I say real nonprofits because the IRS’s recent requirement that all nonprofits – not just those with annual financial activity over $25,000 – file tax returns, will result in the demise of a number of dormant nonprofits…but the vast majority of those exist only on paper, not in the flesh.]

So the question, looking back at Dr. Light’s statement, is not truth – but impact.

Did Dr. Light’s prediction spur nonprofits to take the deepening crisis more seriously?

For some, yes.

Did Dr. Light’s prediction help engulf our sector in a quicksand of gloom that took nonprofit leaders some time to climb out from?

For some, sure.

And did it lead certain politicians, and funders, and even nonprofit leaders, to write off the nonprofit sector, assuming it was too fragile and too marginal to respond to the forces marshaled against it?

We’ll never know.

Dr. Light was attempting to help nonprofits adapt, and some times we need a gun to our head to change.

But is the stick (or loaded gun) the most effective way to generate a response from beleaguered nonprofits?

At Cause Effective we’ve seen both ends of the spectrum:

1. We’ve witnessed nonprofits exhibiting exhilarating resiliency in the face of extraordinary adversity;
2. And we’ve come in after nonprofits have grabbed hold of any available dollar, no matter how devastating the potential consequences (I’m thinking in particular of a nonprofit I just counseled that spent its restricted funds once its reserves were gone…)

As fundraising strategists, we’ve certainly been in the eye of the storm. And what we’ve seen is that creative responses to adversity grow more easily from a sense of possibilities, not a terror at inevitabilities.

Same goal, different means.

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.

Remembering Beth Straus

In my first nonprofit capacity-building job in New York, Beth Straus was our “angel.”

It was for the Cultural Council Foundation, in the late eighties. CCF was an arts incubator – we acted as a bank and fiscal sponsor for arts start-ups, and provided advice in all areas of arts management (that was my department).

Beth was the honorary board chair, but I remember our CEO explaining that she was really his hands-on boss. She opened doors for him, constantly making introductions for CCF and explaining to her peers that New York City was the arts capital of the world and if we didn’t support our young artists, where would we be?

And if we had a cash flow crunch and had trouble making payroll, Beth would fill the gap, with loans that turned into gifts at year’s end.

Those days are long gone.

There’s a certain public citizen/philanthropist model of commitment to New York City’s diversity, coupled with a hands-on, roll-up-your-sleeves approach – someone with time and financial wherewithal – that today’s board members are hard-pressed to meet.

People today are working, are pressed for time, and don’t have the sense that their financial assets are secure (here today, gone tomorrow?). Their hearts are in the right place but their capacity to help a nonprofit as Beth Straus did, just isn’t there.

CCF ultimately shut down, the victim of changing economic conditions for the arts – and the loss of patrons like Beth and her peers. But I learned a lot from her – from afar – about the sense of responsibility, and partnership with the CEO, that a stellar board leader has.

Beth Straus died last week, at the age of 94. She made a difference.