Corporate fundraisers working for charities might want your money, but some of their colleagues are likely to be far more choosy, warns Ian MacQuillin
You’d think that deciding whether to accept a cause-related marketing partnership worth £1million ($1.8m) would be a no-brainer for a charity fundraiser. After all, a fundraiser’s job is to raise money, and the more the better.
But when the UK-based Breakthrough Breast Cancer charity was offered just such a deal recently, it felt it had only one choice – to refuse. That’s because the company offering the deal was Nestlé, which to many in the non-profit world is the devil incarnate.
The episode highlights a significant question: whether non-governmental organizations should take moral or ethical stands over company donations at the expense of the beneficiaries they have been set up to help.
But there is another aspect to the story – and that is the division it reveals within fundraising departments as to how the business world and its philanthropy are viewed.
The charity people most industry figures come into contact with are corporate fundraisers. They are business savvy and well aware that you have to offer business something for something. But most fundraisers are not corporate fundraisers; they raise money from trusts, the wealthy or, more likely, from Joe Public.
At fundraising conferences and training sessions, when corporate ethics come up, delegates are almost invariably asked, by way of example, if they would accept money from Nestlé. Whether it’s Nestlé or some other controversial company – Shell is a popular one – usually the corporate fundraisers are in favour of accepting the deal, and the non-corporate fundraisers are for turning it down.
So why are general fundraisers so willing to turn down money? As individuals, fundraisers are generally very committed, passionate supporters of causes. They would actually prefer to be campaigners, rather than the money-raising ‘tradesmen’ of the voluntary sector on whom other charity workers look down.
Many actually believe it is not the main aim of their job to raise money, living instead by a modified version of the doctrine of ‘relationship fundraising’, a concept that is widely misunderstood. True relationship fundraising holds that the best way to get donations out of people is to build mutually rewarding relationships with them – which means that the relationship is a means to an end. But for many fundraisers, the relationship is an end in itself. To them, if taking a moral stand against a company helps build a relationship with individual donors, or just feels like the right thing to do, then they follow that route, regardless of the need to bring in cash.
Be warned then. While your corporate fundraiser is building a relationship with you, his or her colleagues may be priming the NGO to do exactly the opposite.
Ian MacQuillin is editor of Professional Fundraising magazine email [email protected]