Fundraising not so Fun Any More

It's been five years and two months since the last blog entry here. So, have things improved for charitable fundraising in the interim?

Sadly, I have to say no, I don't think so. Here's why.

Sure, there are many more billionaires, and their lesser wannabes the millionaires.  The one percenters are increasing apace.  And if you believe the tabloids, there's a lot more money flowing from the rich to charities here and around the world.  So that should be good for fundraising, right?

But these richest elites aren't giving any more to charity on a per capita basis, and they're not increasing their annual giving as a percent of annual income, or assets.  They need the tax deductions and the image-boosting notoriety, certainly.  But they're not the most generous donors.  That honor is reserved for their poorer middle class cousins.  

Also some of the wealthier billionaires are not really giving to charity, or, shall we say, for charitable purposes.  They use their gifts to set up personal or family art museums, or foundations.  They fund ideological think-tanks in order to buy elections that directly accomplish their own political objectives.  Can one, indeed, call this "charitable" giving?  It's more of a tax dodge than anything.  So it's irrelevant for fundraising when you come right down to it.

Unfortunately, the IRS hasn't seen fit to strike these new types of so-called "nonprofits" from the lists of qualified charities.  So much of the touted increased giving by the wealthy is self-serving, not public-serving.

To the contrary, fundraisers have typically found America's middle class a much riper field in which to harvest gifts for the common good.  It may take more solicitations and more time in the homes and offices of our donors, but the harvest is richer, and brings fruitful benefits for the whole society.

But after five years what do we see?   Half the middle class has been put on a slide to slavery by the neo-cons and the big corporations.   They now find themselves in poverty.  And the other half is on the way down.

Our middle class donors are also in debt.  Because as their wages stagnated or been cut directly, middle classers have tried to keep up their lifestyles.  They're constantly bombarded by corporate advertisers to buy the latest stuff in the stores.  And they're running up mounds of consumer debt doing that.  And we must mention the fact that their kids are getting their college educations by also mounding up huge education debts.

Well, that means our formerly very responsive middle class donors aren't as loyal and generous as they used to be, through no fault of their own.  And, incidentally, the bankers are getting a lot richer as a result.  So the charities lose while the bankers win.

That puts a strain on charity budgets, and charity fundraisers.  As a fundraiser, when you find out a dozen of your former best donors are now clients of your human services charity, that is a sorry state of affairs.  And one thing I think this says is that economic inequality coupled with political ideology and the relentless pursuit of globalized capitalism is ripping our civil society to shreds right along with our social safety net.  That doesn't augur well for our nation's charitable organizations, because they've got more people's needs to meet and less money with which to meet those needs.

Ordinarily I would chalk this up to the shifts all nations are undergoing these days in moving further into modernity.  As seen in that view we could anticipate a reversal of fortunes for the charities within a decade or so, maybe a generation.  Typically, Americans have the strength and the good sense to understand what's happening and invent new ways to redistribute wealth.

But there's now a complicating factor that's going to make the picture a lot worse: the pending climate disaster.  And when you cross that with all the other changes we're still getting accustomed to, I think it spells real trouble not only for fundraising, but for nonprofit management generally.

James Baldwin once wrote that history "always arranges to bill a civilization at the very instant it is least prepared to pay."  That's our lot at the moment.  The way I see things is this:  We need to restore the basic elements of civil society that we've shredded to bits over the last century.  We also must expunge racism from its deep entrenchment in our nation's institutions.  Then we need to restore democratic governance to our people, and, in the process, create a new economic system and get some new political institutions that more effectively represent real flesh-and-blood people.  But then the icing on the cake comes along -- we're headed swiftly down the track to climate disaster.  And when the food, water and shelter get scarce, and the nation's wealthy elites turn out to have the resources all the rest of us need to survive, there's going to be more work for our nonprofits than we've ever seen.

And that's going to put a certain new kind of edge on fundraising, isn't it?