Do you ever feel like fundraising for the future takes place in an “economy of errors?”

That phrase is an Amenable Original™️, so let me explain—These are the fundraising campaigns predicated on solving a problem. They identify something wrong and suggest that the only way to ameliorate it is for you to lay down some cold, hard cash.

For a more specific example, one of the most common problems solved by fundraising is a lack of space, which is usually addressed through a building campaign. If you’re involved in a nonprofit or church, you know what these look like—sprawling, multi-month pleas that highlight current limitations and future freedom.

If we had our own building instead of renting a shared space, we could have a place to store canned donations.

If our auditorium was bigger, we could host more people and have fewer services.

If we could pay to fix the plumbing, we wouldn’t have flooding in the basement.

Okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch.

These are problems in need of a solution, and it’s easy to understand why people donate to these campaigns. Either these donors feel a little bad about the problem or they know they’ll get to see a clear improvement and think, I did that. For example, someone with sciatica sitting in a wooden pew will likely be very willing to invest in theater-style chairs. Fundraising for the future is appealing when your audience sees their place in that future.

But what about instances where there isn’t a problem to solve? What if there’s no observable benefit to a fundraiser?

This is the challenge for fundraisers who aspire to do something more ambitious, such as a capacity-building campaign to offer more training for your staff or hire communications support. For the average person, this will be a hard sell. After all, they might think, if your staff isn’t in crisis mode, why shouldn’t the money go to a real “need”? This is where the limits of an economy of errors—focusing on problems—rear their ugly head, and these situations require organizations to rethink their approach.

Positively Prosocial Possibilities

In cases where you can’t identify a problem, focus the pros—the prosocial, that is. Fundraising scholarship has found that a recurring theme in fundraising is the importance of prosocial behavior, or the desire to contribute to a greater good. Elsewhere, Joe has written about the importance of invoking social identity in fundraising, but its value cannot be understated, particularly when the benefit of a campaign is immaterial.

Because Amenable likes research, I trawled the darkest reaches of JSTOR and EBSCO to find a few considerations and recommendations for reframing fundraising.

Networks at Work

One of the most explicit ways to appeal to prosocial behavior is through social media support in your campaign. “Duh,” you may think. “What in the buzzfeed is this point?” you may say. Reader, I’ve included this point because I was as surprised as you will be to learn that fundraising changes as soon as you pull in your social media presence. Critically, according to Saxton and Wang (2014), donors care far less about efficiency ratios. To put that in layperson’s terms, they don’t care as much about a return on investment. Fundraising for the future is possible, even without a clear future.

This might seem remarkably counter-intuitive, but it offers you a great deal of freedom in what you foreground. If the goal of a campaign is to offer extra training for your staff team, facebook or Instagram are going to highlight a sense of equality and co-investment because there’s no perceivable barrier between your team and your audience. You can focus more on cultivating those connections than “proving” that your staff will be 30% more effective after a training weekend.

Specificity & Agency

When approaching large donors, it’s important to create space for them in a project. With something physical like a building, soliciting funds might be enough, but for other campaigns, you’ll need to be more proactive. In a study at the University of Texas, Alston et al. (2021) found that donors were largely unresponsive to non-personal means of contact like paper mail or email. Furthermore, their research reinforced prior findings about the importance of donors feeling a sense of agency about where their money went.

Practically, this suggests that fundraising is more about connection than anything else, both between fundraisers and donors and projects and donors. With that in mind, you should look for ways to create specific delegations for funds so that donors feel the freedom to support a particular aspect of your work. That way, even if they can’t see the change, they can articulate their specific contribution. In these cases, successful fundraising for the future requires people to have a say in what that future is.

The Value of Vision

Finally, to synthesize the two previous points, it all comes down to emphasizing the scope of your vision and ensuring that your audience can see their role in fundraising for the future, even if they don’t get to see its impact. You can think abstractly and qualitatively about why it’s valuable for your nonprofit to get some training in communications. You can appeal to your donors by framing the campaign as an opportunity to bolster existing strengths rather than fix latent problems.

If you want help thinking through ways to cast a clearer vision to prospective donors, we’d love to help, but if you take away only one thing from this month of fundraising content, remember this:

Fundraising doesn’t have to be fun draining.

(We workshopped that for weeks.)