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Personalization Isn’t Personal: Data, Scale, and the Supervisor Problem w/ Jason Lewis
16 Plays5 hours ago
In Part 3 of my conversation with Jason Lewis, we move into uncomfortable territory.
If fundraising feels transactional, the issue may not just be external systems. It may also be how we use data, how we scale, and how we supervise fundraisers inside our organizations.
Jason challenges the assumptions behind:
- Wealth screening and hidden data
- CRM systems and personalization
- The pressure to grow donor files endlessly
- The idea that more scale equals more impact
We also discuss what he calls the “supervisor problem” and how internal expectations can mirror the same distortions donors experience on the outside.
This episode invites leaders and major gift officers to examine whether the systems meant to help us are quietly shaping us into something we never intended to become.
Find Jason's Substack, The Butterfly Effect here: https://responsive.substack.com/
Looking for fundraising coaching? Check out www.abundantvision.net
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Transcript
Introduction to Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast. Whether you are a seasoned professional or a first-time fundraiser, we have the advice you need to take your next step toward major gift mastery.
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Dauber, President of Abundant Vision Philanthropic Consulting. Last week's conversation was a blast. I'm so excited to have you with me for this next segment.
00:00:30
Speaker
Let's get back to the show.
Raising Responsibility in Donor Relationships
00:00:32
Speaker
So back to your article. You talk about... raising responsibility. ahve We've got mutuality here and we want to, I guess, challenge the donor, challenge a partner, raise that responsibility.
00:00:47
Speaker
How would you do that without creating a sense of urgency or guilt or like moving into that coercive mode or or sales mode even?
Market vs Coercive Relationships
00:01:01
Speaker
In a market relationship, Thomas, in a market relationship, if you or I walk into Walmart or Target and buy a product and we're not happy with it, we return it and we get our money back, right?
00:01:14
Speaker
um In a coercive relationship, the tax collector, whoever that is, takes whatever he or she wants and they do with it what they want. And we're just subjects to that tax, right?
Dynamics in Gift Relationships
00:01:27
Speaker
In a gift relationship, if the relationship isn't going the way that the giver wants it to go, the gift essentially wants us to lean into that because it's it's basically saying, hey,
00:01:40
Speaker
this is about the relationship more than it is about you being validated or right or um i watched an organization last year make a strong position on the palestinian it israeli sort of conflict last year they made a very strong position on that and one of their funders withdrew their support and they're a grant writing agency and they're in the tax bureaucratic sort of posture that they're in they have every right to do that i would say that in a gift relationship you lean into that you don't withdraw that support you lean into that you recognize that
00:02:20
Speaker
Hey, we're in this relationship. We're going to listen to each other.
Intuitive Understanding in Fundraising
00:02:24
Speaker
um I'm not a consumer, so I don't get to i don't get promised that everything's going to be you know work out the way I want it to. I don't get to return the washing machine when it doesn't work the way I want it to.
00:02:37
Speaker
um this is how you understand a different type of relationship it's like with your kids i guess you get don't know if you have kids they do yeah you have kids your kid's gonna do some you're gonna give your kid a gift then your kid a couple of days later is gonna do something foolish and you're gonna want to take that gift back that's not the power the power of the gift is to not take it back not to take it back you know if you're If you're a coercive king, run your house that way. You and I are both dads. It doesn't work that way.
00:03:09
Speaker
It does not. That's very, very true. Yeah. This is great because a lot of the things that you're saying, guess they feel intuitive to me just from years of being in this space.
Wicked Learning Environments
00:03:22
Speaker
but If you think about the different types of knowledge, you've seen that quadrant of knowledge you're conscious of, knowledge that you're unconscious of having. Yeah. um A lot of times in life you can understand something without knowing why you understand it.
00:03:37
Speaker
You might understand. There's a group of authors, two authors that wrote a book a number of years ago about the notion of how we form expertise or just the notion of how we develop experience, right? So experts, guys like you and me who walk in and say that we're experts at something.
00:03:53
Speaker
We largely do that based on experience. And one of the things that they describe and they're not addressing the conflicts or the distortions between gift theory versus the logic of the commodity or the tax but they call them they call these spaces wicked learning environments and wicked learning environments are these places where where we can't connect the dots that then yield expertise or yield positive experience because ah the the things are sort of out of order.
00:04:26
Speaker
um You're essentially learning the wrong lessons. Think about, you know, if you're, you know, I spent some time in education. We can teach children the wrong things. We can teach them to connect the wrong dots.
00:04:37
Speaker
And that's essentially what I think we've done that has consequently led to some of the problems that we have today in the fundraising community. We've created what these authors call a wicked learning environment where we're unable to connect some of the dots.
Consumer Logic and Ethical Data Use
00:04:52
Speaker
I don't think our donors want to be treated like consumers, um but because we've used so much consumer logic, we assume that they do. And so therefore we make these assumptions that say that the donor wants to be treated Like they get treated when they buy a washer and dryer from Sears.
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah. yeah So if I'm a consumer, I'm probably sitting in someone's CRM somewhere. And I'm probably being examined by salespeople who have dashboards yeah or cards.
00:05:26
Speaker
Yeah. We use those as well in the fundraising profession. Yes. Where do those things lead us wrong in fundraising? So that gets back to the use of information. So in a market relationship, the market is a competitive space. It's supposed to be competitive. You're not on the same team.
00:05:46
Speaker
When you go to Walmart to buy a stick of deodorant, when you buy a home, all of the ah the marketplace is competitive. If you want to see it most competitively, go to an auction or watch the way that the stock market works. A lot of us don't see it that way because we think that the cashier who's given us a big grin and says, have a great days.
00:06:04
Speaker
But we're in a competitive relationship to see if we can sort of balance the scales. And if the relationship sort of balances, if the deal works out, everybody feels like they win. That's why we call them win-wins.
00:06:17
Speaker
The gift and isn't a competitive relationship. It's a collaborative relationship. One of us is supposed to get the advantage of the other, usually the person on the receiving end.
00:06:29
Speaker
Right? When you give a gift to somebody, you don't mind feeling like the person got more than you got back. Yeah. ah Back to your information about data.
00:06:40
Speaker
So all that data in the marketplace is used for those purposes because it is a competitive environment. So we use that in the marketplace, all the data that you and I use to help our clients answer questions comes from the marketplace.
00:06:56
Speaker
designed by companies that are largely selling similar products and similar infrastructure to profit-making companies that it are in competitive relationships.
00:07:07
Speaker
I'm not saying we don't need CRMs. I'm not saying that we don't need data. I'm just saying that we need to use it in a collaborative relationship, which is to say, do your donors know that you have that information?
00:07:19
Speaker
Your donors don't know that you ran that well screen on them, right? They don't know that stuff. In a truly collaborative relationship, I think we need to be full. just If I'm going to run a well screen on you and find out that Thomas can give me $50,000, I can at least be forthright and honest about the fact that that I relied on some piece of infrastructure, some sort of data to tell me that.
Ethical Priorities in Wealth Screening
00:07:43
Speaker
The market, though, market, the competitive marketplace, if you and I were talking to one of those well-screening companies who don't agree with me, they would tell, they would they would spout out all kinds of reasons, but those reasons why you wouldn't be so transparent are not reasons that are grounded in the gift, they're grounded in the commodity.
00:08:04
Speaker
Hmm. So just practically, we'll play devil's advocate here. Yeah. So ifve if you've got 10,000 donors yeah and so how do you use data ethically from the perspective of the gift to prioritize.
00:08:23
Speaker
but Like let's say you only have two or three fundraisers to manage that many people and to do discovery work. One could make an argument for where wealth screening could help one ah prioritize a little bit better.
00:08:36
Speaker
What's your perspective on that? Oh, that's another hour. So you referenced the name of my substack, the butterfly effect.
00:08:47
Speaker
So the butterfly effect, but and when we're referring to complexity theory, is all about initial conditions and initial conditions that then have ripple effects. My argument is is that our databases, Thomas, were never meant to be 10,000, 100,000,
Challenges with Large Donor Databases
00:09:04
Speaker
millions of names. They were never meant to be that big.
00:09:07
Speaker
But because we adopted these ways of thinking, And because we were able to treat donors like consumers and use things like direct mail and mass communication, all of these things that we largely borrowed from other places in the economy, because we were able to do that,
00:09:25
Speaker
that's why those databases are as large as they are so by you at you know some of the questions that i periodically get asked like the one you're posing there is is it's a downstream problem to the you know a problem that has you know that's decades decades old we borrowed the logic of uh when you look at the history of direct mail i think direct mail for example is a combination of trying to get politicians elected and essentially mass marketing.
00:10:01
Speaker
oh It didn't come from, it's not something we came up with. So it's got the logic of, and it put the donors seated in a very passive sort of non-active role.
00:10:16
Speaker
and and it And it does, you're right. when when you When you use a system like that and your expectations are very low, you're gonna build a huge database.
00:10:28
Speaker
But eventually that database is gonna get too big. And that's where some of these organizations are at now. When you and I started our fundraising careers, I heard somebody say this the other day, he would celebrate three and 4% response rates. Now these organizations have databases that are so big that they're tolerating one and a half it keeps getting bigger and it creates the rationale for the data and uh and i just hope that it doesn't eventually sort of collapse on us yeah well yeah some of these organizations are are in quite a predicament they have databases that are so large um
00:11:10
Speaker
lot of them are my grandparents and my parents' generation. you know the I think when the baby boomers give their last gift, I think a lot of that will sort of...
CRM Systems and Ethical Data Use
00:11:22
Speaker
We'll we'll be all we'll be we'll all be very interested to see how that plays out in another 20 years or so. The baby boomers give their last gift.
00:11:32
Speaker
We've been talking about that wealth transfer for quite some time in our industry. that When the baby boomers finally sort of say, okay, we're done with this, we're not respond to another mail appeal that shows up in my mailbox, um some of that issue might get, you know, I may not sound as, you know, ah far out fringe, I guess.
00:11:54
Speaker
So CRMs, generally speaking, yeah we have to have them because there are people and we've got to know. Yeah. how How do we use those ethically? I don't think it's... I don't think that the CRM is the... you know I don't think it's what has to get used ethically.
00:12:17
Speaker
Again, I go back to some of the meandering we were doing around the idea of... um talking about how we utilize data, for example, and and the idea that it marked in a competitive marketplace, utilizing that data to basically simulate or sort of mimic authentic relationships. That's what we do with the CRMs. We take data and we simulate, we mimic relationships.
00:12:45
Speaker
A lot of the language that you see, if you and I looked at some advertisements right now with the CRM companies, they would talk about personalization. Personalization is not the same thing as personal.
00:12:59
Speaker
I just recently read that in a book by Andy Crouch. He talks about personal personalization is what the technology enables you to do to make it look like it's real or look like it's human or look like it's a gift relationship.
00:13:13
Speaker
Personal is when it really is. Yeah. Well, how do we do that? How do we do better in that space? Well, you embrace constraints, for example. I don't know if you're in some of these other conversations, but there are other places in our economy right now that are talking about things like human scale.
00:13:32
Speaker
They're basically saying that technology has allowed us to sort of go, mean, we're kind of drifting away from the gift conversation, but the gift requires constraints and limits.
00:13:45
Speaker
It kind of, it sets boundaries, right? the CRM and technology doesn't. The CRM will, I don't think many of us in this space really sit and ponder just how ah how exploitive those CRM systems can actually be. Their business model is to never stop growing.
00:14:07
Speaker
And so they want to utilize logics, largely the logic of the marketplace, but largely to treat the donor in a way that looks more like a consumer. They're going to keep figuring out ways to do that at grander and grander levels of scale. They're going to keep sort of pushing what that scale means.
00:14:25
Speaker
I don't want to be around when that sort of gets to the place where you're like, whoa, are you for real? um in There's nothing in the business model of the CRM company that prevents them from saying that there's an upper limit on things.
00:14:39
Speaker
Nothing. That's the answer to your question. When you show me a CRM company that says that an organization should have an upper limit on the size of their donor base, expectations.
Self-Limiting Relationships in Nonprofits
00:14:51
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:14:54
Speaker
So it sounds like you would say that in an ideal world, our nonprofits would be self-limiting in how many relationships they tried to maintain.
00:15:05
Speaker
I think they're eventually going to have to be self-limiting. any Any highly efficient system, which we've all built for ourselves, any highly efficient system eventually does collapse. My father taught me that about lawnmowers. So eventually, highly efficient system will reach a point where If it's not governed, that's what the little governor is. look There's a gadget on a lawnmower, any mechanical engine that's eventually that machine will blow itself up.
Podcast Wrap-up
00:15:35
Speaker
And what very few of our organizations want to wrestle with is the possibility that something is going to blow up, that this thing's going to sort of collapse on them.
00:15:48
Speaker
That's all the time we have today, but be sure to tune in next week to hear the next part of this exciting conversation. Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to subscribe and give us a five-star rating on your podcast provider.
00:16:02
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Daubert. Thank you for joining me as we journey together towards major gift mastery on the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast.