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00:00:01
Are We Treating Donors Like Customers? w/ Jason Lewis
34 Plays17 days ago
In Part 2 of my conversation with Jason Lewis, we move from defining gift theory to examining what may be distorting modern fundraising.
If fundraising often feels transactional, there may be a reason. Jason unpacks how market thinking, grant structures, and subtle power dynamics shape the way organizations approach donors. What happens when generosity begins to resemble a purchase? What happens when philanthropy starts to operate like retail?
In this episode we explore:
- How sales logic influences donor relationships
- The impact of grant-driven and bureaucratic systems
- Why hierarchy can replace mutuality
- A revealing feasibility study story that exposes how donors experience these distortions
If you have ever sensed that something feels misaligned in the way fundraising operates, this episode will help you articulate why.
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 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.
Inappropriate Modes in Fundraising
00:00:32
Speaker
So we borrowed from the wrong toolbox. Maybe maybe that's the sales toolbox, the the market mode. What... what What could you tell us about those other two modes, the sales and the coercive? Yeah, we didn't. yeah yeah By no means did we entirely borrow from the, I would not suggest that we borrowed entirely from the yeah from the market. um Grant writing is is, in my mind, a bureaucratic process that we largely borrowed from the federal government. yes The federal government in the 1950s and 60s was figuring out how distribute dollars to communities and stuff. And it figured out how to use the grant as a way to do that.
00:01:14
Speaker
The Ford Foundation and others you know figured out how to sort of piggyback on that that existing process. And so now we have this corner of our professional community that essentially defines itself by just having simply borrowed this bureaucratic process that really the government came up with.
00:01:35
Speaker
Yeah. um It's really no different. The same, if you listen, like if you're talking to a grant writer, or a grant writer's can talk very positively about the process, but if you talk to somebody at the receiving end of the, or even some of the folks who are being very honest in some of these foundations, it sounds like they're talking about the DMV or something. I mean, it's not it got the way in my mind that the relationship's supposed to work.
Gift Relationships vs. Market Logic
00:02:02
Speaker
You win grants, for example. The grant maintains a hierarchy, which is another one of those things that a lot of us in the fundraising community, is the relationship supposed to be that the funder necessarily has the power, or is it supposed to be more peer-to-peer, more level, um more of a collaborative relationship?
00:02:24
Speaker
type relationship. Yeah. So yeah, i would I wouldn't by no means say that we've only borrowed from where I think we're maybe in a little bit of a pickle right now is that without considering the potential of the gift to answer some of our questions, we have this sort of this multiple camps that some of them are drawing from the logic of the market while some of them are bar and not even necessarily aware that they're doing it borrowing from the logic of the tax and and sort of competing with each other
00:03:00
Speaker
and Yeah. Would you say that the state mode, the coercive mode, yeah yeah this is is this influencing the parts of our profession where it really is?
00:03:15
Speaker
a bunch of peers going into a back room and twisting one another's arm and there's a there's a, you know, you have to support my things, I've got to support your things. Anywhere where you and I might say that we've heard our colleagues almost referring to as if they're entitled, right?
00:03:33
Speaker
Coercive mode to tax mode, you know, any kind of redistributive sort of system, even going back to like the Old Testament tithe.
00:03:44
Speaker
yeah I mean, these things happen throughout history and we can find all sorts of examples of them. But anywhere where you find people on the receiving side almost describing people the what it what it is they're receiving as if it's an entitlement.
00:03:59
Speaker
Or that they're...
00:04:02
Speaker
that they're justified in being critical of the terms of engaging. In a gift relationship, I would say, hey, if you don't want to receive the gift according to those terms, and I'm fully aware that sometimes those terms are unreasonable or inappropriate or perhaps even completely unjust, then you just choose not to be in that relationship. You just don't.
00:04:24
Speaker
um And I think what we've done is we've adopted some of the, maybe some of these distorted logics and then found that they don't really work in our behavior and in our ah you know to our benefit.
00:04:37
Speaker
And we're trying to fix them without understanding that very deep underlying logic that's sitting down there. Yeah. Now, what about the market mode? So the market mode is when you hear...
Inequality in Fundraising Approaches
00:04:49
Speaker
So I was in a room last week, Thomas, with a group of fundraisers, and you know the age-old sort of...
00:04:57
Speaker
sort of You know when the fundraiser, young fundraiser, maybe inexperienced fundraiser, sort of, they're kind of squirming in their seat over the idea that one donor doesn't get treated the same way that another donor gets treated, right?
00:05:12
Speaker
In the marketplace, that's just the way it works. The person who pays the highest price gets the best service. If you want to buy a Ford Escort, that's what you get. and You want to buy BMW, that's what you're going to get. So that's the logic of the marketplace.
00:05:27
Speaker
the gift won't really give you that sort of it doesn't really give you room for that the gift doesn't make room for that the gift is trying to create a relationship and trying to create a community of essentially citizens or members or peers it's not trying to create a hierarchy yeah yeah i worked it another way to think about this is and this is certainly maybe a soft jab at donor-centered fundraising but You know, I worked at Sears when I was a kid or in college.
00:05:58
Speaker
and And in the marketplace, we tell ourselves that the customer is always right. And that's one of the things that that's one of those repeated sort of refrains that I heard on the podcast was fundraisers saying these these these donors think that they're always right, that they can come in and kind of direct where this is going and change up the mission and exert influence and control that maybe they shouldn't have.
00:06:24
Speaker
I mean, if you're a if you're a consumer buying a washer and dryer, when I was selling those things in college, we were supposed to make the customer feel like they were always right. And the gift relationship doesn't try to do that.
00:06:39
Speaker
It doesn't try to tell you that one of you has got this handle or this better understanding of how things should work. So you talk about distortion, you know, how taking the market mode, the state mode has created a bit of a distortion, probably um probably through this transactional approach. yeah now Was there a moment that when you were fundraising actively, yeah you were with a donor board or a team of people, where you first felt that distortion? Yeah, yeah. So I was...
00:07:16
Speaker
I read that you you had, i I almost wondered as I was prepping for this question, i thought, man, he he, but I don't know that I've told you this. I don't, I haven't told you this story. Several years ago, Thomas, I was doing a feasibility study for a client and I'm in their living room on behalf of my client.
00:07:33
Speaker
And I'm referencing this scene. So if you've done a feasibility, I'm sure you've done feasibility studies before. You're sitting there and you're acknowledging the gift or the gifts that, that the donor has given and you're kind of you're probing about what the future opportunities might be and and and i and i did just as i was trained to do i acknowledged the one gift that was on that was in the you know on the record that this grandparent couple this was at a private school had actually given to the organization and the grandmother sort of sat over there and she said we've never given a gift to the
00:08:08
Speaker
We've never given a gift to the school where our grandchildren go. And I said, well, there's $1,600 or whatever it was, some dollar number. And she said, no. Anyway, after a few minutes of sort of figuring it out, Thomas said,
00:08:23
Speaker
What we figured out is is that this grandparent couple had bought a washer and dryer set at the school's annual auction. And their relationship with this school that was there trying to find out if this could could be a perhaps a six or seven figure donor to their capital campaign, this grandparent couple had a relationship with this school that really was no different than like I'm referencing Sears. They bought a washer and dryer from the school. Wow. And in her mind, you think about it, in her mind, she had never given a gift.
00:08:55
Speaker
And she was sitting there insisting that she had not. And so those are those little moments that I've had over the last eight or 10 years, especially while consulting and interacting with donors and just sort of picking up on things, kind of like the conversations on the podcast where the signals are coming back at us and I don't know that we're reading them all.
00:09:18
Speaker
Yeah. And so when a, you know, when a grandparent says I've never given a gift because that wasn't a gift, I bought a, come on, I bought a washer and dryer set, you know, it registered.
Stories Illustrating Fundraising Misunderstandings
00:09:29
Speaker
And so that kind of, I went and started hunting down explanations for what was going on there. and Yeah.
00:09:37
Speaker
So how would a frontline fundraiser or an executive director today, how might What other ways might they feel this distortion?
00:09:48
Speaker
I think the way that we use market tactics or um market data, for example, the way we use data, for example, all of the ways that we use data,
00:10:01
Speaker
are utilized within the context of a competitive marketplace. So whereas a gift relationship is supposed to be a collaborative relationship amongst two people that care for each other, the marketplace by distinction is a competitive marketplace.
00:10:18
Speaker
Like the relationship, think about the relationship that you have in a buyer seller relationship when you're buying a home. You know how you're not supposed to have any interaction with the seller and we both have agents and data is supposed to move very carefully and there's laws and there's contracts and stuff.
00:10:37
Speaker
That's all very characteristic of a competitive marketplace, a good, healthy, competitive marketplace. That's the way you want it to work. when that kind of experience creeps into fundraising or giving experiences, whether it's for the fundraiser, for the donor, whoever,
00:10:57
Speaker
That's where I think you start getting a little, you kind of start squirming in your seat and think, this maybe isn't supposed to work. I don't like gift contracts. How often, you know, in higher education we hear, because these gifts are so extraordinary and we're worried that the donor is not going to follow through. I totally understand it from a legal standpoint. now I understand it from a market standpoint.
00:11:17
Speaker
But a gift is more like a covenant, not a contract. whom You know? And it comes with risks that are different than you know, than we encounter are in the marketplace.
00:11:31
Speaker
Yeah. I guess when I think about gift agreements, as we called them at OICU. Yes, yeah. I guess for me, it was less about the contract. because We generally would tell donors that this isn't legally binding. And if, you know, market drops out, you know, we'll work around it. Yeah, yeah.
00:11:54
Speaker
But at the same time, in my mind, it was always more for clarity. so that everybody involved understood mutually what, what was supposed to happen.
00:12:07
Speaker
Is there any point to that? Yeah, there's nothing. So for example, let's let's stay within the context of the gift agreement. So there's a lot of conversations happening in today's sort of philanthropic and fundraising community about the idea of unrestricted and multi-year gifts, right? The idea that i like them both. Right. And there's nothing wrong with them.
00:12:30
Speaker
And but one of the articles I've written not too long ago was the idea that if those are the terms of the relationship, which might would be outlined in a gift agreement, the gift, the logic of the gift would say that those terms should come from the relationship itself.
00:12:47
Speaker
So it's not a third party a fundraising guru you know, it's not you or me sort of looking from the outside in and looking at these two people exchanging this gift.
00:13:00
Speaker
So that's where the terms to use, you know whether it's a you know unrestricted or multi-year or we're going to give and we're going to give to this, you know should it be designated to go to this building or whatever, or should it be written down on paper, right?
00:13:15
Speaker
I want that to just come from the relationship itself. I don't want a third party saying, this is the way to do it or this isn't the way to do it you and i don't consult i don't think we do when we think about giving gifts to our spouses or our children or whatever we don't usually count we don't consult with experts who are supposed to tell us how these things are supposed to work yeah we we do this because we're invested in the relationship and and we even chance the fact that we might get it wrong you know
00:13:48
Speaker
<unk> I'm sure over the years I've bought my children things that they wished I wouldn't have. Dad, why'd you buy me this? I wish you would have bought me that. But the point of the gift is not really supposed to be focused on the object. The point of the gift is really supposed to be on what the object represents, and that is the relationship. And I think we've lost track of that.
00:14:08
Speaker
so So how then should one come to those terms? Because the examples that you give are all good examples, but they're typically unsolicited. mean, my wife doesn't usually come to me and say, honey, i would love it if you would give me a birthday present this year.
00:14:24
Speaker
And then would you consider this? And you get what I'm saying. It's... I give my children a gift and that's a ah manifestation of my love for them, maybe, or an embodiment yeah of that.
00:14:38
Speaker
And um I might ask them for a list. What sorts of things might you like? Let me flesh that out just mentally. I'm trying to grasp this. I think the fascinating thing is, first and foremost, is the way you just described that. Thomas, you know exactly how gifts work.
00:14:56
Speaker
yeah in every other context i i do this periodically i did this with the group that i was sitting with last week if i said describe to me how gifts work nobody has any issue describing to me what you just you know yeah challenges is that for some reason us fundraisers sometime around the middle of the 20th century decided, okay, we're going to borrow this. We're going to sort of pick and choose what of that logic we understand. I don't have to actually explain gift theory to you. You understand it in very deep and meaningful ways.
00:15:35
Speaker
in the context of other in other giving and again you know in other context if you received a gift from your you know extended family if you're paying if you inherited something from your fam you know parents or something you know how these things work but for that in order for that logic to apply to what we do in the charitable sector stretches us It makes us vulnerable. The gift does want us to feel vulnerable. It does want us to feel a little, it is risky.
00:16:08
Speaker
Well, and that makes sense. I mean, authenticity, transparency, those are risky things. They make us vulnerable. We set ourselves up for rejection. But I guess getting back to that question, what does that mean if there is going to be a gift agreement?
Defining Genuine Gift Agreements
00:16:22
Speaker
you know, if there is going to be some, something in writing that outlines, ah here's why I'm giving this to you. Here's what I want you to use it for. yeah And then I promise you, yeah, we'll do that. yes How should that then exist with those values?
00:16:41
Speaker
I think the effect of that is in my class, I teach what's called sense making. And it's it's sort of the notion of it's ifs It's not the gift that's negotiated so and the terms are outlined in the donor side, however you do that. Yeah. It's the subsequent gift that you can't renew because of that experience. I've done enough of these. one of the things I've learned having done enough of these feasibility studies is a lot of donors are making decisions as it relates to participating in one capital campaign, for example, based on a prior experience. Hmm.
00:17:13
Speaker
And so I understand that in the moment when you're talking about the gift that's right there in front of you, that the donor's not exhibiting any kind of disappointment or perhaps you're not experienced. Maybe this feels great. Maybe this feels like a win-win, right? But when you look at it across across multiple exchanges or the lack of exchanges, you know where does that relationship go next?
00:17:38
Speaker
I think you begin to see that Some of the borrowing behavior, as I would call it, the the borrowing from the logic of the state or the market is actually what trips us up, you know.
00:17:52
Speaker
This reminds me of my last conversation with Jim Langley. Yeah. And he had suggested a metric that he hadn't seen used much.
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah. And it really came down to looking at major gifts and who repeated a major gift. Right. As a qualitative measurement of how well you are doing at treating your donors. Right.
00:18:20
Speaker
but Would you agree with that? as as I know Jim really well, and Jim and I speak similar language, different language. You know, Jim, the last couple of years, has been talking about using the language of a garden and, you know, very, ah you know, natural sort of references to sort of inform his thinking and articulate his.
00:18:40
Speaker
um but But the parallel with me talking about the gift is that these are circular economies. you use the word qualitative. It sounds like you, you know, the market and the state tend to be very um linear sort of straight line sort of economies. You know, there's one person here and the money maybe moves in one direction and that's sort of the way it doesn't sort of circle back.
00:19:04
Speaker
But nature itself is a circular process. For sure. You know, and so the more you understand the logic of the gift or the logic of the garden or the logic of just human nature, the more you understand that that it's very circular and it is very qualitative.
00:19:24
Speaker
um Are there um things that but Jim's, Jim, just sort of riffing on Jim's experience. So Jim, Jim had spent a great deal, I think almost all of his career, for example, in higher education. That's right. Yeah.
00:19:40
Speaker
and a lot of these institutions benefit from very close, almost like tribal, sort of clan-like relationships. That's what institutions create. If you're a graduate of an institution, that's what they create. That's right.
00:19:56
Speaker
The interesting thing is, Thomas, is that you remember I was saying that that sociologist or that anthropologist, if they wanted to help you make sense of a gift economy that happened way back when, they're going to talk about tribal or clan-like societies.
00:20:13
Speaker
They're going to talk, I mean, they are. yeah That's the way they're going to describe it. yeah And so they're going to describe an economy that works in very much You know i remember being a kid and watching the way that Alabama versus Auburn football worked. Those are, you know, those are competing clans that are fighting against, you know very tribal-like ways.
00:20:33
Speaker
But the benefit of that is, is that those loyalties that exist amongst those, you know, the alums at Alabama or Auburn, for example, um creates a gift-like economy.
00:20:47
Speaker
And you start to make sense of it. 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.
00:21:04
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Dauber. Thank you for joining me as we journey together towards major gift mastery on the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast.