Shit Non-Profits Say

“Our board chair encouraged us to be nimble, so we created a subcommittee on nimbleness staffed by a rep from each department to draft a Plan For Nimbleness. We are currently on Version 16 of this iterative process.”

That is an example of a Tweet from Shit Non-profits Say, a Twitter account that shares, well, the shit that gets said in non-profits.

The account, which is dedicated to “capturing the aesthetic beauty of non-profit organizational expression (all we need now is a facilitator),” has over 5,700 followers from the non-profit world (including me).

To date, there have been over 600 Tweets that share some of the weird, frustrating, eye-rolling, crazy and absurd—yet earnest and well-meaning—things that get said by people in non-profit organizations.

Things like this:

“Our executive director has asked to review all tweets in advance.”

“We don’t just have ideas, we have visions. And not just any visions, we have bold visions.”

“Why can’t you understand that capacity building is you giving me a multi-year grant?”

“After a three-hour facilitated discussion, the board concluded that our target audience is the general public.”

And so on.

As someone who spent most of my career in non-profits, the things found at Shit Non-Profits Say comes pretty close to some of the conversations I’ve heard over the decades. 

Whether it's NGO-speak or insider code words, these are comments that make people exchange puzzled glances in meetings: Did that person really just say what I just heard him or her say?

Although nobody's name is attached to Shit Non-Profits Say, I get the sense it is run by an insider—someone who respects and loves non-profit work, and appreciates the pressure non-profit staff are under, yet at the same time is driven crazy by the shit that sometimes get said.  

While the comments poke fun at life in the non-profit world, they also expose some uncomfortable truths about life for people who work there.

These are things like lack of resources, poor work-life balance, low pay, impossible fundraising targets, over-reliance on grants, impenetrable prose, interminable process, boards that meddle, and meetings—so many meetings!

At the same time, some of the things that are shared are really funny. And who couldn’t use a good laugh now and then? (Or even just a knowing smile.)

One thing that isn't clear is whether these comments come from the account owner's own experience, if they are submitted, or just made up. 

In one respect, it doesn't matter. The comments sound true, no matter their origin. All of us have heard variations at one time or another (or lived through that same kind of lengthy and unproductive meeting.)

Anyway, here are a few more gems from Shit Non-Profits Say. Any of these sound familiar?

Person 1: “I need your feedback on the content of this presentation. Just the content.” Person 2: “This isn’t our current Power Point template.”  Person 3: “I’d like to make an argument for two spaces after periods.” Person 4: “You should capitalize the word program.”

“This one-page memo has eleven authors.”

“We are totally committed to spending $800 in staff time to investigate your documentation for the $2.14 coffee that you want reimbursed.”

“Can we somehow make process our goal? Because we’re exceptionally good at that.”

Person 1: “I just found 10,000 copies of an out-of-date brochure in the storeroom.” Person 2: “Hang on to those. We may need them someday.”

“We don’t have answers, we have SOLUTIONS. And we don’t just have solutions, we have INNOVATIVE solutions.”

“Our strategy in this space is to leverage dynamic change resources to launch utilization of transitional scaling agencies and community supports.”

And especially for people who work in communications and marketing, these two gems:

“If we just do good work, the media will take notice and money will begin flowing in our direction.”

“There was a mean article about us in a newspaper six months ago. We have been internally editing a letter-to-the-editor ever since.”

Check it out.  

Getting Outside the Bubble: How the Vegan Movement Started Disrupting U.S. Culture

A big challenge for those committed to a cause is getting caught in a self-reinforcing bubble, or echo chamber.

Within that bubble, everything makes sense. And why not? Everyone you encounter believes in and accepts the basic suppositions: Foreign aid is important, peace is better than militarism, action needs to be taken on climate change, etc.

The main problem, of course, is that the arguments that everyone accepts inside the bubble often make no sense to those on the outside—the very people who need to be won over if the cause is to succeed.

That’s where the American vegan movement found itself in the early 2000s.

According to Chase Purdy in an article on Quartz, titled How the Vegan Movement Broke Out of Its Echo Chamber and Finally Started Disrupting Things, “the movement was always its worst enemy.”

Members of the movement “made their first impressions bellowing into bullhorns, desperate to make a difference by willing it with a loud enough voice,” he wrote.

But actual engagement with non-vegans “was a weakness as people tended to ignore the passionate subculture with a rigid gospel prohibiting use of any and all animal products.”

For the most part, he wrote. “the only marks left by their efforts throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s were those scuffed into their shoes as police officers dragged them off the streets.”

And then, he says, something changed.

A small group of vegans decided to take a different, a controversial—within the movement—tack.

The 2001 schism splintered the vegan community into two camps: absolutists who tout veganism as an all-or-nothing moral imperative, and pragmatists who quietly advocate for incremental change.

Over the past 20 years the pragmatic side has won out, with the result, according to Purdy, that “the movement has morphed into one of the biggest disruptors of the American food system.”

The key message behind the effort was that getting people to eat less meat was easier than getting people to eat no meat—and that you might be able to spare more animals by doing that.

To propel this message forward, the small group decided on an inside strategy or trying to change farm animal welfare policy, pressuring companies to improve housing conditions for pigs and hens, and drafting legislation and ballot measures to get the issues in front of voters.

They also enlisted the support of groups like the Humane Society of the United States, which has enough money, smarts and political power to influence policy in that country, along with sympathetic CEOs of various companies.

Today the work of that small group of radical pragmatists has led to the creation of The Good Food Institute, a lobbying shop in Washington that represents the interests of meat-alternative food products.

According to Purdy, all of this has resulted in a force that is “a legitimate threat to meat industry practices.”

How did it do this? Instead of throwing red paint at places like McDonald’s, they picked on farm animal production techniques that appealed to consumer emotions, got issues on to ballots, and forced companies to “defend practices that can seem draconian. Should piglets have their tails cut off without anesthesia? Should egg-laying hens and farrowing sows be crammed into cages in which they can barely move?”

Despite the success, not everyone in the movement is happy or onside.

Says Purdy: “The 2001 split in the vegan movement was painful, leaving behind feelings of resentment that never healed. From the absolutist point-of-view, the pragmatists diminished the importance of fighting for animal lives by concentrating their energies on farm animal welfare.”

Those absolutist tactics might make true believers feel good, but they estrange the movement from the mainstream culture, and fails to change behavior, Purdy says.

Or, as he put it, quoting one of the pragmatists, “when you ask people for all or nothing, typically you get nothing.”

The story of the vegan movement in the U.S. has parallels to other many causes that people dearly believe in. As long as true believers stay in their bubbles, and demand all-or-nothing in terms of commitment, they will forever be sidelined and ineffective.

Playing the insider game has its dangers, of course, but not working with the culture and the political structure is also a dangerous proposition. And isn’t getting something better than getting nothing?

That’s the big question facing social change groups. What’s your answer?

For more on this topic, see my post What NGOs Can Learn from the Success of the Gay Marriage Movement.

The Decline of the Media and Denominational NGOs

Two institutions I appreciate and respect—and work for—are in trouble: The mainstream media, and denominational NGOs.

The mainstream media’s woes are well-known, especially newspapers.

In the 1950s, more newspapers were sold each day than there were households. Today, fewer than one in five households pays for a paper.

Meanwhile, ad revenue has dropped from $3.8 billion to $2.3 billion in a decade.

The result? Since 2010, 225 weekly and 27 daily newspapers in Canada have shut their doors or merged with other papers, and about a third of journalism jobs have been lost in the past six years.

In late January the Canadian government released a report on the Canadian media landscape. Titled “The Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age,” it offered a grim assessment for the future of the mainstream media in Canada.

Canada’s news industry is on the precipice, it stated, battered by a digital revolution, falling circulation and plummeting ad sales.

Things are not only getting worse, it said—they’re getting worse faster.

Something similar is happening to denominational NGOs.

Like the mainstream media, they once were dominant in their sectors.

What made the media successful was their monopoly on advertising. What made denominational NGOs successful was denominational loyalty.

For the media, things worked well until the digital revolution came around.

Until then, the media were pretty much the only game in town for advertisers—there was almost no place else to go.

But then came Craigslist, E-Bay, Kijiji, Google and Facebook. Suddenly, advertisers had options—and they took them.

Ditto for media consumers; no longer did they have to rely only on the local newspaper, TV or radio stations. They could get news from anywhere—and for free.

For denominational NGOs, things also worked well as long as members were loyal to their denominations and their ministries.

For a very long time, they had a monopoly on giving from members of their denominations.

For an older generation, it was understood that Anglicans supported Anglican ministries, Presbyterians supported programs of the Presbyterian Church, and so on.

Like for the media and advertising, the denominational loyalty system worked great—until it didn’t.

It didn’t stop working overnight; it has been going on for about 15-20 years.

(A survey by Ellison Research in 2009 in the U.S. found that Protestants in that country were less loyal to their denomination than to their brand of toothpaste—16% said they were loyal to their denomination, while 22% said they would only use one brand of toothpaste.)

But once people realized they had other options for doing good in the world, the bottom started to drop out for denominational NGOs.

Like with the media, which saw the digital revolution coming but didn’t react in time, most denominational NGOs sensed the changes, too, but failed to adjust.

Instead of investing in fundraising, marketing and communications, they kept those departments small (one to three overworked people). Got to keep that overhead low, don’t you know!

When they did hire, they tended not to go after trained marketing, fundraising and communication professionals—or offered salaries which would be sure to prevent them from applying.

And so they continued to send the same old fundraising letters to churches, based mainly on the old premise that “since we belong to you, you have to give us money.”

(Or, in the case of denominational schools, "since we belong to you, send us your students.")

In the meantime, parachurch competitors had seriously upped their game.

They invested heavily in marketing, fundraising and communications. They hired skilled and creative people. They developed imaginative offers that captivated and attracted donors. They watched for changes in how people got information and adjusted accordingly.

Denominational NGOs, however, were slow to change—or didn’t change at all.

They kept on as before, sending out the same materials to the same people in the same way—with ever-diminishing results.

It’s got to the point that one denominational NGO leader recently told me he expects his organization has about 10 years left.

Why that time span? That’s when the older donors, who still operate out of a sense of denominational loyalty, will be dead.

(His comments echoed that of an editor of a major Canadian daily newspaper in his 50s who, when I asked how long he hoped the paper would last, said: “Until I retire.”)

Another denominational NGO leader told me he has given up wanting to be the number one charity for members of his denomination.

“All I hope for is to be in the top three,” he said.

And so, here they are—the media and denominational NGOs. Both are standing at the precipice, both uncertain for their futures, both wondering what happens next.

For both, I fear the worst.

The "Domestification" of Church Giving, or More Challenging Times Ahead for Church-Related National and International Agencies

A friend attended a Canadian church conference last week. He posted the following during the event.

“A survey of 1,400 respondents that shows that congregational budgets are clearly reflecting a 'domestification' of priorities.”

A day later, he sent out another post.

"The secularization of Canadian society has caused most pastors in the survey to view the funding of international witness as a misallocation of funding. We funded international mission to the neglect of our own neighbourhoods."

“Domestification” is a new word. But it aptly describes what fundraisers at many church-related NGOs already know: More Canadian churches are keeping money at home and sending less to agencies that work overseas.

One main reasons for this is that churches have caught a vision for helping their neighbours—a good thing.

In this, denominations must accept some of the credit—or blame.

For decades they encouraged their churches to respond to local needs, to do mission at home.

Good news! Churches caught that vision. For this, denominations can be grateful.

But there's also bad news. The dollars churches used to send to denominational agencies for national and international programs is being kept at home to support food banks, homeless shelters, kid’s clubs and many more important things.

Ideally, churches would want to support good work at home and abroad. But when money is tight, the first place to be cut is funding for outside agencies and work far away.

And for many churches, money is tight these days.

Added to this is the immediacy and strong personal connections that result from addressing local needs.

When money is given to an international agency, it goes far away. The only way to know if it made a difference is when the agency sends back a report—which may or may not come and, if it does, may come months or longer after the donation was given.

Contrast that with supporting a local project. Givers can see the results right away. 

Better yet, they can be personally involved, too. This is something that is increasingly hard to do with international agencies.

(And for good reason, I might add—it's much better to employ local experts to operate programs than unskilled Canadian volunteers.)

Local projects don't pose those constraints; almost anyone can be involved. This provides a strong emotional connection for donors—they can meet the people being helped, personally hear their stories, and maybe even become friends.

Another reason for greater interest in local needs maybe growing mistrust about international relief and development work.

There are too many stories about waste, misallocation of funds and corruption in the media, such as about the Red Cross in Haiti.

Scandals like this are the exception, but they receive a lot of attention—and negatively colour the work of all NGOs.

When money is kept closer to home, it is easier to track it and make sure it is spent well.

Then there is just general donor burnout; needs in Africa, Haiti, and Syria go on-and-on without end. 

When someone has only a few dollars to give, maybe it's better to give locally and see some progress, if only in a small way.

Personally, I am not unhappy to see churches responding to local needs—that’s a good thing. Denominations should celebrate it.

But for international church-related NGOs, and other national and international agencies, it means more challenging times ahead.

Kodak Moment No. 2: What Business Are International NGOs Really In?

In a previous post I told how Kodak missed the opportunity of a lifetime by forgetting what business it was in.

After dominating the photographic film scene in North America for over 100 years, Kodak thought it was in the film business.

It wasn’t.

Kodak was in the memory and image preservation business—film was just the way people preserved their memories and images.

So when the digital camera revolution came, Kodak, with its dependency on film, was steamrolled. In 2012, the company went bankrupt.

For non-profit communicators, the lesson of Kodak is to not forget what business they are in.

They are not in the magazine or newsletter or website or even social media business—they are in information sharing business.

All those things are just channels for sharing information. And they can change. 

Information in print is disappearing, TV news is in serious decline, and even websites are being considered legacy media today.

But it’s not just non-profit communicators who can forget what business they are in. Non-profit organizations themselves can forget it, too,

Since I work for an international NGO, what does the lesson of Kodak mean for my sector?

If I were to ask colleagues or board members, I’d expect to receive answers such as this: We are in the relief and development business, in the poverty alleviation business, in the peace and justice business—and many more.

And, to some extent, I agree. International NGOs do all those things. But those are simply channels for their main business, not the main business itself.

And what is our main business? Receiving money from Canadians and giving it to people in the developing world.  

We are in the resource transfer business, in other words.

Surprised?

Some might be. And maybe offended, too.

After all, when the boards of international NGOs meet, most of the time is spent on international programs, not on fundraising or engaging the public.

And, of course, overseas programs are important. Without those programs, there would be no reason for us to exist.

But without donations, and the donors who provide them, those programs would cease to exist altogether.

Don’t believe me? Just let the donations stop and see what happens. Soon programs would be closed, shipments halted, staff laid off.

We’d go out of business, in other words.

The Canadian Hunger Foundation found that out the hard way in 2015 when they couldn’t raise enough money to keep going.

By all accounts, they had excellent programs in the developing world. They just couldn’t raise enough money to support them.

“While we were reaching more people [with international programs] than ever over the last couple of years, we weren’t investing what some other organizations were on marketing to donors, and ultimately that meant we couldn’t keep pace with our fundraising needs,” said former President and CEO Stewart Hardacre.

Of course, programs are important. But without donations, they would cease.

In economic terms, it's a matter of supply and demand.

When it comes to human need, there is no shortage of demand. But donations and donors? They may be harder to find, as many denominational NGOs are discovering.

Despite the challenges of fundraising, my experience is that little time is spent on that topic in the average board meeting.

And when NGOs hire new executive directors or CEOs, many still lean towards program experience as the determining factor in their selection process—despite the fact that their major needs are in the areas of fundraising, marketing and communications, not programming.

It's like they aren't paying attention to suggestions from the non-profit industry that CEOs of charities need to spend half their time or more in fundraising and marketing these days.

As for their communications, marketing and fundraising staff, many of the people I know involved in those things are overworked, understaffed and under-resourced—even as demands for more donations increase.

So, what's the solution? 

Of course, every NGO needs good programs; otherwise, people won't give. But they need to spend as much time thinking about fundraising, marketing and communications as they do about their international work—not just a few minutes at a board meeting to hear a fundraising report, followed by a polite silence before moving on to other things.

Otherwise, one day the only fundraising report they'll get is the one that says there aren't enough donations, and they, like Kodak, are out of business.

What do you think? Is this post way off the mark? Response is welcome.

What Can NGOs Learn from the Great Canadian Newspaper War?

In 1998, Canada’s major newspapers went to war.

That was the year the National Post was launched, sparking a circulation battle with the Globe and Mail and the Star in Toronto.

It was a fierce fight. But instead of going to war against each other, they should have been focusing on a common enemy: The Internet.

That's the view of John Stackhouse, author of the new book Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of the Media Revolution, 

In a chapter in the book titled, appropriately, “The Wrong War,” Stackhouse notes that the real fight was against Google and the other digital upstarts that aggregated and, later, created news and other content.

It’s not like newspapers weren’t warned about their real enemy. 

As early as 1992, Bob Kaiser of the Washington Post wrote about a visit to Apple and what he saw as the danger to newspapers of the coming digital world.

In a memo, Kaiser wrote that the Post needed to do two things immediately: Create electronic classifieds and publish an electronic edition.

“Both ideas,” Stackhouse writes, “were ignored.”

So why did newspapers fail to react and respond to this new enemy?

For one thing, life was pretty good for newspapers in the 1990s. They were one of the main ways people got news, and how advertisers reached the public. They were making lots of money.

For another, they had invested heavily in buildings, presses, shipping departments and work forces.

The result? When the online world took off, both for news and advertising, newspapers were left behind.

It didn't matter which newspaper won the printed circulation war; the battle was already lost as subscribers and advertisers drifted away to the new digital world.

What does this have to do with the international relief & development sector? 

Like newspapers in the 1990s, I think the sector is fighting the wrong war.

Instead of focusing on the big challenge of how to grab attention in this noisy world or expand the total number of Canadians who support relief and development, groups are fixated on how to address their own funding and communication challenges.

This is understandable; there are programs to be supported and staff to be paid.

The problem is we are fighting against each other, not against public indifference in general.

Of course, being non-profits, we don’t talk that way. We don’t speak about competing with other organizations.

But that is exactly what we are doing.

Worse, instead of expanding the overall donation pie, we are fighting for the attention and money of a small, and decreasing, number of givers.

According to a report in The Philanthropist, only about eight percent of total charitable giving in Canada goes for international purposes (very broadly defined).

And who is giving those funds? According to other research from the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy, the typical international donor is more likely to be older and to cite religious motivations for donating.

Since religious attendance in Canada is declining, especially among mainline churches, and since many donors are getting older, this should give all international NGOs pause. 

But instead of recognizing there is a problem, groups are busy using scarce resources to develop new and ambitious marketing and fundraising plans to either get traditional donors to give more, or to reach outside their donor base—to steal someone else's donor.

Instead of combining our efforts to make a larger splash in this noisy world of communications, most of our efforts hardly raise a peep outside our own little worlds.

In the end, like newspapers, we could find all these efforts are for nothing. We might hang on a little longer, but ultimately be defeated in the larger battle against public indifference. 

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that groups abandon their unique identities, missions or audiences.

I’m only suggesting that this might be a good time to come together to talk about creative ways to unite for a common cause and purpose—a United Way of international relief and development.

One group that is trying to do something like this is the Humanitarian Coalition, which is sponsoring the World Refugee Day campaign (June 20). 

Through it, the Coalition is trying to bring together NGOs to focus on the theme of refugees—with over 60 million displaced people in the world today, it is a huge crisis.

Maybe this experiment will work, maybe it won't. Or maybe it will spark new ideas for working together, instead of fighting the wrong war.

Time To Get Rid of the Term "Non-Profit?"

Is it time to get rid of the term “non-profit?”

That’s what my friend Mike Duerksen asks in a post on his website.

For Mike, a savvy marketer and communicator based in Manitoba, the phrase sounds negative.

It doesn’t describe what he does for a living, or how he also—like someone in business—seeks to maximize the return from every dollar his organization is given, how he rigorously measures impact, sets goals and holds himself accountable.

While businesspeople answer to shareholders looking for the highest return, he answers to “donors looking for the greatest impact for their philanthropic dollar.”

By using the word “non-profit,” he says, “we are defining ourselves by what we are not.”

Just because non-profit is a legal structure “doesn’t mean it should define us,” he says. “It strips our work of its value—and it’s just plain bad marketing.”

As for what might be used instead, he proffers a few ideas such as “for-purpose” or “for-impact.”

Mike has a point. By using “non-profit” we define ourselves by what we don’t make—a profit. But the case could be made that we do make a lot of “profit.” But our “profits” aren’t the kind that can be counted the way a business counts profit.

Our profit isn't money, but lives saved and changed, health improved, people fed and educated, the environment preserved, water cleaned, and more.

Which is a pretty amazing bottom line, when you think of it.

What do you think? Is “non-profit” a good or bad way to describe our sector? Is there a better word? Would the public be more interested in donating to our groups if they viewed it not as charity, but as investment?

It sounds like a worthwhile conversation to me.