Don't forgive forgetfullness

Howard Lake | 18 February 2009 | Blogs

• Tagged with:
• Individual giving
• Management
• Technology

Once upon a time, many years ago, a fresh-faced me sat at the feet of the direct marketing greats and eagerly listened, learned and remembered.

We – my charity colleagues and me, and our agency – applied what we learned and spread that learning amongst ourselves. And the knowledge proved accurate and powerful. It did well, raised a great deal of money at good ROI.

Soon, many of us in the fundraising community had about the same amount of knowledge and we applied it, getting better and better with practice.

This was a generation ago. Where did that learning go? I know it stayed inside my head. I replayed it at conferences and with clients, but it was just last year that I realised:

• Many fundraisers have forgotten  that powerful stuff that we all learned and knew once upon a time
• There is no mechanism for preserving the best knowledge and passing it on to the new generation
• The sector suffers from amnesia, forgetfulness or is just plain distracted
• It has forgotten some of the classic, timeless fundraising knowledge that makes things work at their best

Here are 4 examples, anonymised, from 2006-2009, of what happens when you forget important, foundation knowledge:

• Junk e mail: the forgotten science of DM testing, laid down at least 40 years ago, resulting in untargeted, junk e mail campaigns ‘because it doesn’t cost us any more money to e mail everyone so why bother with all that testing malarkey?’. Words fail me.
• Using the donor’s data history comprehensively in communications: a top-drawer agency, founded a generation ago by DM greats, which obsesses over data analysis but forgets totally the potency of using highly personalised long-copy appeals with relevant data items inserted …leading to poor income results. Quelle surprise.
• The unexpected keepers of the flame: the agency whose charity client has such a high turnover of fundraisers  that only the agency greybeards (and none of them over 50) know the history of the charity’s marketing.
• Still being asked the same questions: those of us still active with roots ten, twenty, thirty years ago sometimes reflect to each other that we are being asked the same questions now as when we began. Is nobody out there learning?

Years ago a Cambridge academic told me about ‘institutional memory’. It was, she said, the term for the collective knowledge of an enterprise. It was a kind of invisible but nonetheless potent asset that all organisations had.  It couldn’t be quantified and never entered the balance sheet because accountants did not know how to measure it. But it was definitely there. Generally, if a few special, experienced people left, the knowledge went out of the door with them. Start all over again.

Since the late 90s academics and others have talked about knowledge management and how valuable an asset knowledge is. It has become very big business, with an infrastructure of consultancies, academics, internal knowledge management experts and authors. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_management)

Knowledge is captured, written up, made available in paper and via web channels. Firms in the commercial sphere report substantial benefits from creating ‘communities of interest’ who share knowledge in person for the benefit of the business. ROI data is scarce but growing, but tangible results of KM and with supporting data can be found for cost reduction, speed to market of new products and collaborative problem solving.

The challenge to the not for profit  world is to preserve the valuable learning that charities naturally generate so that it is not lost – to their great detriment.

With the recession that is now with us, and for some long time, finding and rekindling that classic, powerful knowledge seems rather important.

The 16th-17th C philosopher and thinker Sir Francis Bacon wrote that ‘Knowledge itself is power’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientia_potentia_est) His world was not ours, but I think he was right.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.