Different interpretations of stewardship cause "culture clashes" in charities
Howard Lake | 3 July 2009 | News
Delegates at the Institute of Fundraising’s National Convention today heard that different concepts of stewardship of donors are generating “culture clashes” between different types of fundraisers.
This development was presented jointly by Gordon Michie, director of development at telephone fundraising agency Relationship Marketing, and author of a white paper in 2007 and survey in 2008 on stewardship, and Sarah Wheeler, development and individual giving manager at Cystic Fibrosis Trust.
In the “All things to all men: different types of fundraising stewardship” session, Wheeler argued that stewardship is “all things to all men and therefore nothing to any of them”.
Advertisement
She outlined three types of culture clash:
• A clash of stewardship ideologies
• A clash of stewardship definition
• A clash between fundraisers and other charity staff over the need for stewardship in the first place.
She gave an example of a clash of ‘ideology’ between herself as a proactive steward (a major fundraiser) and a passive steward (a donor service manager).
A donor had given £200 and asked that this should be restricted to a specific element of a project. She believed that this would not be a cost effective use of the donation given the staff time it would take up to meet the necessary reporting back.
Wheeler said: “I spoke to the donor services manager, who was processing the donation, and asked him if he would go back to the donor and ask her to consider making the gift less tightly restricted – explaining how this would ensure her gift would go further.
“If at the end of the conversation she still wanted her gift to be restricted we would do so.
“He refused to even have the conversation with the donor. In his view the donor had already expressed their wishes that the gift be restricted and we should respect those wishes.
“We had a clash because we were both applying the principles of ‘stewardship’ but at different levels. He passive, mine proactive.
“Passive stewardship had made things less flexible and ironically removed the opportunity to build a deeper level of understanding with a supporter.”
Michie said that he wasn’t surprised that this kind of clash occurs “if fundraisers persist in referring to different degrees of relationships with their donors by the same name”.
He agreed with Wheeler that discussing stewardship with other fundraisers is like “trying to compare apples and pears but not even realising there are pears in the fruit basket”.
The Relationship Marketing Stewardship Survey report can be downloaded from
www.relationshipmarketing.org.uk
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.