Don't put off appeals after major disaster appeals
Howard Lake | 3 April 2006 | News
US fundraising expert Tony Poderis argues in his latest article on the raise-funds.com website that charities should not assume that they must cancel their fundraising appeal just because a high profile disaster appeal has been launched by other agencies.
Immediately following 9/11, and post-Katrina in the fall of 2005, I was asked by a number of organisations how I thought the terrorist atrocities committed in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC, and the disastrous aftermath of the hurricanes in the Gulf states, would affect fundraising in the country as a whole.
Would the generous and caring people who gave money to the hundreds of disaster relief organisations fail to be as generous as usual with their own local non-profit organisations? Would money sent to the victims of those calamities be taken from favorite charities at home, especially the smaller ones? Should we cancel or defer our fundraising until the time is right?
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My reply then to questions from non-profits about quitting or putting off their organisations’ fundraising campaigns was to emphatically state that donors giving aid to the victims of 9/11 and Katrina would neither abandon nor neglect their own local non-profit organisations. That’s still my answer. The true danger to non-profits across this country is the fear inherent in those questions. Disasters seen as siphoning off local money to be redirected to states far away can become a convenient excuse for fundraisers and leadership who fail their organization.
Even disasters of considerably less magnitude can impede the fundraising efforts of non-profit organizations located in areas where they occur. Flood, drought, storm, and other natural disasters are obvious candidates to impact an organisation. Major accidents, industrial or otherwise, can hit hard too. On top of these real possibilities there is always the crisis that could result from change. A key supporting industry moves away or closes. The local economy enters into a general malaise. Add to all those, the results of bad publicity hitting a non-profit organisation or the impact of what happens when a well-known national charity is embroiled in scandal.
When problems of this type and magnitude arise in an area, officials of local non-profits can be tempted to question openly whether they should proceed with regular fundraising, let alone dare to tackle new initiatives.
Should any of those unfortunate events come about in your future, don’t allow anyone in your organisation to anticipate fundraising failure as a matter of fact. I provide that encouragement – to press on with a fundraising campaign, no matter the odds – in my new article: “A Campaign Deferred Is A Campaign Defeated.”
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.