Greater Good Project
Howard Lake | 11 September 2010 | Blogs
Interesting to read this week that Alan Clayton will lead a research project into donor motivations as part of an Institute of Fundraising move to encourage more people to give. It is to be called ‘The Greater Good Project.’ Our Institute has come a long way in the past few years and this is one of a number of exiting new pieces of work that should make a big difference in shaping the professional in the coming years. This particular initiative, or something like it is long overdue and it’s good to have some of the finest minds in our sector wrestling with how to engage the public, add value for donors and grow philanthropy.
Great stuff!
Two thoughts I think it would be helpful for the Board of Trustees to consider when they meet to discuss this proposal at the end of the month.
Firstly, motives for charitable giving are without doubt one of the most researched domains in the social sciences with contributions from economics, sociology, psychology, social psychology, marketing, nonprofit marketing and even the emerging field of fundraising itself. We understand a lot right now about why people give, the barriers that exist and why they stop. The difficulty is that little of this learning ever feeds into sector policy and practice. I’m hoping that this new initiative will use this extant work as a foundation and build on it to genuinely add to knowledge – then disseminate all its findings effectively to fundraisers, donors and policy makers.
Secondly there is genuine value in periodically taking time out for ‘blue sky’ thinking (apologies for the cliché), but one thing we still lack in the sector is the drive (and resources) to follow up on any good ideas we might generate. There is already a lot of evidence from existing research that tells us exactly how we might increase giving, yet there is no concerted effort to pick the best of these ideas, invest in them and maximize the resulting benefit.
If someone told you that they could increase giving by over 30%, that that enhanced giving could be sustained through subsequent years of the resulting relationships, and that all this could be achieved while significantly enhancing how good donors felt about offering those gifts, might that be something we should be following up on? Shouldn’t we be exploring that in more detail and seeing if we could push the figure up to 50 or 60% while adding even more value for donors?
I haven’t made this up – this work and the opportunity to develop it further exists right now. It’s also just one piece of work, from one of the domains I mention above. There is much more out there but no-one is using it.
So yes – by all means, lets lead more work on giving, and learn all that we can, but when we decide on action and avenues to spend our money on, let’s compare the utility of the new ideas that emerge, with the utility of all the ideas that already exist and invest in those that have the greatest potential, irrespective of when and by whom they might have been generated.
If it does this the Greater Good Project has the potential to massively increase philanthropy.
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.