Say What You Mean When Fundraising

For the final post in this week of ideas about fundraising, I’ll be straight with you: speak plainly. People give money to causes that share their values and have impact. So, when asking for money, say what you do and why. That’s it.

I bring this up because there are two communications trends in nonprofits that are working against this fact. The first is a trend towards renaming organizations from having descriptive names to more abstract names. This article from last year in Kellogg Insight describes a food pantry outside of Chicago changed their name from Lakeview Pantry to Nourishing Hope. Timothy Calkins, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, says this is a problem because it’s not clear what “Nourishing Hope” does as an organization. Nonprofits shouldn’t be making their fundraising more difficult by abstracting what they do when that’s exactly what a potential donor needs to know in order to make a decision to donate. Plus, any name recognition that Lakeview Pantry had built up is now gone.

Matt Watkins, a fundraising consultant, is raising the alarm about a second communications problem: mouthfuls of jargon finding their way into public communications. In an article for The Chronicle of Philanthropy (paid subscription might be needed to read), Watkins describes how the increased expectation to have a certain kind of language in grant applications has bled out into public communications, leading nonprofits to refer to the social problems they’re trying to solve in terms that send you running for a dictionary or just scratching your head. He writes:

For example, rather than saying, “We advance anti-displacement strategies through equitable redevelopment,” say, “We help people stay in their homes as rents rise, neighborhoods change, and minimum wage remains stagnant.”

I would even argue that “stagnant” isn’t clear enough; “flat” would be better.

This reminds me of comedian George Carlin’s observation about how people (Americans, specifically) complicate language to obfuscate meaning. Let me say that clearly: the less we want to deal with something, the more fancy words we use. (If you’ve never seen this clip of how “shell shock” became “post traumatic stress disorder”, please watch it. You’ll never hear garbled language the same again.)

But that’s not what we need to do to raise money for important causes. We need to state a problem clearly, say how we’re going to solve it, and ask the person for their financial support to make it happen.

When fundraising, don’t underestimate having a clear answer to “What does your organization do?” That’s most of what someone needs to know, it’s really that simple.