Catalogue Fundraising: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
In celebration of the shopping season (and the upcoming boxing day MWUY8838U4BN) let’s discuss another increasingly common fundraising technique: catalogue or shop fundraising. You know where you can literally “shop” for what your donation “purchases”. Stuff like…
- $600 purchases a cow to help end poverty (World Vision Canada)
- $20 gets two dozen chickens in Zambia to help vulnerable children (Spark Ventures)
- $33 keeps a mobile bank on the road for a day (Opportunity International Canada)
- $22 provides safe and clean drinking water (Oxfam Canada)
I like all of the above organizations (and worked for two of them!) so in keeping in the spirit from last week where I discussed the fundraising strategy of “100% of your donation goes to…” language and its pros and cons, let’s take a quick look at the good, the bad and the ugly as it relates to this shopping focused fundraising.
The Good
A $50 donation has been made on your behalf OR a goat in Malawi has been purchased in your name. Which is more compelling to receive? How about to give? It’s the latter. That’s the beauty of this method of fundraising. It makes it easy to give. And not just give, but give to others. Getting people to give your organization’s gifts to friends, family and co-workers is a great way to engage current donors and recruit new ones in a “cool” easy to market fashion.
A secondary benefit is we as charities are starting to speak the donor/consumers language and actually compete with businesses. Terms like “shop” “purchase” “buy” carry different connotations around them than “find” “give” “donate”.
The Bad
If $22 can provide safe drinking water for 1,000 a day and an organization $11 million dollars, why are we still having clean water problems in developing countries? That’s a question a donor or skeptic could ask. While it can easily be explained that’s just the problem. Charities should only have to explain how they are achieving their mission and creating/advancing social change. Period. When we do this type of fundraising we are bringing up and even encouraging a whole lot of questions that, at the end of the day, are not pertinent to having an impact.
Also, just like the “100%” donation language is a bit of semantics and marketing, so are these catalogues. The $20 isn’t purchasing two dozen chickens in Zambia. It COULD. It’s another way to raise unrestricted money but has the appearance of restricted. This is the same type of situation that got Kiva in some hot water and it’s about clear and accurate communications with donors. Many donors, especially at the lower level that the catalogues appeal to, do not know the truth about how nonprofits and charities operate so we are, in a small way, abusing that lack of knowledge instead of finding ways to actually enhance that knowledge.
The Ugly
Mark Petersen, Executive Director of The Bridgeway Foundation, recently published a post on his blog titled “Exploiting poverty in a catalogue” where he features an article by Chris Heuertz from Word Made Flesh in the Washington Post. Chris highlights the real danger and potential ugly side of catalogue donations:
I was recently with some friends who are deeply concerned about issues of poverty. They were telling me about the glossy catalogues of human need that turn things like freedom into formulas as advertising jingles, “for only $35 you can help get a Cambodian woman out of a brothel.”
But when we step back and evaluate these kinds of giving opportunities I’m not so sure they aren’t creating new forms of exploitation and new kinds of commodification. It’s tragic enough that a person’s sexuality has been reduced to something that can be bought and sold, and now to turn their freedom into a commodity as well seems to further diminish their humanity. (read the full post here)
Summary
Overall, I think if done in a way that is factually accurate, does not rely on deception and most of all maintains the integrity of the people the charities themselves are trying to serve then it can be a useful tool. With some negatives and potential risks in there as well the real question is, is it worth it?
For me, I’d love us to move beyond semantics and marketing gimmicks where donors have a true understanding of what charities do, charities show clear results from their work and we together, donor and charity, are focused on impact. And that, is priceless.
