Excerpted from my e book, The Cash-Elevating Nonprofit Model: Motivating Donors to Give, Give Fortunately, and Carry on Giving.
I’d been in India possibly 20 minutes, in a cab from the airport, once I noticed him: a small man, sitting by the street, his ft stretched out towards visitors. One thing was flawed with the form of his face — as if one eye and the cheek under had been scooped away. Then my gaze was drawn to his foot. Swollen, mottled pink, surrounded by a cloud of flies. It didn’t seem like a foot, however extra like an underinflated soccer, oozing, with toenails poking out of it like damaged blades.
Leprosy.
Within the days that adopted, I noticed a whole lot of squalor and struggling. However that man with leprosy stayed in my thoughts. How far into struggling and brokenness can somebody sink?
Years later, I acquired the possibility to work with a company that fights leprosy. The illness is totally curable with an affordable course of antibiotics. Caught early sufficient, it can depart no mark, no wound, no stigma. Signal me up, I believed. As causes go, you may hardly beat curing folks of leprosy.
However there was an issue: the leaders of the group on the time have been devoted to eradicating the phrase leprosy from the world’s vocabulary. I needed to write compelling copy about “Hansen’s illness” — and by no means point out the opposite identify of the illness.
That was laborious. However I may work with it: untreated Hansen’s is sort of a torment from the decrease ranges of Dante’s hell. They get cuts, burns, and different accidents that most individuals simply keep away from or restrict. (Should you put your hand on a sizzling range, you’ll jerk it away immediately, earlier than critical injury is completed. Somebody with Hansen’s doubtless gained’t.) Infections unfold as a result of they don’t damage. That — mixed with clawing brought on by eroding cartilage and tendons, is what makes them lose fingers, toes, and limbs. Noses decay and faces are ruined. Blindness is widespread as a result of they lose the flexibility to blink, and their eyes really feel no irritation. Folks actually scratch their very own eyes out.
The even better horror is how folks with the illness are handled by others. They’re typically totally rejected by everybody they know and love. They stay in full isolation. Usually, the spirit is much more broken by the illness than the physique.
Name it leprosy or name it Hansen’s illness — I had a narrative to inform.
However I couldn’t.
Eliminating the phrase leprosy was solely a part of the group’s campaign. They believed that we performed into the stigma of leprosy any time we talked about its dangerous results. So far as they have been involved, descriptions of individuals with Hansen’s illness have been no totally different from the rocks and merciless insults which might be hurled at them.
The issues I’ve simply informed you wouldn’t have been allowed. We have been enjoined as a substitute to inform hope-filled tales of sufferers who bravely made lives for themselves regardless of disabilities. Or individuals who’d been cured early and now lived regular lives.
As you may in all probability think about, getting donors to rally round the reason for serving to wholesome individuals who used to have a illness no one has ever heard of was a bit tough. In a world the place kids have most cancers, individuals are homeless, earthquakes flatten cities, puppies are abused, and the polar ice caps are melting, who has the bandwidth for an obscure illness that appears to pose no significant risk to anybody?
You gained’t be shocked to know that the group was in steep monetary decline. Their fundraising simply didn’t work. Engaged on their initiatives, I felt like a baseball participant stepping as much as the plate and having the pitcher hurl a Nerf ball into my strike zone. It didn’t matter how laborious I swung.
I perceive these Hansen’s illness professionals. Their method was rooted in compassion. Hansen’s illness wasn’t only a “trigger” for them — they labored amongst sufferers, knew them personally, felt their agony. They didn’t wish to wallow in that ache and exploit it. Once they checked out one among their sufferers, they noticed a human being, not a illness. They needed the entire world to see it that method.
However there’s one other reality they have been lacking, another apropos to the state of affairs at hand: You possibly can’t make folks care about one thing that’s summary to them.
These professionals have been selecting to disclaim donors the very data that had remodeled their very own lives — the tales and pictures that despatched them down a path to changing into heroes within the combat towards leprosy.
They have been conserving donors at midnight as a result of it felt higher for them that method. Like many non-profit professionals, they have been unable to get outdoors of their very own heads.
It is a defining battle for a lot of nonprofits. They know the horrors they’re preventing. They know them extra deeply and clearly than you or I ever will. However they’ve moved on to a special place, a spot the place horrors is superfluous, even dangerous.
They’re like good troopers who fought, who crawled by means of the mud with bullets whistling simply over their heads — till they have been promoted. Now they combat from convention rooms within the Pentagon. These well-ordered chambers are essential to the conflict effort, however the mud-and-bullets aspect of conflict is what most individuals consider as the true factor.
Donors aren’t with us within the convention rooms or on their faces within the mud. Most of them won’t ever be there.
And there’s nothing flawed with these “shallow” donors. They will assist your trigger wholeheartedly in the event that they catch the imaginative and prescient. These “shallow” donors make the philanthropic world go ’spherical. Their much less superior understanding is not any barrier to giving. The barrier to giving is weak fundraising that fails to satisfy them the place they’re.
When nonprofit professionals mandate summary, “skilled” methods of describing their points of their fundraising, they make a alternative: to encourage fewer donors, elevate much less income, and do much less good. And that, so far as I’m involved, is method too excessive a worth for having the ability to be ok with your fundraising. To place it bluntly: How many individuals nonetheless have leprosy as a result of some folks refused to say leprosy?
That refusal to attach with real-life donors is among the variations between an ineffective fundraising model and a model that powers fundraising. And the flexibility to get outdoors of your individual head and discuss to donors, quite than to your self, is the primary and most essential step to a donor-focused model.
The Cash-Elevating Nonprofit Model is out there at:
(This publish first appeared on August 6, 2019.)
