My Life in Politics and its Lessons for Fundraisers
Last Friday I delivered pamphlets on behalf of a candidate for the city council here in Toronto. I did the same for our local MP at the last federal election, and then acted as a scrutineer when the votes were counted.
That’s it! My career in local and national politics came to not much more than a few hours delivering bumf. But what I learned from it will be longer-lived for sure.
I joined the Liberal party just before the 2010 federal election. This was only after my attempt to join the NDP online had failed. I couldn’t see myself a Tory, and I figured a party without a functioning online enrollment system was probably going nowhere. Once I had joined I went to the local campaign office and laid all my skills and abilities at their disposal. I must have said that I was a communications consultant, because they asked me to knock on doors on election day and get people to vote — Liberal, preferably. In all likelihood it was down to my persuasive endeavours over a few blocks in Alderwood that Mr Ignatieff was elected and became leader of the official opposition.
I continued to get messages from the Liberal party for some time, asking for support (read money) and selling me tickets to hear Mr Ignatieff speak (read fundraisers). The emails stopped after a year or so and now I consider my membership to have lapsed. The party did nothing to teach me the principles of Liberalism and little to help me overcome my growing doubts about membership in their club being my cup of tea. So now they won’t get my support (read money) and Michael Ignatieff will probably go down to defeat at the next election without my abilities on the knocker. Because of their lack of interest in me they won’t get my vote, either, if I were permitted to cast it*.
It’s probably the same with most political parties. They need busy worker bees when votes are going to be counted, but the rest of the time the queen bee and her faithful (and expendable) drones can survive on the honey made by the thousands of workers at election time.
So what lessons did my political career teach me?
If you are an organisation needing volunteers to provide services or donors to keep you in operating funds, the first rule is to value, cherish, take care of and coddle every person who has ever donated time or money in support of your cause. On this commandment the whole law hangeth.
By all means tell donors they are important but act as if you mean it, if you want to keep them on your side. When they are too busy to give you their time or too broke to give you their money they still have to be looked after, and your messages to them ought not to be merely ‘asks’ but also ‘tells’ about what it is they are supporting, and even inquiries about them. Communicating with your supporters is better thought of as a conversation and not a monologue, and you choose to make it one-sided at your peril. Which brings me to lesson number two.
Educate your supporters so that they know more about what you do and understand why you do it in the way that you do. Bring them into your camp mentally, help them engage with you philosophically by inviting them to share your goals and internalise your principles. Years of handling inquiries for The Salvation Army tell me how little people really know about the organisation they are supporting. Doing good, I suppose, but not explaining well. If someone had bothered to talk to me about what being a Liberal really meant, I might still consider myself one. (Like, yesterday I couldn’t spell pamphleteer, now I are one.)
Finally, make your supporters truly part of your team. If you are engaged in projects — a well for a village in Tanzania, books for a school in Kenya, an irrigation project in Ethiopia or an HIV/AIDS eduction centre in Ghana — your donors are as much members of your team as any other person.
Send them updates and pictures from the country their money is going to. Partner with them, instead of seeing them as ‘funding sources’ while others are the ‘doers’. The danger of making donations ‘project-specific’ ought not to be a problem, if you have worked hard at lesson two. When your supporters feel they are part of your work and take pride in your joint accomplishments, they talk to their friends about what you have achieved together. Then those friends might also become part of your team. After all, isn’t word-of-mouth the best advertising?
How hard is all that? Some organisations manage to do it quite well — World Vision, for one — and really do make you feel you are part of their work, which is why they get a bit of help from me. Others get up my nose with their persistent requests for money, snivelling TV appeals, and demeaning representations of the misery they want to alleviate. I feel like shouting at them, “The magnitude of the problem is not the measure of the support you will be getting from me”, except there are too many words in that sentence. In truth, I am moved to tears by the wretchedness in the world, but I won’t send money unless I think I can really help. Tell me what you will do with my small gift and the others like it, then tell me you have done it before you ask for more. If you don’t, you are merely a professional mendicant backed by a corporation. I can pass by with equanimity (rather than indifference) the grubbiest hand held out for my small change and the most skilful of beggars — even the old woman with leprosy in Ethiopia or the girl laying her baby in a puddle in the streets of Tirana in order to make it cry harder.
Am I hard-nosed? No, but I don’t have much money and I am learning to treat the little I do have in the same way as those who have kept their large fortunes intact through the tough times. You can guarantee that the potential million-dollar donor gets more than a piteous appeal by mail for more money. I want that same attention, and with today’s communications at their disposal there is absolutely no excuse why churches, charities or NGOs cannot give it to me.
Some organisations feel that their reputation alone is sufficient. “Trust us,” they seem to say, “and we’ll do the right thing with your money.” In the case of a church, I might call it ‘donation by exhortation’. Sorry, folks! Despite your protestations of rectitude, people today have learned to trust no enterprise, no matter how large and historic, and are more cynical than any previous generation about the moral standing of churches and their associated charities. That means that you have to work harder and smarter to get money from the public.
And, yes, I do know how difficult it is for well established charities to make the changes necessary. Things may be going well for them right now, but I fear that it is only because long-standing habits and residual goodwill are enough to preserve their funding at a reasonable level for a while. When that generation of donors has gone, however, the organisation will be playing catch-up with all its competitors who have already been working successfully with a new breed of well-intentioned but value-conscious donors.
Like me.
* No, I am not a “Woman, Idiot, Lunatic, Criminal” as defined in the Dominions Elections Act of 1900 — just a person born to a Canadian father before 1947. My father married my mother while serving in England in 1943, and I came along in 1944, well before the 1947 Act made my Saskatchewan-born father a real Canadian. Before that, ‘Canadians’ were British Subjects, so, even though I traveled on my mother’s Canadian passport in 1951 and lived in Canada as a small boy, I am not a citizen. Parliament did pass a Bill making it possible for me to reclaim my citizenship, but the only records I have of my Canadian childhood are my father’s passport, my parents’ marriage certificate, two Cunard White Star passenger lists and the memories of a few people who knew me in Canada in those days. That, according to the bureaucrats I spoke to, is not enough. By failing to keep copies of my official entry papers into Halifax when I was three and my passage back to England four years later I have made it impossible to prove my provenance. When I asked what child would have known to do that, the woman I spoke to said she had kept all her travel papers and that she thought it likely that most children applying for status in this country would have theirs, too. She sounded like she was a recent immigrant from the Far East, so it was probably true in her experience. So I ended up paying the government for copies of my landing papers at Pier 21 in Halifax from the Aquitania from 1947, but got in the mail, with no accompanying note, a copy of my immigration papers from thirty years later. I can understand someone mixing up 1947 with 1977, especially if they weren’t born more than thirty years ago, but who could confuse Hailfax’s Pier 21 with Toronto airport and the liner Aquitania with British Airways? And who would have thought the legitimate son of a Canadian serviceman would have needed to keep his mother’s stamped passport for sixty years in order to prove his nationality? My mother didn’t, for one. Anyway, I have decided not to pursue the matter. Ars longa vita brevis.