The most memorable of his classes was major gift fundraising. He would begin by telling newly minted fundraisers that to be successful, they had to change their lens on what giving was about. To make his point, he would tell a story about growing up poor and attending a school with limited resources; so poor was the school that the music department had no actual instruments. His music teacher, Ms. Meloda, instructed the class to make keyboards out of cardboard, painting the keys white and black. She then taught the class to play on the paper keyboards, pushing them to imagine the beautiful sounds that would emanate from their keyboards. He used this story to illustrate that fundraising was not about asking for money but instead about making people’s dreams come true. To this day, I have no idea if the story was true—the name of the music teacher is a bit suspect—but he was so inspirational that scores of fundraising professionals credit their success to his teaching.
I think his lens on fundraising is extremely important to consider as we encounter a new landscape for charitable giving. Post-recession giving, particularly to education, has been on a steady growth trajectory. But with the recent tax code overhaul, many are anxiously waiting to see how the doubling of the standard deduction will affect giving, particularly to the annual fund, which so many schools rely on to close the revenue gap.
An Early Look at the Data
A June 2018 report by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) predicts a 4 percent drop in giving overall, which translates to $16 billion to $17 billion. A similar study by the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy estimates that charitable giving could drop by about $11 billion to $13 billion per year because of tax-law changes. The Lilly study noted that 2018, in particular, was going to be a hard year to forecast because of the combination of the tax changes and a volatile economic picture. If the economy continues to improve, giving may grow, particularly among major donors. Smaller organizations that depend on many small gifts may still be hit harder than those that get the bulk of their giving from high-net-worth individuals who will continue to itemize.In 2017, we started to see slower growth in giving to educational institutions. After a few years of explosive growth, education saw overall gains of only 3.6 percent. The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) has already begun analyzing 2018 giving to see what early indicators might tell us. The news is not great—giving overall decreased in the first six months of 2018 compared with the same period last year. Specifically, AFP observed the following trends:
- total number of donors: down 6.6 percent compared with the first quarter of 2017
- total revenue: down 2.1 percent
- overall donor retention rate (percentage of donors who continue to give to the same organization from one year to the next): down 6.4 percent
- number of new donors: down 12 percent
- number of newly retained donors (new donors last year who have made a second gift this year): down 18 percent
Dreaming Bigger, Digging Deeper
Even more important, I think we need to embrace Don Craig’s message of making donors’ dreams come true. Last year, I wrote an article about the power of asking the right question to introduce the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) methodology. NAIS recently used this methodology to understand why parents choose to send their children to a particular school. This research elucidated four distinct Jobs that parents “hire” independent schools to do. (For more information, see “Research Insights: Why Parents Choose Independent Schools.") I think this methodology could be equally useful in understanding what dreams donors are trying to fulfill with their gifts.For example, the JTBD theory says that “a Job is the progress that a person wants to make in a particular circumstance.” The progress is defined by these various elements:
- Context: the context of the situation the consumer is in
- Struggling Moment: the moment of struggle that leads a consumer to begin looking for a new solution
- Hiring/Firing Criteria: the dimensions that tell consumers how well a product/service solves or doesn’t solve their problems
- Forces of Progress: the causal mechanisms that move people toward and hold them back from choosing a new solution to a struggling moment
- Desired Outcome: the metrics customers use to measure success when getting a Job done
- Trade-offs in Hiring Criteria: what consumers are willing and not willing to give up when hiring a new product/service
- The purely altruistic: I donate because I value the social good done by the charity.
- The “impurely” altruistic: I donate because I extract value from knowing I contribute to the social good for the charity.
- And the not-at-all altruistic: I donate because I want to show off to potential mates how rich I am.
Fundraisers can be in the business of dream granting. And just imagine what those dreams can build for our children and our children’s children.
Interview Your Donors
If you want to delve deeper into the true motivations of your school’s donors, try doing a bit of JTBD work on your own. If you’re game, you can learn the JTBD framework and technique by:- visiting the site and watching interviews at jobstobedone.org/news/uncovering-the-jobs-to-be-done-intro-live-interview
- taking the course online at learn.jobstobedone.org/courses/JTBDinterviews
- reading the book that walks you through the technique: jobstobedonebook.org
