A Young Nonprofiteer’s Misplaced Frustration
A recent post by Tracy Kaufman, of the provocatively titled blog Ask the World’s Foremost Expert on Philanthropy, caught my eye for its strongly worded plea to nonprofits to shut up, already, with the corporate jargon. Ms. Kaufman, without naming names, wrote that “some nonprofit bigwig” had published a piece in “one of the many philanthropy-ish magazines that I read at work” that contained this quote:
Leveraging existing knowledge, know-how and relationships with other donors can support achieving desired outcomes. Listening, following one’s intuition and being surrounded by professional philanthropic resources will go a long way to ensuring effective social investment.
Ms. Kaufman then blasted the piece for sounding way too much like something out of a Wall Street prospectus. Disconnected from reality, such verbiage has nothing at all in common with the real people that nonprofits seek to assist, she said.
This is nonprofit, for god’s sake! I thought people got into this field because it WASN’T BUSINESS! Because it’s allegedly something REAL! Something that helps people and doesn’t operate like a well-oiled machine of doom!
If you want to help people, a very basic first step is to BE PEOPLE YOURSELVES. Or else you’re just as bad as the corporate types. Lordy.
A little Googling turned up the source of Ms. Kaufman’s frustration: “Individual giving: making it count — Effective strategies for making a difference,” by Peggy Dulany and Adele Simmons, in the June 2008 issue of Alliance, which calls itself “the world’s leading magazine on philanthropy and social investment.”
As a writer, I’m fully on board with Ms. Kaufman’s desire that we all speak and write in plain language. But in this case, I think her anger is misplaced. The paragraph she quoted reads quite well to me, and is sound advice to nonprofits in a variety of fields. Moreover, that is the language spoken by many, many donors whom those organizations must reach for badly needed funds. And finally, the corporate types aren’t inherently evil, and such thinking does nothing to advance anyone’s cause. For-profit ventures employ millions of people worldwide — they put bread on the table, a roof above, and funding for our moms and dads to enjoy their retirements. They also can be extraordinarily generous friends to the very nonprofits Ms. Kaufman lauds so, um, passionately.
We’re all in this together, right? One sector demonizing the other is sooooo 1993. I mean, “a well-oiled machine of doom”? Lordy. | 501(c)
I left this comment on Kaufman’s website but thought it fit here too, as I think the problem is primarily with knowing when to distinguish between authentic expression that’s necessarily complex and mere buzzwords that simply buzz without offering substance. The dialect being used might reflect the priorities of many funders: I wrote extensively about the problems of RFPs here, here, and here. I can keep the grant register away from my normal, skeptical register, but I can also see how one would bleed into the other. This doesn’t make it right, but it does explain the phenomenon.
Bureaucratic Language in Government & Business, a book I’ve referenced before and will no doubt mention again, is also worth reading because it’s so useful for understanding how jargon systems work.