Nonprofits Need to Stop Whining and Start Educating

Sunday’s New York Times piggybacked on the recent announcement of Red Cross staff cuts with a commentary that laid the blame at the feet of donors, thanks to the huge increase in the practice of gift earmarking.

Relief organizations receive plenty of donations for a specific crisis, but can’t find the money to build wells to supply clean drinking water; hospitals have more than enough support for breast cancer research but have to beg on behalf of kidney research. At the Red Cross, 92 percent of the roughly 77,000 catastrophes it and its chapters addressed last year were single-family house fires, not exactly the stuff of national headlines.

Experts quoted in the piece say that it is unreasonable for donors to expect nonprofits not to have overhead costs that need to be funded. That’s true enough, and I sympathize with Diana Aviv, president of the nonprofit trade group Independent Sector, who told the Times, “… [I]t’s … hard to run an organization when you have a million donors insisting on running it, too.” Yet that’s the wrong attitude to have. Unless your nonprofit is sufficiently resourced to run without donations, you need to place the highest priority on educating the donor community. If that means placating the million donors who insist on running the show, well, so be it. Don’t blame the public for doing what you wanted them to do — respond to disasters by opening their wallets. Instead, do a better job telling them why their donations are just as needed for homeless shelters and new computers, and why those gifts are just as important to help you fulfill your mission as the directed donations that are so in vogue. | 501(c)