We have come to the end of another calendar year, fellow nonprofiteers. This is traditionally a time to think about and celebrate peace. It is also a time to celebrate the turn to longer days as the solstice approaches. It is also a time when we are traditionally generous, making donations to the causes that mean most, and I’d like to ruminate on that for a bit in this Blog From the Big Chair.
The act of giving money to charity is fascinating. Is it human nature to do it, or is it something unnatural that we have to encourage people to do? I think it comes down to the whole generosity thing. People give money out of an impulse to help. It is a way of touching someone else’s life and helping It makes you feel really good. When was the last time you made a donation and felt bad about it? For those of us who do not have $17 billion to give away, or even $1 million, our generosity is not celebrated or written up in Philanthropy Digest. But maybe it’s even more generous because it means we are giving of funds that might have been spent on ourselves.
The real reason I started this blog was in reaction to an opinion piece in the New York Times lauding the benefits of giving to something like GiveWell. If you have not heard of it, GiveWell is another form of charity evaluator, helping donors figure out who can use their donations most effectively. In fact, you can take the really easy route and give GiveWell your donation and they will give it to the agencies that top their list of effective philanthropies. Kind of like a new version of the old United Way model. Trust us with your money and we will make sure it is spent well.
So the act of generosity is now down to analytics. Use data to make sure your donation has the greatest impact.
This is analytics doing to philanthropy what it has done to baseball: taking the joy out of it and making it a science.
Watching many baseball broadcasts on tv now is one of the most boring things on the planet. I truly love the game and am a partial season ticket holder for the Milwaukee Brewers. I love going out to the ballyard and seeing the grass, and watching the game unfold before me. I love the poetry of the long strides and great leap people like Lo Cain make as they trace an arc toward the wall and jump to rob a batter of a home run. Or the dance between the pitcher and the runner on first.
I really do not give a crap about spin rate or exit velocity or launch angle. I really don’t. But that’s what you hear about when you watch the game on tv. The science of the game, not the beauty.
And that is what analytics is in philanthropy. Places like GiveWell are turning it into a science. Moneyball philanthropy, it has been called. And to me that is counter to the spirit of generosity that is at the heart of giving.
I belong to a giving circle that has been around for about 20 years. Some of my favorite donations were to a cause that would probably not even show up on a list of effective nonprofits. It was an older woman in the heart of Milwaukee’s central city helping her neighbors access low cost prescription drugs. She would set up a computer in the second floor of a coffee shop and older people in the neighborhood would come to her for help. They did not trust the big hospitals who might have been able to help, but they did trust one of their own. So they came to her and she helped them get on line, fill out the application, and get their prescriptions filled.
We knew that PARS was not a viable organization. So what? We knew that it would close up shop sooner rather than later. We knew that the hospitals were a more effective way to do the same thing. But it didn’t matter. There was something beautiful in what she was doing. And we really wanted to celebrate that and support it, so we gave not once but twice. It was a gift from our collective heart as a giving circle.
That gift made my heart feel a little warmer and made me feel really good about being part of this group that would make gifts like that. Maybe we helped keep the place open for another month. Maybe that helped a dozen people access the prescription that they needed. More important, though, is that it helped someone who was helping others. It was saying thank you to her for doing this. It was acknowledging her as someone who just wanted to help her neighbors.
So true generosity, to me, is an act of the heart, not the mind. The mind does investment. The heart does philanthropy.
So, fellow nonprofiteers, at this traditionally generous time of year, let us dwell on true generosity and give from our hearts. Let us remember to give to causes we believe in jus5 because, and people whose work we like and admire.
Comments