You are applying two different meanings of “express” here. “Expressing oneself” in isolation from any witness is not the same as “show or express” as used in the definition you’ve given. To “show or express” something, there must be a someone to whom you are showing or expressing. If no one has felt or perceived disrespect and if no one has felt or perceived insult, it is simply impossible for any disrespect or insult to have occurred.
I’m giving citations and you’re talking out of your ass. Care to back any of that up?
Pop quiz: I make a post to a blog that no one else ever reads. Have I just expressed something?
You have “expressed yourself.” You haven’t “shown or expressed” something until someone’s seen it.
Look, there is a simple logical issue here. If someone has not felt disrespect or insult, it has not occurred. Disrespect or insult is something is an emotion or feeling. If it hasn’t been felt, it hasn’t happened.
Post a link and I’ll take a look. I can’t promise feedback, but I’d be happy to read it.
If you believe in such stuff, then God would have seen you mistreat the Koran, so you’d be insulting the one entity that you really don’t want to insult. But it’s cool – you’re part of his grand plan.
I also once took communion just to be polite, not knowing that I was committing a faux pas. A friend of mine who attended that church said that it was okay if, for a brief moment, I’d felt infused with the glory of god, accepted Jesus as my savior, eaten the wafer, and then it went away. So if it ever becomes an issue, I’m going with that explanation.
Good post. I agree with all of it, except where you decided that 100% participation was only about immediate impact for the individual organizations involved (and their clients). I’m sure if pressed you could come up with plenty of tangible, positive-outcome reasons that companies push for 100% participation, and how UW benefits from that.
:smack: It was a hypothetical. When I blogged, people read it; and in the hypothetical, the entire point would be ruined if anyone actually read anything.
I’m an atheist. I still think it would be disrespectful for me to shit on a Qur’an in the privacy of my own apartment.
Ignorance can be an okay excuse. For things like weddings and funerals, they generally try to print a notice and/or the priest explicitly says something, though.
Other than PR, I don’t see one. As I say, charities are helped by dollars, not donors. It’s a hard truth, but there is no real difference between one guy donating a million dollars, and a million people donating $1 apiece (in fact, since the administration costs for handling one gift as opposed to a million are far less, the millionaire donor’s gift would be more effective). Though you’d agree it’s far more impressive from a PR standpoint to be able to say “one million people supported Project X” than “one wealthy donor supported Project X”. That carries some real interest.
The real problem with the PR benefits of insisting on 100% participation it doesn’t have what our VP here would call “the wow factor” and what I’d more conservatively call “memory impact.” If there was a company the size of Microsoft or Target where every single employee decided to donate to a specific charity, that would be very impressive. But while it’s still impressive for a fundraising professional like me to see a business of about 100 employees or so with 100% participation (and I could go into why that is from a data analysis standpoint, but I don’t want to spend dozens of pages), I don’t think it’s that impressive for the outside world.
And not to pick on UW again, but part of that is their fault. Too many people (many of whom have posted in this thread) are familiar with the “workplace shakedown.” As a result, if you told the average person on the street that “100% of the employees of Z Corporation made a donation to this charity,” their response would be, “Eh, I guess they really wanted to keep their jobs.” There’s a lot of cynicism out there about 100% participation rates, and it’s deserved. For most of us professional fundraisers, if we can get 25-50% of our constituents to make a gift in a given year, we know we’re doing all right. 100%, of any constituency, suggests a kind of artificiality. “What did we sacrifice to ensure 100% participation? Was that worth it?”
Well, what usually gets sacrificed in a drive for 100% participation is good will. Most of us professional fundraisers want to treat our donors well, for we know the longer someone gives to us, the more they’re likely to give. Yes, we could run a scorched-earth campaign to artificially drive up our participation rates, but at what cost? We’ll get a lot of “FU gifts” (I’ve even heard these referred to at conferences as “foo gifts”), but our chances of seeing a gift from those people next year is about zero…and probably the year after that, and after that, and for quite some time in the future. And the FU gift is going to be a lot less than what we could have expected from a donor, in a lifetime of giving. Better to be good to our donors now. It’s no coincidence that we refer to the process of working with donors as “cultivation.”
What’s truly damaging about the scorched-earth campaign is that it hurts more charities than the organization that ran that kind of campaign. Look over the people who posted in this thread who were unhappy with UW’s tactics. Do you think they are likely to be philanthropically inclined in the near future? Probably not. That wasn’t anybody else’s fault but UW. I’ve never been one to argue that everybody is philanthropically inclined in some way, but I think that many people have that kind of inclination. It’s easy enough to snuff out, though, and it’s unlikely that a third part is going to revive it soon after it’s damaged.
So, in summation, the relatively small PR benefits from going after 100% participation in any sphere are simply not worth the damage to good will that a 100% participation drive will probably entail. I think that demanding 100% participation at a workplace is particularly pernicious. Anything work-related of that nature is going to have some nature of obligation, whether it’s overt or merely implied. I would feel extremely uncomfortable processing any donation which I felt was given in obligation.
:smack:I know. I was playin.
Good post, Duke. We were lukewarm on UW before my husband received the egregious arm-twisting he got at work; we will never, ever knowingly donate to them now, and will probably participate in threads like this and real life discussions every chance we get to try to convince other people to stop supporting such a cancerous “charity.”
We still make private donations to two or three charities every year, though. UW hasn’t soured us on all charities; just the really bad ones.
In response to the last part of Duke’s post, I just wanted to note that while I absolutely refuse to give to workplace omnibus fundraisers (we don’t have UW directly, but another combined initiative), that doesn’t mean that I don’t donate at all. I do donate directly to the charities of my choice. I am more than a little miffed at UW’s (and similar fundraisers’) tactics, but it’s the whittling away of my donation that I hate. Rather than fund UW’s overhead and have my charity get probably 1/2 to 3/4 of what I actually donated (and then have to use part of that to pay their own overhead), I’ll give directly to the charity and they only lose whatever their own overhead is. It’s more efficient.
Are you really suggesting that having one million donors (or, more realistically and manageable - 100,000 donors at $10 each) wouldn’t have value in and of itself (ignoring the admin costs of mailings, etc.)? Organization A with one $1 million donor has far less power/influence/voice/abilities than Organization B with 100,000 $10 donors. That’s a simple fact. I’d much rather have a large potential pool of volunteers, specialized expertise, potential planned giving donors and third party advocates than just one person. Maybe if you’re arguing that your one Big Donor is a near-guarantee to provide that $1 million every year, while I’m faced with the typical turnover that small donors have (it’s a hell of a lot easier spending 10% of your budget focusing on that one guy than it is making an effective appeal to the masses - but I have a feeling this is all for a different thread).
Well, PR certainly is a big one. The increased kudos and goodwill generated - even in limited circles like the local Chamber of Commerce - go a long way as well. Watching the annual campaign year to year, it looks like law firms are always competing - it seems they see a very strong benefit to beating out the other guys each year and garner a certain amount of prestige by doing so.
Oddly enough, I just got an e-mail on the subject of inaccurate information on 990s and the folly of basing your donation on “overhead numbers”. Here’s a link to the blog post:
From the post:
That’s true…but only in a temporary situation. A company that slashed its margins permanently would suffer on the stock market. Nobody’s going to look at year-on-year profit margin declines and shrug, “Business is business.” If a non-profit is consistently showing high overhead, that’s a cause for concern.
And, at that, I question whether deciding to go with 70% overhead “to accomplish an important mission” is really that common. I know plenty of short-term fundraising ideas which had ROIs that bad…most of them are referred to as “that thing we tried but will never try again.” Most of the time, when a campaign hasn’t raised its goal, the deadline is extended–not from procrastination, but because lowering your ROI is not a healthy long-term strategy for your organization. This isn’t like Wal-Mart doing loss leaders to get more feet through the door.
Lastly, to be honest, if your mission is so time-critical that your organization stands or falls on whether you can raise a lot of money right now and you can only do it by spending a lot more money than before…well, it’s probably already too late for you. Cultivating donors takes time more than money.
I thought you might have been, but I wasn’t sure. Well deadpanned. 
That’s charitable of ya! Appropriate, huh?
From a cost/value standpoint, 100,000 $10 donors are simply not worth 1 $1 million donor. And I have no interest in disparaging the little guys.
For a start, processing 100,000 gifts is a huge, huge task. To give you a comparison, our full-time gift processor works on about 12,000 gifts a year. Now, granted, those include stock gifts and gifts to more than one fund, which take a while longer to process. And if, like UW or Relay For Life or similar fundraisers, you’re mainly writing down a name and a number next to it, then collating a group of those gifts to send back to the main office, each single gift isn’t going to take as long. But you’re still going to need someone to enter every single name, every single amount and reconcile each of those with your accounting department. You still need to have somewhere safe to keep the checks and cash, and someone to make sure all the checks and cash gifts are accounted for. You’ll need somebody to set up a bank account and somebody to deliver all those checks and cash. You’ll need someone to prepare acknowledgments. And all this has to be done with 100% accuracy, because donors get ANGRY if you get a misspelled name or a wrong amount.
So, there’s work for at least two people for a year, just to process those gifts. Whereas, the one gift will probably take one person about a day or so to handle. We had a $5 million check come through, and that’s about how long it took to handle everything involved.
As for donors = volunteers, well, maybe. Not in our experience, though. Some people will donate and volunteer, some people just want to donate, and others want to just volunteer. There’s a correlation between donating and volunteering, but not a vast one. And the cultivation process is very different. I don’t think you’re going to be able to concentrate on donors and hope that those people will also decide to volunteer; you might get more volunteers, but not that many more.
As for the other suggestions–specialized expertise…again, that’s a volunteer issue. You can hope specialized volunteers show up, but you’re better off looking for them specifically. Planned giving: if you’re only looking at one-off $10 donors for a planned gift, you’re probably better off at playing the lottery. Planned-gift donations need long-term cultivation and even then it’s a long uphill battle. Maybe some people make a $10 gift to an organization then twenty years later leave their entire estate to it, but that’s vanishingly rare. I can’t think of a single planned gift donation where we didn’t have significant cultivation of the donor before the paperwork was signed.
I’ve got to ask in all seriousness: does anyone choose a law firm based on 100% donor participation in a fundraising drive? Yes, it sounds strange for someone like me to dismiss that, but in all seriousness I couldn’t tell you which firms around here have that kudo. I can tell you which firm give a lot to charity, though. Even for people like me who are deep into fundraising, there’s just not a whole lot of prestige involved in participation as opposed to total donations.
As for “seeing a very strong benefit to beating the other guys”…these are law firms (or computer companies, or supermarkets, or whatever). If they can drum up a bit of free extra press by winning a pie-eating contest, they’ll do it. That doesn’t mean those law firms are staunch supporters of the American Pie Council.
Let me pose this question to you: If you’re a charity, would you rather see a law firm give you $10,000 when 90 percent of the partners made a donation, or $5,000 when 100 percent of the partners made a donation? Again, you can’t feed the hungry on participation rates.
All your points regarding 1 v. 100,000 are fine - I mentioned “dismissing the admin costs”, which was, as you point out, a huge amount of handwaving. On the other hand, just having one $1m donor kind of puts you out of a job… 
(assuming an org where $1m is “we don’t need to do anything else” kind of money.)
Of course not. But it puts them on a great deal of lists, gets them higher up on banners and signs of donors at fundraising events, and gets them much more exposure than the other guys. 100% participation really isn’t the goal these days either - it’s really high rates of participation, plus beating last year’s donation total by X%, etc. etc. You get the point.
Yup, I agree. It’s the people working at the companies who get hit on by upper management who have less than a velvet touch when it comes to these UW drives who push for 100% - they know they’re not going to get, and they know they don’t need it. But they also know they’re not going to get huge amounts of cash from the secretary pool to get their “30% more than last year” award, they’re going to check off “70% participation” from them by pushing for 100% on their way to the Super Special Company Award. Here’s what the local UW is looking for: 2010 awards criteria.
I won’t go too far into this, because it’s a long day ahead of me, but reading between the lines of this document it seems that UW is still more concerned with participation rates and allowing UW to control donations than getting significant increases. For example: one of the “benchmarks” in Campaign Goals is “85% of donations going to the UW undesignated fund.” That’s extremely high, and it’s directly counter to UW’s “you can choose where your money goes” claim. In order to hit other benchmarks, participation must increase by 10%, but dollars donated must only increase by 5%. 10% of participation increase is a pretty large jump (and again I’ll spare you the data analysis as to why that is, it could go on for pages), but a 5% year-on-year increase is very conservative. Heck, average inflation is about 3% these days, so 5% is barely keeping up with inflation.
So, in all, better, but it’s still not exactly a sea-change in attitude on participation rates. And there’s still nothing particularly stopping the “UWCI representative” from pushing 100% as a potential goal.
Uh - while reading between the lines you stopped reading halfway through that benchmark - the “OR increased at least 5% from last year”. 85% IS really high - but it’s also their ceiling, and they’re saying going from 10% to 15% is just as good. It’s also an optional benchmark, just like everything else. There are 6 benchmarks in that category, of which you need 3 to qualify. 5 of those 6 are of the “5% increase in donation” variety, one is of the “10% increase in participation” variety.
Exactly. Thus my half-hearted defense of the UW against claims of it promoting arm-twisting strategies above all else.
Of course not. That’s why I addressed that earlier.