A recent post at the TechSoup Blog took a look at public radio fundraising: Guilting Donors in 30 Seconds or Less and made this important observation:
[What] drives me crazy, both as a public radio fan and as a member of the nonprofit community, is the “help us stop this dreaded pledge drive!” approach. Shouldn’t our fundraisers be a cherished event for donors to look forward to every year?
Okay, I hate pledge week too. It’s tedious, it takes over the programming I want to hear, and it takes too long.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the reasons the pledge drive sucks is the people who run it think it sucks. They hate it so much that they’ve actually turned everyone’s mutual hate for the pledge drive into a fundraising hook!
How might it be different if they thought it was special?
That’s the number-one reason so much fundraising is so awful: It’s created by people who do it as a necessary evil — not a joy and a valuable thing.
I don’t know what a great public radio pledge week would be like. (Though I do remember that public TV pledge week used to be the only time you could watch “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” This is back before the Internet, hundreds of cable stations, or even wide-spread video rental. Watching Monty Python was a huge and rare treat.)
Whatever kind of fundraising you do: If you think it’s special, cool, fun, joyful, or helpful — you’ll do it differently.
Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.
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