You owe your donors passion

Passion is exciting. It can help you accomplish the “impossible.”

Most of us would rather be passionate and be connected with passionate people and organizations.

It’s the same with most donors. They want to be connected with passion.

Sadly, passion can be hard to find. Especially among nonprofits that choose to be generic, cautious, bureaucratic … Passionless.

I’m not talking about the people at nonprofits. They are generally full of passion. I’m talking about the corporate cultures and public communications. Including their fundraising.

Most nonprofits are founded in passion — from a burning vision of some way they could make the world better. But time and growth causes many to lose it. It’s natural — passion is hard, exhausting work. It’s even a little dangerous — after all, one of the meanings of the word is suffering.

But fear of criticism, complaints, and controversy lead many nonprofits to tone everything down. To decide for donors what might be “too much” for them.

Everything is bland, flat, and “safe.”

But hardly deserve one cent of your donors’ money if you aren’t a white-hot source of jaw-dropping passion — and visibly so. That’s your function in their lives. Their lives are consumed with their jobs, their relationships, their commutes — a lot of pretty mundane stuff. But they want to matter, to improve the world, to give back. And that’s where you come in. If you’re passionate enough.

If your organization and its communications aren’t passionate you’re boring. Not worth people’s attention, much less their money. You may be good at what you do, but that’s not enough. Janis Joplin was an amazing musician, but that’s not what made her great. It was her passion that made her stand out among all the other amazing musicians.

You don’t have to have a screwed-up life and die young in some gruesome, tragic way.

But if you want to raise money, you’d better be passionate.