Fundraising is a sacred ritual grounded in generosity and love
Fundraising is a sacred ritual grounded in generosity and love rather than marketing or metrics.
Fundraising enables generosity in donors. Not their own ego-driven and transactional generosity, but a deeper spirit of capital-g Generosity. It's difficult to overstate how important that instinct is.
Generosity is one of the only ways we have to overcome both fear and greed, the two fundamental driving forces behind the world's economy (and many of its woes). Those two self-obsessions are both dangerous in different ways, but neither of them will allow generosity. There's a reason every religion on earth encourages a generous spirit. We need to be encouraged.
Today we suffer from an abundance of narcissism and a lack of ritual. Fundraising, at its most skillful, can offer this ritual. It can create a home where the asker and the asked can meet on the same ground.
Ritual creates embodied knowledge. It is the way communities are built without communication. It values the symbol, something which is radically still. This stillness is antithetical to the hypergrowth mindset of many fundraisers today. Symbols don't produce value. They don't help you meet KPIs.
When fundraising forgets the fundamental grounding of love, it becomes dangerous. It starts having all the hallmarks of the manipulative profession of marketing, and at its worst, it shows up wearing the same mask. But marketing is a profession of clever tricks leading to a capital outcome. Fundraising, when properly performed, is a practice of deep spiritual importance.
Some clever attempts at this manipulation offer emotional management as their art. The perpetrators recognize that consumers don't just consume things, they consume the emotion bound up in these things. Fundraisers, trained always to optimize and upgrade, realize that this works. We start to treat emotion as an efficient means of production, even more efficient than rational management.
This leaves both the asker and the asked with a feeling of emptiness. To fill that void, we double down. More consumption. More communication. More craving for attention. The endless quest for production destroys our ability to access that which endures, that which lingers.
As has the world, fundraising has moved towards digital communication. Digital communication is useful, but it does not establish relationship. It is disembodied. It isolates us as the producers of ourselves -- it has us playing to the gallery to garner more attention. Calling our disembodied suffering "Zoom fatigue" is a cute label designed to dismiss a fundamental truth. This is core to our human experience: we need each other in real life. Not in communication, but in community. Fundraising must be the antidote, not the disease.
It cannot be a response to shortfall or scarcity. Yes, it is a profession of transactional outcomes, and all people should be measured appropriately in the context of their job. But the metric cannot become the driving force behind our work. Fundraising strips away all fear of scarcity and control, revealing a core spirit of generosity in both the asker and the asked. It is not an invitation to invest money. It's an invitation to invest ourselves, through our resources as symbolic vehicle.
We forget this because money deals with the most intimate place of our heart. We don't want to reveal our needs. We don't want to give away our security to someone who might betray us. We have unprocessed guilt, shame, and fear associated with the way we were raised, or the lessons we learned as an adult.
That is why we must learn how to let go of these stories. We must reveal the love underneath it all. Fundraising is a gift we give ourselves, to plant and nurture love. It's where we meet each other. It's an invitation into our common yearning. What is created in that shared ground is emergent. It's greater than both the people who need money and the people who can give it.
Henri Nouwen encourages us to ask "Can you love the rich for who they are, rather than what they have?" I ask it here too. This is the central question of true fundraising, generosity-enabling fundraising, which cannot be measured by any metric. Can we love each other? Can we learn to resonate with each other, and to build and grow that resonance? Can we deepen and stabilize that love through repetition, instead of chasing new stimuli?
Fundraising is the alchemy by which hostility becomes hospitality. It welcomes us, the tired, the wounded, home. Without this resonance, without this ritual, we will be thrown back into our own narcissism. Well-built fundraising can disburden our ego, and build a spiritual home for those who are trying to make a difference.