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Column: GPP - United States
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Here is some fundraising advice from Howard Freeman, author of Making a Difference 2.0: The Ultimate Guide to Online Charitable Giving. Check out part II here.
 2. “DO NOT ‘TRY.’ EITHER ‘DO’ OR ‘DO NOT.’ THERE IS NO ‘TRY.’ Even though my wife fell asleep during “The Empire Strikes Back,” these words of Yoda’s stuck with me about raising money during LBL. You have to decide to be “all in.” Giving this a half-hearted effort will result in even less than 50% results. Like a friend of mine said when I was learning to surf and got scared of bigger waves, “You have to decide to commit to the take-off.”
Here are a few things I did to get and then stay committed:
- After the hour-long presentation I heard in Spring 2010 with Hugh Evans here in NYC, I did a couple easy things. If you haven’t already, then do these first: “Like” the GPP Facebook page, sign up on their mailing list, and consider signing any relevant online petition. These steps get your heart and head involved, and also now that Facebook has timeline, your friends will see the info in a way that might draw them in.
- Later, after committing to do the event in May 2011, I watched the videos of everyone from Gillian Zinser to a guy who lived in his car in Austin for five days. I attached myself to this community in body, mind and spirit, because that helped me ask more often and more sincerely, and it also helped when I felt particularly hungry. (An important reminder: this exercise is not so much about us feeling hungry or empathic toward the world’s poor. It’s about our privilege giving us the opportunity to build awareness and raise a lot of money in order to eradicate the problem of extreme poverty.)
3. PLAY HARD, AND STAY IN THE GAME. Once you’ve gotten over your fear, once you’ve committed, then play hard until the buzzer. Here are some things I did:
- Created a LBL Campaign Facebook banner. (This was before timeline, so I don’t know the equivalent in 2012.)
- Make the first donation. (Can’t ask others to do what you haven’t done yourself.)
- When someone makes a gift, you’ll be auto-notified by an email from GPP. I dropped what I was doing and wrote a thank-you email to the donor. Or in some cases I even called. It’s excellent stewardship and also good karma.
- When someone writes you with a question, concern, or gripe, answer it immediately. This, too, is good stewardship. Earlier, I mentioned how we fear rejection. I was incredibly shy growing up, and I still hate asking for money, so when I emailed my entire list, I felt I was putting myself out there to get slammed. One co-worker complained in an email to me about why I was doing this. (“Isn’t it arrogant to try to act poor for a week?”) Hugh Evans was at that time rebutting a GOOD Magazine piece on the same topic. I referred my colleague to the rebuttal, and I tried to be uncharacteristically polite. He didn’t make a donation, but we remained on great terms after the event. To my recollection, I did not receive one general complaint from more than 1,200 people in my email list. Who is going to complain about your wanting to help people who live on less than $1.50 a day?!
- At the end of two days of fundraising, our team was #1 out of more than 3,000 U.S. teams, and we completed the campaign in that position. I played off this first-place spot during the week and to the end of the fundraising stage (about two weeks later) in order to raise more money, and I increased my goal along the way, passing the second one as well. My son’s karate teacher calls this “friendly competition.” As long as you’re doing things in the right spirit, a healthy sense of competition can only help the larger effort.
- I made YouTube videos each night and circulated them to supporters and select potential donors.
- I sent daily email updates to supporters during the fast itself through the LBL email system, which made it easy to send to all or send to those who had donated since a certain date. It also branded the emails as LBL, so that supporters would feel they were part of something bigger.
- I mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: I made sure to personally thank supporters immediately after receiving notice of their gifts (GPP allowed us to insert our email address so that we would get gift alerts). Remember, the way you go about fundraising will reflect on GPP and its partners as well, so practice good stewardship of your donors’ gifts.
- I thanked supporters multiple times and told them what food I had bought with the money and about my culinary skills (or lack thereof). I kept it all lighthearted, so they’d keep reading. Every third or so message I told them about the work of GPP and encouraged them to click over to the GPP website to learn more. By the end of the campaign, one of my supporters said he was persuaded to take his whole family of five through the experience!
- I asked supporters to share the campaign with their friends via social media and email.
- I used and perhaps overused Facebook and Twitter (and the #LBLUSA hashtag). I received only a handful of gifts from people who weren’t my friends, but I was pulling out all the stops and didn’t mind if this was considered a bit aggressive. Frankly, I was willing to look like an idiot to get more money to help the cause.
- I was into it 100%. Online and offline.
- To underscore one thing I learned more than anything: I have an amazing community of friends, family and coworkers. I relied on that community to come through for the cause, and they overwhelmingly did.
- So I’ll make you this promise: trust the power of the community you’ve developed over the years, ask them to help in tangible ways, and you’ll be amazed at the results and also walk away later feeling even more gratitude that they’re in your life.
Check out Howard's book Making a Difference 2.0 here
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Here is a post from Howard Freeman, author of Making a Difference 2.0, who was the top Live Below the Line fundraiser from last year.
Though I’ve been in fundraising for almost seventeen years, I’d rarely asked for money from friends for a project I was personally (rather than professionally) involved in. When I did “Live Below the Line” in 2011, I therefore had little experience, and the prospect of raising the money was more daunting than the fast.
I  n 1986, I did a 15-mile walk-a-thon in New York City but signed up my sponsors to pledge by the mile “run.” I figured I’d raise more money. I stupidly ran the last ten miles in old sneakers and then couldn’t walk the next day. That was it—my personal fundraising one-off—until my next experience nearly twenty-five years later. This past year’s effort was transformative in my own way of looking at the issue of extreme poverty, because in addition to eating less for a week, I took the time to learn more. But it was also a time that focused me on the power of community, so much so that I wrote a book about how robust online giving can come only from strong community. Your personal community—I can’t stress this enough—are those family, friends and coworkers who will both support you financially and keep you encouraged.
Therefore, if you commit yourself to the fundraising part of this event, and if you will work hard at it for a couple weeks, you will strengthen that community by allowing them to partner with you, and you will reap a great reward in knowing that you’ve done a wonderful thing for people around the world who will never have the opportunity to thank you personally.
Yet there’s at least one big fat obstacle in the way: actually raising the money. So I was asked to share my story from last year, since our team was fortunate enough to end up in the #1 spot out of more than three thousand American teams. While there are certainly some “techniques” and strategies that I think worked—most being those that GPP gives all of us in their online guide—the one thing I credit our success to is the community of my friends, coworkers and family who contributed. Your community will support you if you let them know how important this effort is to you. Make this personal.
Leading up to Live Below the Line, I’ll be sharing my top tips on reaching your financial goal. Here is number 1:
1. “YOU DO NOT HAVE, BECAUSE YOU DO NOT ASK.” Having now done two micro-fundraising efforts; raised personal support from family and friends to go to graduate school; and spent 17 years in professional fundraising, mostly in major donor work—and also as the observant father of three sons who are too young to know better—I can say without hesitation that the #1 reason more people don’t raise more money is because they’re afraid to ask, so they don’t ask.
If you’ll notice, children are never afraid to ask for anything.
If we’re honest, our hesitation is that we might be too proud to put ourselves out there and get rejected. (Again, children are not proud.) My encouragement is this: assume for the moment the humility of the people whose plight you’re representing and speak to those with means to help. Poor people have a voice, but they don’t have the ear of those you do. Be that go-between connecting the voice with the ear. Trust that those who are reading your email or text, or listening to you on the phone or over coffee, are among those who care about you. They’re not suddenly going to hate you! And take consolation: it’s often harder for them to say “no” than for you to hear it. They will most likely simply not answer your message.
Here are some practical tips, which I feel are vital:
- Email your first message to your entire email list. The reason to do this is that once you start cherry-picking people to include, you will come across a lot more reasons to exclude. You’ll also waste a lot of time. EMAIL EVERYONE.
- Since you’re emailing everyone, plainly state that in your note. Last year’s LBL occurred during my birthday, so I opened with some quip about sharing my cake with 1.4 billion people, explained the project, and then added an ending like, “I'm bcc:ing my entire directory with this note (yes, it is somewhat impersonal...but it is for a good cause!), and it's likely I have never asked you personally to donate to an organization before. But I'm asking you to please consider it today.” BE OBVIOUS: YOU WANT AS MANY PEOPLE TO HELP AS POSSIBLE. This also underscores your passion about what you’re doing: you’re asking everyone you know.
- I think I emailed my entire list only twice, maybe three times. After that, I kept it more focused, did a lot of thanking, and did social media (covered later).
Check out Howard‘s book here
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The 1.4 Billion Reasons presentation aims to be a lightbulb moment for audience members, to illuminate, somehow, a clear path ahead and provide the strength of heart to walk it. Everyone has her own lightbulb moment, when she glimpses the part she must play in the larger world (and, correspondingly, bore all her friends and acquaintances describing it). This is mine.
The girls told me that their employers called them donkeys, ânes. In the shed where we talked, they reported this with little visible anger, only small traces of bitterness, just a hint of shame in the creases of their eyebrows. They cried when they reported being beaten, raped, or when they worried about losing their jobs as domestic workers, and some raised their voices in anger; but none seemed particularly disturbed about this dehumanizing appellation.
When I started interviewing domestic workers in Mali for a project during my study abroad, I expected to hear terrible stories. I wanted to know the worst about this system of servitude, and I certainly learned awful things, but the first time I cried in an interview was when a girl told me that her employer called her an animal.
Their words affected me so strongly, I think, because they demonstrated so clearly the foundation of the issue. Domestic servitude in Mali is fraught with problems, and each instance of abuse relies on the basic assumption that the servant is not a person. The women related sagas of long hours, horrible conditions, sexual abuse; and all of these things could be summed up with one powerful epithet: donkey.
It's no surprise that humans have trouble understanding that other people are, well, people. But this particular instance brought home to me how even subtle dehumanization can lead to large-scale abuses. These girls became domestic servants because they had no other options. They grew up, for the most part, in farming communities, and came to the city at age twelve or thirteen to raise a dowry. They wandered the streets until an employer picked them up, and they worked seven days a week, eighteen hours a day. What happened to these girls in their employers' homes was an obvious violation; but the revelation to me was that their rights had been violated a long time before they ever arrived in Bamako, from the moment they were born.
When we see cases of extreme abuse – child soldiers, or victims of torture – we know instinctively that rights have been compromised. It's easy to identify the perpetrator and the victim, and accordingly, we open our wallets and our hearts. But we often forget that people end up in dangerous and harmful situations because they have been denied their rights from the very beginning. When we see someone who is hungry, but not famine-level, ribs-sticking-out, Ethiopia-in-1985 hungry, it's simple to write it off as an unfortunate matter of circumstance, but not really requiring our attention. We see no need to alter the way we live our lives, because the connections are too distant, and the abuse not severe enough.
Before I went to Mali, I certainly planned to donate to worthy causes, to spend a spring break or two with Habitat for Humanity, and read even the most impenetrable articles about famines. After Mali, I found a new determination to stretch my understanding of the human experience, and to address human problems at their most basic level.
Seeing a lightbulb is about understanding in a place deep in your bones, in your belly, that all people have equal value, that no person deserves to be called an animal. That the poverty of whole nations is not an unfortunate circumstance affecting some, but an injustice to all. I can't say that my lightbulb illuminated my path forward with blinding clarity; but I can say that in a small, dark shed in a back alley of Bamako, I talked to some women who made me certain that I should walk it.
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On March 21, 2012 the House Budget Committee, under direction of Chairman Paul Ryan (R, Wis.), released its budget plan for 2013. This document essentially outlines the Republican Party’s spending priorities for the next fiscal year and provides a response to President Obama’s budget plan, released in mid-February.
Being that 2012 is an election year, these competing documents are both highly political and thus nearly impossible to be approved by a divided Congress. But they do give us an idea of how our two major parties are thinking about foreign policy.
The committee’s proposed budget for “international affairs”—which includes U.S. foreign aid spending—came in at significantly less than what President Obama has requested in his own budget plan. The Obama plan has allocated $56.1 billion for the international affairs budget in 2013, whereas the Ryan proposal has allocated $43.1 billion—a difference of about 23 percent, and a 10-percent decrease from actual spending on international affairs in 2012.
So what would such a spending reduction involve? For those too squeamish to peruse the entire 230-page document, here are some of the notable policy recommendations (largely cost reductions) for international affairs spending in the Ryan plan:
- Eliminating USAID’s “Development Assistance” funding model, and instead funding all U.S. foreign assistance through the Millennium Challenge Corporation—an independent aid agency created in 2004.
- Eliminating the Complex Crises Fund (CCF), established in 2010 “to support stabilization activities and conflict prevention in countries demonstrating high risks of insecurity.”
- Eliminating funding for the Inter-American Foundation, the African Development Foundation, the East-West Center, the Asia Foundation and the Center for Middle Eastern-Western Dialogue.
- Eliminating contributions to Clean Technology Fund and Strategic Climate Fund.
- Eliminating Feed the Future, President Obama’s 2009 initiative that aims to end global food insecurity.
- Reducing funding for USAID’s International Disaster Assistance.
Many aid organizations and think tanks have been critical of the proposed policies, most arguing that such cuts would greatly damage U.S. influence in international affairs, threaten the lives of millions and jeopardize national security.
The strongest criticism comes from the Center for Global Development (CGD) regarding the elimination of Feed the Future. Ryan’s budget proposal argues that existing initiatives, specifically Food for Peace and the McGovern-Dole food and nutrition program, already serve the function of addressing food insecurity, making Feed the Future unnecessary. However, CGD argues, these two initiatives “[are] not a long term program to promote food security … It is a ‘feed the now’ rather than ‘feed the future’ approach. Its goal is to keep people alive, not to increase farm yield or any of the related activities necessary to help develop sustainable agriculture.” CGD have also shown in the past that Food for Peace and McGovern-Dole have proven to be some of the most inefficient and wasteful programs in the federal government.
But regardless of what you think about the proposals, the Ryan plan tells us something useful. It’s not that our elected officials on the budget committee don’t care about doing what’s best for the world’s poor; it’s that—for now—they don’t have to.
When President Obama’s budget proposal was released in February, the Inter Press Service pointed out that “Given a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, election-year politics and the lack of a politically potent grassroots constituency willing to lobby for more foreign aid, the administration’s request is unlikely to make it through the Congress intact.”
Facing the Ryan plan’s policy prescriptions, this prediction appears to be dead-on – there are few grassroots voices calling for more or better aid. At the Global Poverty Project, we’re passionate about the latter half of the above quote — the general lack of political will on the part of the individual to support effective foreign aid.
As a general rule, Congress won’t voluntarily fund something unless it is of an immediate measurable advantage to the United States, or unless the people demand it. That’s what is both magnificent and challenging about our democratic system—it requires our participation.
Unless the average American raises concerns or ideas with Congress about the sort of aid we should be giving, this situation is unlikely to get any better. And every March, we will continue to fight the same battle over that 1-percent of federal spending that goes toward foreign aid.
What’s truly necessary is for everyone, from development experts to ordinary citizens like myself, to move beyond political name-calling and preaching to the same small-but-passionate choir of aid enthusiasts, and to become campaigners. Let’s commit to using our voices to ensure that the needs and interests of the world’s poor are addressed, in 2012 and beyond.
Sign petitions, make phone calls, write letters—and more importantly, talk to your friends, co-workers and family members, and get them to do the same. The people of Egypt toppled a dictator with the help of Facebook and Twitter; compared to that, influencing our foreign policy doesn’t seem so difficult anymore.
Let’s be the generation that harnessed our social networks to create positive change for the world’s poorest people. Let’s stop defining our democracy by the inaction of our elected officials. Instead, let’s define it by the actions we take together, whether as Democrats or Republicans, Mac or PC, iPhone or Android.
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When I first arrived in Malawi with the Peace Corps, I thought all its schoolchildren needed was computers and pencils to achieve the intellectual standards of the developed world. After a year or so, I realized that the problems in Malawi's education system, and culture as a whole, had much deeper roots.
The truth is that our aid efforts in countries like Malawi often do no good, or even negatively impact the culture. Moyo's Dead Aid and the works of William Easterly outline how our development assistance can prevent African nations, in particular, from evaluating closely their own financial resources, and should be phased out. Other scholars, like Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier, say that in fact more aid to Africa is necessary. All – Moyo, Easterly, Sachs, and Collier – agree that the only path forward for Africa involves the development of its own industries and markets, which necessitates some private sector involvement.
No matter where you fall on the issue of aid in the future, we can all agree that aid now could be better spent. The problems with bed-net distribution in Africa – that people don't use the nets properly, that free nets put local manufacturers out of business, that recipients hoard nets and sell them at 100% profit – are well-publicized, but I was still shocked to see USAID mosquito nets acting as my neighbor's curtains. My school received three computers from an American church, but we didn't have electricity. Nor did we have the concave mirrors we needed to fix the microscopes donated by Bausch & Lomb.
These instances of useless aid did more than waste postage. I had noticed a crumbling structure at the edge of my school's property; I was informed that it was an unfinished classroom originally built by the EU. When I proposed a capital campaign in the village to finish the structure, which required only making mud bricks and buying some cement and aluminum sheets, for a total materials cost of about $50, I was met with flat resistance. Why should they raise money, the school board argued, when surely some agency would come along to build it for them?
The problem wasn't that the donations were too generous, or too many. It was that they were illogical. From a Malawian point of view (as well as my friends could explain it to me), Americans have so many microscopes and computers that they can afford to just throw them anywhere, even where they won't be used. If your only exposure to America is its thoughtless extravagance, is it any wonder that you lose respect for its donors and agencies? When I visited Livingstonia, the first settlement of British colonists in Malawi, I was pressured to take plastic tubs of knitting supplies down the mountain to my school. They'd been sitting in a shed for years, apparently, without any clear destination; nobody wanted the skeins of yarn and crochet hooks.
I truly believe that Americans want to help people, and that people in the developing world need our help. I think we're just not very good at supplying it. It's too far away, and the lifestyle is too foreign; even after spending two years in Malawi, I'm still not sure what Malawians need most or how to help. But ignorance is no excuse for apathy. What we need is better research, more insight, and greater ambition. It's not enough to send books. True progress will come from policy change and an mindset shift: the sooner we acknowledge that working with people in developing nations benefits us as well as them, the sooner we can all move forward together. The best work we can do is about facilitating independent economic development, providing infrastructure and credit markets, knitting together people rather than yarn.
People often ask us what they should do to help. Donating clothes, books, or computers is a very nice thing to do, and I have no doubt that the recipients of such items are grateful to get them. But I think our responsibility to the developing world is much greater, and much broader. We've got to distribute vaccines and medicines, but we've also got to change minds, donors' and recipients', about how charity works.
And while we're at it, we could use some concave mirrors.
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Posted by Meg Watkins in Aid for column GPP - United States on Mar 30th, 14:20 |
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