Can you hear the gears grinding?
Is there a growing schism in the third sector between Services and Systems as ways to effect change?
Everywhere we look, charities are waking up to the fact that they can’t do what they set out to do. They can’t end homelessness, cure cancers, achieve equality. At least, they can’t do it alone.
They can’t do it without engaging with the broad, systemic, contextual issues that hold them back. The political systems & structures, business practices, attitudes & behaviours that have a bigger impact on their causes, for better or worse, than any programme they could run.
In other words, their programmes are vital. But their programmes won’t do it. And with needs growing and budgets shrinking, there is a sectoral shift from Services to Systems as a means to effect change.
And this is happening everywhere we look.
- Crisis and Shelter (formed in the same year as short term responses to a housing crisis and still around 50 years later) are talking about a permanent end to homelessness, driven by a radical rewriting of the social contract.
- WaterAid are talking about achieving their ‘everyone, everywhere’ mission and scaling down or shutting up shop by 2030.
- RNIB are refocusing around a peer-support model with people with sight loss at the heart of provision.
- Cancer Research UK are focusing on public health alongside research as the only way to meet cancer survival targets.
- Scope have downsized, pulled out of government-funded programmes and refocused on achieving equality for disabled people.
- WWF and other conservation charities are focusing on climate rather than reserves and species.
- UK children’s charities such as The Children’s Society and NSPCC are coalescing around the systemic changes needed to reverse the long-term decline in young people’s wellbeing and life chances.
These shifts are vital and fundamental, and right for the trying, transformative times we’re in. For one thing, organisations are talking themselves out of the ‘endless growth’ narrative that they borrowed from corporates in the 90s. There’s no point pretending you’ll ever be big enough or rich enough to solve the problem on your own. Not even to your trustees. And especially not in a recession. And that’s given birth to a new organisational bravery.
But where does this leave fundraising?
After all, fundraising has always been built around programmes. Actual work that the charity does, and that supporters can fund. Tangibility is one of the cornerstones. Impact on beneficiaries that people can see, feel, understand and fund. It’s baked in. We don’t really know how else to do it.
But how do you fundraise when you’re moving away from programmes — either in reality or as core to your narrative of change?
Asking mass-market donors to fund cross-sector collaboration, advocacy, systems change, policy development? Some organisations manage it, but they’re few and far between (and none of them are big).
Meanwhile there are growing audience segments (everywhere from millennials to corporates to wealthy entrepreneurs) who buy into the vision, but don’t see a way to be part of it. Particularly because the journey — the role they are offered — leaves them cold.
These two centres of gravity aren’t pulling together, they’re pulling apart. They’re ways of thinking about the world with seperate lexicons, ways of working and crucially measures of success. Each works on their own terms. They just don’t work together (yet).
With so many charities developing strategies and propositions that are about fundamental change and actually achieving their goals (rather than throwing back starfish), are we seeing a fundamental schism emerging, between what the organisation stands for and what supporters can fund? How can fundraising culture, assumptions, benchmarks adapt to this new reality?
We’re in danger of developing parallel structures, operating at different registers and speeds, where the organisation’s purpose is at odds with the fundraising story it tells. That’s a familiar story, but mattered less when fundraising had the lion’s share of the budget. Now it’s all too apparent, and the gears are grinding.
Fundraising has a chance to become about actually unfucking the world, rather than growth, income, RoI, shopping lists. But I can’t see that happening without a radical change in fundraising culture; and a new model of public engagement that fundraisers can sell to their leaders, to their trustees and first of all, most of all, to themselves.
I’m indebted to all the cool people I talked to about this who reassured me I wasn’t seeing an issue that doesn’t exist. Including Annie Moreton at GOOD, Wayne Murray of Humanity Squared and Andy Hyde at Age Futures.
