The Lame, Evil Donors meme rolls on, this time in an op-ed in the Washington Post by Peter Singer, Heartwarming causes are nice, but let's give to charity with our heads.
Singer says donors make terrible choices when they donate to help sick kids through the Make-A-Wish Foundation rather than donating to a cause that saves lives. The $7,500 average cost of granting a wish (think the recent wonderful Batkid story), if spent on nutrition or disease prevention in the developing world, save a lot of lives.
Therefore, Singer reasons, a gift to Make-A-Wish is irrational and immoral.
Michael Rosen nicely (and quite fairly) skewers Singer's argument at Is it Ethical When an Ethicist Browbeats Prospective Donors?, calling it "coercive manipulation." Read it.
I don't trust myself to fully understand where my charitable giving really ought to go. I really don't trust Peter Singer or any other self-appointed Master of Morality to make those decisions for me. Or for the generous donors who fund all the great causes of the world.
The troubling thing about this is that Singer is just one voice in a puritan chorus that says something is wrong with donors. They are lame and evil, and they owe it to us to change.
Any fundraiser who follows that line of thinking is doomed to create ineffective fundraising. Because they'll miss the reasons people give.
Our duty as fundraisers is to use resources wisely to maximize donor connection and donations. If we do crummy, ineffective, brow-beating fundraising, trying to remake donors into weird imitations of ourselves -- that's malfeasance.
Fundraisers who do that will go broke in a satisfying cloud of self-righteousness, which is far more immoral than any "misguided" thinking donors might be committing.
If you believe your cause is more important than some other cause, your job is to make it more compelling than other causes. And you do that by entering the donor's world, and appealing to them on their grounds -- not by deciding there's something wrong with donors and insisting that they change to fit your needs.
Every donor has a duty to make the world a better place. And to do that to the best of their ability, following their heart and mind. We can help them by showing them what they can do through us.
Trying to dictate how they should think won't work. We have no business in that business.
