I have a difficult relationship with fundraising.
I was in scouting as a child. We had a great troop leader (later replaced with a sadistic bastard, but I digress) and we were sponsored by a company with vast land holdings including forests, mountains, and beaches; it was pretty much all available to us for camping. But then we were expected to participate in the fundraising activity: selling Scout-O-Rama tickets to our friends and neighbors. I was painfully shy. Knocking on the doors of neighborhood houses and trying to sell tickets to adult strangers was horrifying to me, especially after I realized that the majority of those few who actually bought the tickets had no real interest in the event.
For many years, I enjoyed listening to National Public Radio until news, in general, became so toxic that I had to carefully curate my exposure to it. The fundraising drives, however, were nothing short of awful. (I’m sure many, perhaps most, of the local stations’ staff had even stronger feelings than I.) I contributed to the stations, but I tried to avoid contributing during the drives out of a sense that I was just encouraging them.
I am, as both regular readers know, a proponent of free and open-source software (FOSS). It is astonishing what software engineers the world over have created either to scratch their own itch or just out of a desire to create. I suspect the GNU/Linux operating system is the single largest collective human endeavor in history, yet it was done without an IPO or investors or stocks or profits or corporate control.
For many years, I did clinical and research work on a rare but devastating Tragic Disease™ and I was sponsored, in part, by a nonprofit Society dedicated to eradication of the disease. The Society was a loosely-organized collection of members of affected families and their caregivers and healthcare providers. It did good work, but not much of it. At one point during my tenure, the Society hired a — I’m not sure what you call it — nonprofit professional? — as CEO. She got things organized and ramped up, really ramped up, the fundraising. As a result, the Society became far more effective and had a much larger budget for research (and a MUCH larger budget for more fundraising). I spoke at one of their national conferences, and they put me up in a $2,400/night room (I’m more of a Motel 6 kind of guy). They did and are doing an amazing amount of good and the Tragic Disease is now somewhat treatable for the first time in history. Yet I found the constant drumbeat of fundraising, fundraising, fundraising to be intolerable.
So what’s to be done? I don’t think scouting, at least at the level I experienced it, really needed Scout-O-Rama ticket sales to function, but it was 100% dependent on corporate sponsorship and I suspect the sponsorship, at least somewhat, depended on the organization showing some internal commitment to fundraising. I also think corporate sponsorship was a lot more benign in the 1960s than it is now.
I do not know of any way that National Public Radio and its affiliate stations could survive without fundraising.
The FOSS world has periodic crises. You might not know it, but Microsoft, Amazon, Meta (Facebook), and (to a lesser degree) Apple have made billions by exploiting FOSS and, generally, giving back very little to those communities. There are sporadic attempts to create fundraising frameworks to keep FOSS projects viable.
The Society, without a doubt, did far more good for their cause after becoming a fundraising behemoth. Lives have been saved and improved and the world is a better place, but I can’t help but feel that some part of the community’s soul was lost in the transition.
There is a core part of me that believes that the world doesn’t have to work this way, that there is an alternative that doesn’t involve a hierarchical bureaucracy doling out limited funds to causes they deem most worthy. For the life of me, though, I can’t figure out how such an alternative would work.
—2p