I recently got an email from a reader frustrasted by how little he has learned after 30 years of being a donor to international developement causes. With his permission, I am posting our email exchange here:
The letter
I have been giving to aid organizations such as Oxfam America and Trickle Up for over 30 years. Yet my thinking has not benefited from 30 years of direct feedback. I have no independent means of hearing from the people served by these organizations.
Recently, it occurred to me that I should focus on a single region in a particular country where there is a program in place. I would see if I could develop direct relationships with people in that region. Then I would be exposed to different perspectives.
Is it plausible to think that using modern forms of communication, I might be able to form lasting long-term relationships that would give me a useful, local perspective on various aid efforts?
I am also wondering if a problem such as malaria might offer a way to partner with others who are working in the target region.
Are these sorts of relationships for two-way learning and long-term problem solving possible? Can individuals learn from each other and not have the learning mediated by the media or aid organizations?
My Answer
You’re up against one of the most frustrating situation for a committed donor: it feels like throwing your money down a well sometimes. You can’t tell if things are changing because they change so slowly, and when they do change you can’t tell how much of it was because of you. I think that feeling is a big part of what drives the current trend toward randomized controlled trials on international development interventions.
In terms of connecting with people who actually interact with aid programs, I think the answer is a qualified yes. Most of the developing world is rapidly coming online and using social media in particular. People are using the internet even when they don’t have water or consistent electricity.
However, the question that comes to mind for me is: what’s in it for them? What is the motivation for a 22-year-old Malawian to communicate with you about aid programs and their impact on her life? You would benefit from getting a local perspective on where your money goes, but how does your dialogue partner benefit? Their time is valuable and internet access is not free – why should they spend that on you?
If you can find a way past that hurdle, then I think yes, interpersonal learning is completely possible.
One final thought for you – are you familiar with the work of GiveWell.org? I don’t agree with all their conclusions, but they do an excellent job of identifying organizations that perform, and share, genuine impact evaluations. You might consider shifting your giving to such an organization.
This is a very cynical response, but I’ve spent enough time working as a journalist in places where aid has set the standard, and often has been the only reason, for interactions between outsiders and locals to wonder if a donor’s interaction with an aid recipient wouldn’t do much more than reinforce the idea that all foreigners are full of money to be exploited. If your only interaction with a person in a foreign country — especially one you’ve never been to — is to evaluate, on your own personal terms, whether you think your money is making a difference, I can’t see that it does much more than entrench the transactional nature of relationships between strangers that already exists in so many of these places.
I think the reader has gotten his answer from 30 years of dissatisfaction of donating money to aid organizations. Many people feel good about giving, and the pleasure is enough to keep them going. It’s better to stop right here with the pleasure of giving and not think about things too much. However the reader in this post craves to know the outcome of his donations, and that’s where he’s up against a wall. He’ll probably never know, because the aid organizations and recipients probably don’t know either. Productive communication with aid recipients is not likely because aid organizations so easily prop up pretty picture and poverty porn imagery and case studies to motivate donors.
For small individual donors, giving money to aid agencies is analogous to playing the lottery. You put the money in, and nothing visible happens. Sorry. Another useful analogy is the sausage factory. If you like to eat sausage, never witness how it’s made because it is an ugly sight. Similar to aid organizations. International aid is a messy business and it is better for individual donors if they don’t dig too deep. If aid organizations were to disclose what really happens in the field the entire system would collapse due to public outcry. Just keep giving, or not, and feel good about it. This way is better for everybody, maybe.
The reader seems sincere in his commitment to help people. If he continues to be dissatisfied with aid organizations, and continues to have money he can part with, he should consider investing in private sector companies that provide water, energy, and infrastructure to developing nations. Developing infrastructure provides a platform for increased industrial output, economic stimulation, jobs, education, health, welfare, and a better life on a national scale in ways that isolated aid programs cannot. The private sector is also a messy business which should not be examined too deeply. Private investment won’t give the reader a personal relationship with somebody he has helped but it will expose him to different perspectives, and he might make a little money that he can then donate to an aid organization.
Jina:
I think that is a good point, not a cynical one.
What would motivate a 22 year old Malawian to correspond with a 55 year old New Yorker? What might connect one family in Malawi with another family in the US? What if it were fun? Perhaps curiosity and the novelty of being able to chat person-to-person or family-to-family half way around the world would be sufficient. Maybe the human pleasure of sharing simple stories could drive communication.
Out of partnerships, shared goals, and common projects (for example, collaborating to reduce the burden of malaria), can come friendships and connections. Those connections can expand a donor’s understanding.
This is fascinating to me as someone who works in fundraising for a large international humanitarian organization.
On one hand, we as fundraisers are told that best practice is take the donor on a multi-year learning journey into the issues you and they jointly care about.
On the other hand, I look at my mother (in the same 55 year old demographic as the letter writer) getting mail from charities, even charities to which she is a longtime donor, and most of the mail gets trashed without reading it. She just wants the barest minimum reporting. As John says above, the serotonin pleasure of giving is the main motivator, and as a fundraiser my job is to sell and facilitate that pleasure. (Through things like case studies, you’re right on John).
So if most donors are like my mom – supporting a charity but not wanting to invest their time and mental energy – then how am I supposed to take them on that learning journey? I feel like if I am sending them more than four pieces of mail a year, I am bothering them. I ask them how much they want to be engaged, and they almost always say “as little as possible.”
Any ideas? I want to do my job better. I want my donors to feel satisfied; I want to connect them with ideas and issues to the extent they want to be connected; I don’t want to talk down to them; I don’t want to put burden on the field or the beneficiaries we serve. I would feel bad if I was this guy’s contact at the two organizations he named. I like Cliff’s idea of small, common projects. Any others?
This gets at what I see as a core dilemma in aid marketing. Essentially, how to give donors enough good information to meet their needs, while keeping the focus of the overall enterprise fundamentally focused on aid recipients (‘beneficiaries’, ‘clients’, etc.).
Up to what point does a donors’ need for information remain valid, and responding to that need a reasonable responsibility for an aid organization to assume?
Jane – I also wonder if most organzations see contact as “another request for money.” Is it possible that donors might like contact that was a straightforward update on an activity, rather than a fresh ask?
I can understand the donor’s concern, but I’m missing a little bit a certain proactiveness on his part that I find important if one is really interested in development. If you give to large organisations, they have research, as Jane describes, and the average donor only wants 3,365 mailings per year. But if you are able to find Alanna and her blog on the Internet you can easily tap into an endless amount of information, debates and alternative ways of giving (kiva.org comes to my mind), keeping in mind that a direct relationship will most likely be a huge constraint on a poor person’s/family’s/community’s time and resources. However, this may also be a point that marketing staff could take up: Why not include a list of blogs etc in your mailings-even if they are critical about aid? People then have a choice for further, non-organisational resources.
You could also go to meetings in your local community. I live in a small-ish town in Canada and Oxfam’s get-togethers usually attract a diverse crowd of people from the community: Seasoned campaigners, students, activists from the community. It’s a friendly and ‘safe’ environment and nobody would give an ‘ordinary donor’ a bad look because s/he asks ‘simple’ questions about development. I guess my main point is that it’s no longer a ‘giving in exchange for information’ relationship, but that there is a complex network of opportunities to give, ‘take’, learn and get involved.
I’d also like to add that the language is an issue. Also, is the donor expecting the organization to link him/her up with the recipients? That is another burden on the organization.
This is a bit of a digression, so forgive me.
John says many people feel good about giving and the pleasure keeps them going.
Some economists (James Andreoni comes to mind) have argued that people give for the “warm glow” effect it has on the donor. Think about this for a moment. If donors were aiming to make themselves feel good, aren’t there smarter, more direct and reliable ways to get a warm glow? Wouldn’t donors get more warm glow if they gave not to strangers far away, but to friends or family? Wouldn’t the gratitude, appreciation and contagion of positive feelings make the warm glow glow warmer?
The warm glow effect of giving, which I think does exist, is necessarily a by-product, not something one can aim at achieving. If so, then at what is the donor (at least some donors) aiming? Maybe it is reducing human hardship or the suffering of others. If one aims at that, then the more reduction, the better. (Why settle for less when one can achieve more for the same price?) Every rational donor wants to get better at giving, that is, reduce more human suffering with fewer dollars. One reason some are attracted to international giving is that a dollar goes farther abroad. The opportunities for helping are greater because the poverty is deeper.
Consider one more fact. The people who are facing hardships have something to teach others who want to help, but are busy solving a different set of problems in their lives. Donors should learn as much as they can from books, from nonprofit reports, from social meetings with other donors in their neighborhood, and from Internet blogs. But maybe they have something to learn by focusing on particular regions, following those areas for the long term, and most especially by forming partnerships and having dialogs with those whose perspectives are different from the donor’s and closer to the problems everyone wants to solve.
I think there is real value for long-term donors to specialize in a special cause or technical topic, like malaria or HIV or agricultural productivity. It helps build up knowledge they can use to identify good programs.
@Allana “I also wonder if most organzations see contact as “another request for money.” Is it possible that donors might like contact that was a straightforward update on an activity, rather than a fresh ask?”
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. I dom’t think it’s so much to ask for an NGO to give a simple update on their activity via their website, e-bulletin etc, without hitting the donor each time. The organisation I work for, ATD Fourth World, was very conscious of finding the right balance between communication and fundraising in post-quake Haiti. We invested a lot in producing weekly and later on monthly updates on our website to let people know about the challenges Haitians were facing and how we were working alongside them to meet those challenges.
I don’t think a direct relatonship between donor and local project worker is a feasible or sustainable response and probably not where most donors would want to see project workers’ time being best spent.
@Allana: So there is value in the long term donor focusing on a topic (such as malaria, agricultural productivity, etc.). How about focusing on a country and a region?
Thirty years ago the family/community networks of aid recipients were largely located only the developing country. Now those networks are global. If donors want more information about what’s happening on the ground in, say, eastern Mali hook up with the Malian-American/French/Canadian etc immigrant community nearest you. Back in the day, it was easier to think of the foreign poor as being “out there” because they were. But so much has happened in the last 30 years! An aid recipient in northwest Haiti may have a son at a Russian university (she’s a lovely, proud woman). An aid recipient in a small village in the DRC may have a cousin who attended Harvard and another driving taxi in New York City. This is the world, now. Of course, immigrant closeness can also be discomforting to some Northern donors but those cross-border family/community networks certainly can address some of their information needs.
Great point, Carla.
I think Alanna’s comment above to Jane would be a great solution. Aid organizations sending out some information that is ONLY for the purpose of updating individuals who have donated on how their contributions are making a difference. When you make a donation your information is usually given to the aid organization, which would make contacting donors easy. I think even a general update would satisfy most donors to at least knowing that they are actually helping. By a general update I mean something like “we raised this amount of money and it went to this region and was able to provide so much supplies.” Giving numbers to people often makes a big difference to people because they can see the true affect. This step done by aid organizations would not only reassert how much donors helped out, but they might be more inclined to open their mail from the organizations because now ALL of the letters would just be requesting more money.
Hi all —
In seeing this post, I wanted to share two organizations that I think can be helpful in addressing your dilemma. The first is the Proven Impact Fund at Innovations for Poverty Action (http://www.poverty-action.org/provenimpact). IPA identifies “proven and tested” interventions using rigorous evaluations (randomized control trials) conducted around the world. If you are motivated by knowing that your charitable donations are producing the maximum effect — getting the most bang for your buck so to speak — this is where you should go. There are links to papers and studies if you want to educate yourself further.
However, it sounds like you are also looking for a personal connection above all. Check out See Your Impact (http://seeyourimpact.org/) – they provide individual impact stories to donors for each gift, and are well-funded enough so that they don’t actually take a cut out of your donation to provide this service — 100% still goes to the gift that you choose.
Hope either of those help!
Paloma