Today’s guest post is brought to you by one of my favorite people in fundraising, the always insightful and sometimes controversial Mazarine Treyz.
Mazarine is the author of The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising book and blog, http://wildwomanfundraising.com. She’s the co-creator of Adventures in Fundraising, the first fundraising video game. She’s passionate about teaching people how to change the world. She runs a Nonprofit Career club in Austin, Texas, which meets twice a month. To learn more from Mazarine, come and take her webinar in “Managing Organizational Effectiveness” for The Texas Association of Nonprofit Organizations on September 22nd. She’s raised over $1M US in the past three years, and has been fundraising for the past seven years. She can teach you about nonprofit management, fundraising, marketing, grantwriting, and more. See her consulting site, http://mazarinetreyz.com for examples of her work.
I’m calling for a revolution. Here. Now.
Dan Pallotta says, we need to “De-criminalize fundraising.” He goes on, “We should make fundraising a program domain in and of itself — every bit as important as the medical research, social services, advocacy, and everything else it makes possible. We should consider all spending on it to be a critical “program” expense. Instead of disdaining it, we should invest in understanding and developing it.”
Have you ever felt yourself wishing you could ask for more, ask for a percentage of what you make, only to have people tell you you’re “unethical” and “a bad fundraiser” and “that’s not how things are done”?
Have you ever asked WHY? Why is it bad to ask for more money? Why is it such a huge issue to pay fundraisers a percentage of what they raise? How would it be an issue to pay Executive Directors a percentage of what they raised? What about board members? Wouldn’t that make us better nonprofit staff, board, and fundraisers, because finally we would have an actual monetary incentive to raise more?
There are 70,000 nonprofits in Texas, and the majority of them have budgets of under $25,000 a year. This is because they are not investing in fundraising. If they invested in someone who knew how to write a grant, who knew how to put on an event, or send out a letter, suddenly, they would have money. Instead of trying for years to get a fundraiser to work for free, or trying to get volunteers to do the work of a paid professional, they could have the money they deserve right now.
Let’s face it. Paying fundraisers more is just good business sense.
It’s not about believing in the mission enough to take a stipend volunteer position. It’s about helping solve the problems that our nonprofits were set up to solve.
One of the problems we should all care about is making sure that we’ve got a little money set by for retirement. We should have enough money to pay our rent, buy food, get clothing, pay off student loans, get continuing education as fundraisers, and even go out to eat once in awhile. This is not a radical notion. Most of the people that I know who work at nonprofits do not get paid enough to set a little money by. They live paycheck to paycheck, buy work clothes on credit, and are forced into penury by the nonprofits that purportedly help the world.
And you’re scared, of course, that if you ask for more money, someone younger than you will just come up and take your job and be glad to make $10 a hour. Well, here’s how we solve this problem. We need a fundraiser’s union. I am serious.
We need a union that will help us be able to demand cost of living raises every year, a union that will force nonprofits to hire us at the salaries above poverty level.
Have you ever had a boss you just couldn’t communicate with? Did that boss make an intolerable work environment for you? And have you ever been fired, even after raising tons of money, for absolutely no reason, but because you signed an “at Will” employment contract, you could do NOTHING?
We take for granted that fundraising positions have a turnover every 12-18 months. We think this is because of “the stress of the job.” Wrong. It’s the stress of the system. The system that doesn’t reward us, no matter how well we perform. The system that says we should never ask for more. The system that makes us work “at will.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if you had someplace to turn?
You do have someplace to turn. You can join a Public Service Workers Union, UFCW.
You can organize to make sure that you and people you work with have more power to stand up to bad management practices, bad salaries, and bad attitudes. Here is a union that you can join for public service workers, UFCW. To form a union at your nonprofit, check out Organizing 101 How to form a union.
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I can’t wait to meet with you personally.
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