The Futility of Educating Donors

Education is good for everyone — but so is cod-liver oil.

September 2008 By Jeff Brooks

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This fall, I’m starting 10th grade. It’s my third time. Sadly, only the first time through was recorded on my own transcript — I’m doing a lot better at high school than I did when I was in high school. These recent runs at 10th grade are as a shadow to my kids. You see, I’m kind of into education. It’s important. And it’s cool. It’s even fun, at times.

But there’s one kind of education I’m wary of: educating donors.

A lot of nonprofits put tons of energy into educating their donors. They make it a priority right next to raising funds.

For the most part, educating donors is a futile and money-wasting exercise. Not only does it squander resources and opportunities — but it nearly always fails to educate.

Here’s why it doesn’t work
I see two reasons educating donors is such a losing proposition:

1. Most folks don’t really want to be educated. Let me clarify that: Pretty much everybody would rather eat a bug than have more facts crammed into their heads.

I know this because I used to be a teacher.

I thought I was a pretty good teacher, but one thing always deflated me: The coolest, most popular thing I could do for my students — something that would literally make them break out into applause — was to cancel a class. To tell them, in effect, “Tomorrow, you won’t get your education — the thing you’ve dedicated this period of your life to and that’s costing you (well, someone) a pile of money.”

Can you think of any other business (other than death-and-dismemberment insurance) from which people so earnestly don’t want their money’s worth?

It’s not just college students, either. Most people, most of the time, actively avoid being educated.

I don’t want to give you the impression that people in general are dull-witted, Philistine troglodytes with no intellectual curiosity or interest in the world around them.

Far from it. Nearly everyone has a set of interests that they know a lot about, pursue with passion and give meaningful effort to educate themselves about.

In my own circle of friends, there are people who are uncommonly educated about Thai cooking, church vestments, 19th-century string quartets, stadium architecture and the history of golf. For reasons I don’t fully understand, I’m a sucker for geographic curiosities. (There’s an enclave of India that’s inside an enclave of Bangladesh that’s inside an enclave of India that’s inside Bangladesh. That is just super cool, as far as I’m concerned.)