Lessons From Abroad

Our global neighbors are innovative, but they face unique problems.

April 2006 By Tom Hurley

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Another alternative medium employed in Europe is face-to-face solicitations by paid solicitors. The cost to acquire a new donor is high, but like many campaigns in Europe, donors are brought on from the beginning with a commitment to automatic monthly giving. I’m not sure face-to-face solicitation ever is going to take off in the United States.

Where’s the innovation?
Richard Pordes, a leading international fundraiser for UNICEF, looks as close as Canada and sees success with direct-response television. In fact, he sees much innovation coming from our northern neighbors.

“It may be that the Canadian market’s less saturated,” says Pordes, who sees many Canadian charities working hard, while some U.S. fundraisers “have just given up trying to be innovative.”

“We freely copy each other in developed countries,” says Mal Warwick, founder and chairman of Mal Warwick and Associates. “While techniques
in the Western world are pretty much alike, the Global South (nations of Africa, Central and Latin America, and much of Asia) is another matter
entirely. In those countries where a few brave souls have begun venturing into fundraising waters, most of the time they’re on their own.”

Two Calgary educators, who just completed one-on-one interviews with
fundraisers worldwide, confirm Warwick’s observations. Guy Mallabone of SAIT Polytechnic and Tony Myers of the University of Calgary explored attitudes on wealth, cultural influences and perceptions of major-giving practices in Brazil, Germany, India, China and South Africa. In nearly all emerging countries, training, credibility and a professional fundraiser shortage were major issues.

In Brazil, Mallabone and Myers learned individual giving is so new some donors fear kidnapping if their names are published. In India, wealth is kept within a family and transferred from one generation to the next. In China, where growth and tremendous social needs exist side by side, one major donor described the country as undergoing an “age of enlightenment” ... with personal philanthropy as a natural outgrowth.

Warwick sees credibility and trust as major issues for emerging countries.

“The word ‘distrust’ doesn’t even begin to convey the jaundiced attitude so many in the Global South have for nonprofits,” he says.

Warwick is a U.S. delegate to the Resource Alliance, a British organization that supplies advice, training and support for fledgling programs. He and others believe trust will come from the fundraising professionalism that emerging countries desperately need.

Mallabone and Myers, who presented the plenary session at the International Fundraising Congress, summed up their view of the top
eight global events influencing the new world of philanthropy:

1. Woldwide democracy;
2. Capitalism in emerging countries and creation of a global middle class;
3. An open-market economy free of barriers on trade and transportation;
4. A shrinking communications world where voice and data can bring people anywhere together instantly;
5. Environmental awareness;
6. Growth of the nonprofit sector to help solve problems that business and government can’t or won’t;
7. Global disasters, which affect attitudes and giving patterns; and
8. Terrorism.

 

One place to get a global view is the Resource Alliance Web site at www.resource-alliance.org.

Tom Hurley is president of DMW Worldwide’s nonprofit division.
Contact: thurley@dmwdirect.com.