Nonprofit Fundraising Strategy

A Guide to Ethical Decision Making and Regulation for Nonprofit Organizations

Janice Gow Pettey

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781118487570
• eBook ISBN: 9781118614211
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Nonprofit Organizations & Charities
• Index: Business

Practical tools and techniques to incorporate ethical standards and practices in nonprofit fundraising

Nonprofit Fundraising Strategy is a helpful and inspiring resource for nonprofits large and small, young and mature, local and international. The insightful guidance and case studies found within these pages will help you understand how to address specific ethical issues within your nonprofit and leave plenty of food for thought and discussion.

• Adds new materials on new business practice codes, the Ethics Assessment Inventory, coverage of new ethics standards
• Now includes an ethics assessment tool on the Ethical Fundraising, Second Edition companion website
• Considers essential topics including: appearance of impropriety, rights of donors, tainted money, using donations as intended, choosing a leadership role, ethical decision-making, restoring public confidence in the nonprofit sector, and the ethics of grant making and grant seeking
• Written by luminaries in the field of ethics in fundraising
• Explores a topic that all professional fundraisers must engage with in order to build the trust and confidence of the giving public
• Offers an invaluable collection of essays based on the rich experience of philanthropic leaders
• Presents wise reflections on the central role of ethics in fundraising

Featuring contributions from a host of well-known and respected senior-level fundraising professionals, several of whom are members of the AFP Ethics Committee, Nonprofit Fundraising Strategy features a wealth of practical tools to help fundraising practitioners, board members, and governing boards implement these essential concepts into their own organizations.

Chapter 1

Fundraisers and the Good Life

Paul C. Pribbenow, PhD, CFRE

Some 20 years ago, I sat in a Chicago hotel conference room taking the required examination in order to earn my Certified Fundraising Executive (CFRE) designation. It was a multiple-choice test, intended to measure my understanding of the core areas of fundraising knowledge and practice. I remember vividly the question near the end of the exam that posed this situation: “You are the director of development for a small social service agency in Chicago. You receive a call from the board member who chairs your development committee offering you tickets to the Cubs game that evening. What do you do?”

There were four options from which to choose—and there was a right answer according to the code of ethics—but all I remember is thinking how much I loved baseball. I began to think back on my growing up in Wisconsin and how my dad would take my brothers and me to Milwaukee to watch Major League Baseball games. I remembered fun car rides together, baseball park concessions, and the thrill of seeing big league ballplayers up close. Those memories were about family, about rich and valuable learning experiences, about joy and fun. Those memories were about my moral life.

I chose one of the multiple-choice answers—hopefully the right one, which is that I could not accept the tickets for my own use (though there are ways to accept them on behalf of clients or for the good of the organization)—but what I realized in that moment was that too often we focus our moral reflection and decision-making primarily on the dilemmas we face in our life and work, rather than on all of the ways in which our values help to create what I want to call “the good life.” Too often, we focus on preventing misbehavior rather than inspiring the richness and joy of the good life.

Why is this? I think it is arguable that one reason for our often punitive focus in ethical deliberation is that the world is a complex and messy place, and the fact is that human beings don't really like the messiness. We want answers, we want conflicts resolved, we want to believe that if we simply apply the right principle to the dilemmas we face, we will have our answer and resolution. I get that. There are many days on which I would give anything for the right answer to life's big (and small) questions.

As fundraisers, we face this messiness daily. Our work involves relationships, keeping confidences, serving as links between institutions and individuals, and perhaps most vexing of all, money. And for a whole lot of reasons, it is simply easier for us to believe that we need answers to the ethical challenges we face.

At the same time, I would argue that the nature of our work as fundraisers actually places us in situations and relationships where the overriding ethical consideration is not misbehavior, but the value-laden decisions that donors and volunteers make to further causes they are passionate about by giving of their time, talent, and resources. What a privilege it is to be in those situations and relationships! What a noble profession we have chosen, where we are witness to remarkable acts of generosity and vision and commitment! What a privilege and obligation we have in our professional work to help our donors and volunteers give voice to their values! University of San Francisco professor Michael O'Neill has gone so far as to claim that fundraisers must be moral trainers because we are with people when they are making moral decisions.¹ Now, that is the good life!

So, our dilemma in thinking about our moral lives is also messy. We are human beings and we crave order and resolution. We also often crave having someone else tell us what is right and wrong. (As an ethicist, I often find myself consulting on the moral dilemmas folks face, and I am quick to remind them that, though I might offer an opinion about how to respond, my primary duty is to help them think through on their own or with peers what is the right thing to do.)

Our humanness is extended by the fact that our primary work as fundraisers involves dealing with other humans in often intimate and personal ways, thus leading to even more complexity and vulnerability in our moral lives.

Our responses as a fundraising profession to these challenges for our ethical reflection and decision making are instructive. More than 50 years ago, when our first professional associations were being formed, our focus was on drawing together the disparate threads of our professional community—recall that the first professional fundraisers often came out of advertising or journalism or community organizing. In those early days, the issues facing the profession were more about identity and public perceptions of the work of fundraisers.

As the profession evolved—and the numbers of self-described professional fundraisers increased—it became important to begin to codify the ethical values and standards that governed the behavior of fundraisers and that also depicted our commitments to being accountable to the various publics we served (organizations, communities, and the wider society). The work of some of our most wise and experienced colleagues to craft a code of ethical principles and standards for the National Society of Fundraising Executives (NSFRE)—now the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP)—is a model of professional reflection and self-regulation. The AFP Code has gone through many changes during the past 50 years, but it remains a comprehensive and compelling statement of our common values and aspirations as a profession.²

The issue is, of course, that when you make the effort to write down such a code of ethics, it can take on a life of its own (think of Moses and the Ten Commandments!). Given our human and professional inclinations, codes of ethics can quickly become primarily the law that helps us respond to misbehavior rather than a statement of the sort of moral aspirations we share for our work and the world.

Over my 30-year career as a fundraiser, I have watched my colleagues become more and more focused on applying the Code to solve ethical dilemmas. I lead workshops where we review ethical cases and the climax is often giving participants the right answer to the multiple-choice questions. Despite my efforts—and those of many like-minded colleagues—to expand the moral conversation to helping colleagues develop ethical reflection skills and to point to the promise of the good life, we often revert to the legalistic parsing of the dilemmas we face.

But the times are changing! A few years ago the AFP Ethics Committee dedicated itself to developing resources for ethical reflection and decision making that are designed to support this more expansive vision of the moral life for fundraisers. And the timing makes sense, I think, in the context of the evolution of our profession. Our fiftieth anniversary as a professional association in 2010 provided an occasion to say that our important and groundbreaking work on ethics over the decades had now led us to understand the need to help our colleagues not only respond to ethical dilemmas, but to focus as well on their ethical growth and development as professionals. This represents a sea change for our association and profession. The launching of the AFP Ethics Assessment Inventory (EAI) in 2011 created a forum for both individual and common reflection on our moral aspirations, the sorts of people we hoped to be, and on what I might call our public character as professionals and a profession.

What does this mean? What difference will it make to focus on ethical growth as opposed to solving ethical dilemmas? What is the good life for fundraisers—other than following the rules and doing the right thing?

Good questions—and to answer them we need to go back a few millennia to learn from the ancient philosopher Aristotle, whose entire view of ethics is linked to the concept of the good life.³

Not to get too wonky, but just a little bit of philosophy helps. Aristotle believed that the good life is linked to how we define our telos, our ultimate end. For Aristotle, the proper end of human beings is happiness. But this is not happiness in our usual twenty-first century way of defining it—the stuff we possess, the relationships we enjoy, the success we achieve. Rather, happiness for Aristotle is something that comes from within, it comes from our making choices that promote our true nature. For humans, these choices are linked to our particular powers—powers of intelligence and will, the power to make choices, and develop good habits. The good life, therefore, is directly linked to the development of good, moral habits (what are called virtues) and the turning away from bad habits (what are called vices).

The good life, then—at least according to Aristotle, who many of us think got it right—is about the appropriate ordering of our virtues and the resisting of vice. We achieve the good life when we find harmony and peace, controlling our human appetites and perfecting our human powers through the virtues. Perhaps you've heard of the four principal (or cardinal) virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The good life is defined by our capacities to make choices that order these virtues in our thinking and acting, and to develop the habits of living that lead to good character and order.

There is much more nuance and complexity in Aristotle's ethical philosophy, but I would argue that his vision of the good life is precisely what we are trying to promote for fundraisers as they navigate their ethical lives. We want fundraisers to have the support and resources they need to reflect on their experience, to make choices that bring order to their lives, to develop good and virtuous moral habits, and ultimately to be perceived by others as individuals (and a professional community) seeking to live the good life.

Our good colleague, Albert Anderson, writing in his Ethics for Fundraisers, challenged all of us to find in Aristotle the means to consider how “achieving moral excellence begins as a natural bent to gain happiness mainly by discovering and developing a pattern of actions shaped by self-conscious choices that draw the line between too much and too little, the excessive and deficient…”⁴ Hardly an easy undertaking—having someone give us the right answer seems so much more expedient in the midst of my busy life—but surely one worth aspiring to as our fundraising profession continues to evolve in its important public work to support social causes and values.

So what does the good life look like for fundraisers—other than meeting goals and closing gifts? The research undertaken in the development of the EAI offers us a beginning point to answer this question. As detailed elsewhere, the EAI project began by asking fundraisers this question: “Think of an AFP colleague whom you consider to be highly ethical. Describe the behaviors of that person that led you to this conclusion.”⁵ The 2,528 answers received were sorted and categorized by a group of our peers, and ultimately six responses were recommended as of the highest order. We might look at these six characteristics of ethical fundraisers as our professional virtues.

We claim that: “An ethical fundraiser aspires to: Observe and adhere to the AFP Code of Ethical Principles and Standards (and other relevant laws and regulations); Build personal confidence and public support by being trustworthy in all circumstances; Practice honesty in relationships; Be accountable for professional, organizational and public behavior; Seek to be transparent and forthcoming in all dealings; and, Be courageous in serving the public trust.”

Here then are six virtues, if you will, of the ethical fundraiser. Here is the basis for good, moral habits. Here is the stuff of a good life for fundraisers. We observe the rules. We are trustworthy, honest, accountable, and transparent. And we are courageous. The issues are how we define these virtues, how we respond to the challenges to living this way as professionals, and how we support each other in making the choices and developing the habits that bring order and harmony to our professional lives.

Allow me to take each of these three issues in turn as the foundation for understanding fundraisers and the good life.

Defining the Virtues

First, defining the virtues. I want to commend my colleague, Robert Shoemake from the Center for Ethical Business Cultures at the University of St. Thomas, whose article in this volume provides an overview of how the EAI was developed. Once the six characteristics of ethical fundraisers were identified, Shoemake understood the need to provide an initial definition of those characteristics. In what follows, I borrow from his definitional work⁶ as the starting point for defining the virtues associated with ethical fundraisers. Though Shoemake offered his definitions in alphabetical order, I want to argue that there is a certain rank order to the virtues that is important for understanding their integrated role in defining the good life for fundraisers.

Adherence (or Observance)

This is the baseline for a moral life—following the rules and living as if they matter. Ethical fundraisers act according to the highest standards of the profession, not because they have to but because they know it is the right thing to do. The importance of adherence as a virtue is not so much the legal aspects of observing the AFP Code of Ethical Principles and Standards—as important as such observance is—it is the understanding that the Code and Standards reflect a positive depiction of the sort of profession we aspire to be and the sort of world in which we want to live. In other words, what is important in adherence is not simply that I don't do something because the Code says so. For example, the Code says don't take donor lists from one organization to another when you change jobs. I would go further to say that the virtue of adherence says that I so understand and respect the need for healthy organizations, and I appreciate how transience in jobs can potentially threaten organization well-being, that I would do anything in my power to protect the needs of the organization I am leaving. My career decision does not override the need to honor organizational mission and public trust.

Trustworthy

Trust is at the heart of the relationships that fundraisers create and sustain in support of mission-based organizations. We all know what damage can be done to otherwise good and noble work by breaking trust with the mission, values, and constituencies we serve. There are countless examples in our society of individuals manipulating a relationship for their own benefit, and thereby calling into question the trustworthiness of an entire organization (and occasionally, the entire philanthropic sector). I believe that the concept of trust and trustworthiness has various components: it is about trust in competence (and thus, the need for fundraisers to be technically rigorous); trust in interpersonal relationships (and thus, fundraisers must be particularly careful of relationship boundaries); and trust in organizational integrity (and thus, fundraisers must hold their organizations to a high standard in trustworthy policies and procedures...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• The AFP Fund Development Series
• 2012-2013 AFP Publishing Advisory Committee
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editor
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Fundraisers and the Good Life
• Chapter 2: The Appearance of Impropriety
• Chapter 3: Rights of Donors
• Chapter 4: Public Privacy: An Exploration of Issues of Privacy and Fundraising
• Chapter 5: Tainted Money
• Chapter 6: Compensation
• Chapter 7: Using Donations as Intended
• Chapter 8: Ethical Considerations of Making the Ask
• Chapter 9: Honesty and Full Disclosure
• Chapter 10: Choosing a Leadership Role: A Vision for Action
• Chapter 11: The Context and Development of International Codes and Standards
• Chapter 12: Turning a Profit in the Nonprofit World: The Ethical Responsibilities of Businesses in the Fundraising Sector
• Chapter 13: Ethical Decision Making
• Chapter 14: Between the Real and the Ideal: A Meditation on the Future of Ethical Reflection for Philanthropic Fundraisers
• Chapter 15: Assessing Ethical Fundraising: The Creation and Use of the AFP Ethics Assessment Inventory
• Chapter 16: Regulation, Ethics, and Philanthropy
• Chapter 17: Leadership, Governance, and Giving
• Chapter 18: Both Sides Now: The Ethics of Grantmaking and Grantseeking
• Chapter 19: Ethical Relationships between Grantees and Funders
• Chapter 20: Regulation in the Nonprofit Sector: Symbolic Politics and the Social Construction of Accountability
• Chapter 21: Restoring Public Confidence in the Nonprofit Sector
• Appendix A: Ethical Codes and Standards: Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Code of Ethical Principles
• Appendix B: Websites for International Fundraising Codes of Ethics and Standards
• Appendix C: Statement of Values and Standards for Excellence of the Tucson Symphony Society dba Tucson Symphony Orchestra
• References
• Index