Whether you are enjoying time off or working through the busy year-end, we want to highlight some of our best articles from the past year that you will find relevant to your work in 2021.
Nonprofits typically have one narrative they like to tell about themselves. They use it to inspire constituents and attract donors. When that story fails to get a response from a particular group — say, Black donors — many fundraisers interpret that silence as lack of interest and quickly move on to their reliable, mostly white donors. But this is a faulty interpretation that perpetuates a dangerous myth: the disengagement of Black donors.
Instead, fundraisers should view such silence as a call to action.
Just as many white people are learning that the experiences of Black Americans in this country are starkly different from their own; those of us at nonprofit organizations need to recognize the great variations in how constituents experience our work and our mission. Their interactions with programs, services, performances, and curricula, for example, may not be what we intend. And when we rely on an exclusive narrative to communicate with Black donors, we risk new injury on top of old.
This faulty interpretation is part of how institutions perpetuate the disengagement of Black donors. But it can be remedied by curious and caring fundraisers who reject the myths about Black donors and instead view silence as an opportunity for more effective engagement.
If Black prospective donors are not responding to your solicitations, ask them how to connect differently based on their experiences.
An unforgettable experience underscored this for me. Following the death of a retired faculty member from a university where I was a fundraiser, saddened alumni spread heartwarming stories of a beloved mentor who changed lives. Those stories came from white alumni.
At about the same time, I received a call from an African American donor who was establishing a scholarship. She was a successful graduate with an impressive leadership position and a long record of achievement. I estimated that she was on campus during the deceased professor’s tenure and informed her of his passing. (To protect the identities of the people I cite, I have modified a few details.)
She immediately became silent. I asked if she was OK. She said, “I don’t like hearing about anyone dying, but he was a racist S.O.B. and made life a living hell for me and many other Black students.”
I was caught off guard, given others’ mournful outpourings, but I understood that their experience was not hers. Her story was different. And both narratives could exist and be true simultaneously, however unfortunate. She required engagement that reflected her story rather than someone else’s.
The philanthropic myth that Black people don’t give is an extension of the lie that built this country — that Black people are inferior to white people and therefore can be mistreated, even ignored. The truth is that Black people give generously. They may not always give in ways that are visible in the larger white world of philanthropy. But they give nonetheless and always have. Indeed, their survival throughout American history has depended in large part on their own resistance and generosity.
Lessons From History
As a philanthropy researcher, I’ve visited archives to study the history of giving by Black people. While the archives of white donors such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller are easy to access, the situation tends to be different for Black givers. Instead, one encounters what Black women’s historians and others have called the “silences” of the archives. The silences show up when newspapers and other primary historical sources created by and reflecting the perspectives of white people are used to document Black lives. The picture such sources paint is skewed and ill equipped to bring Black life into focus. But they are assumed accurate because they are mainstream.
I encountered this phenomenon while writing my new book, Madam C.J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving: Black Women’s Philanthropy During Jim Crow. Walker, portrayed by Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer in the 2020 Netflix series Self Made, was a Black beauty-products entrepreneur and millionaire who attained unlikely wealth and status in the early1900s at the height of Jim Crow-era racism and sexism. Black newspapers provided regular, detailed coverage of her comings and goings and her philanthropic impact on people struggling under segregation.
White newspapers largely ignored her, however, until they couldn’t: The New York Times Magazine ran a story about her in 1917 after she built a $250,000, 34-room mansion along the Hudson River in an all-white New York neighborhood close to Rockefeller’s residence. But if I had relied solely on white newspapers to tell Walker’s story, there would be no book about the generosity of this remarkable woman and her approach to giving, which differed greatly from her contemporaries such as Carnegie and Olivia Sage, known for donating millions to higher education.
Walker’s experience is similar to that of Black donors today. How often do we in philanthropy pay attention to Black donors only after they surprise us? Recent examples include last year’s $20 million commitment to Princeton University from Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano and Frank and Laura Day Baker’s recent $1 million gift to Spelman College.
What if more nonprofits actively took interest in Black donors before such headlines, cultivated relationships, and became the vehicles through which the donors surprised others? This would require nonprofits to engage Black donors on the donors’ own terms, not the dominant terms in philanthropy modeled after white high-net-worth donors.
Valuing Black Donors
Like those skewed archives and newspapers, nonprofits tend to create one branded story about how they affect lives and communities. We wrongly expect all constituents to fall in line with that story and too often allow those who don’t, those whose experience and expectations are different, to simply fall away. More often than not, those branded stories tend to be exclusive rather than inclusive when it comes to Black donors.
We need to take another path. If Black women constituents, for instance, aren’t attending your “women’s philanthropy” programming, ask yourself why and then ask them why. If Black prospective donors are not responding to your solicitations, ask them how to connect differently based on their experiences with your organization.
Research by Noah Drezner, professor of higher education at Teachers College, Columbia University and founding editor of Philanthropy & Education, shows that donors of color in higher education are more responsive to solicitations that reflect their own social identities and experiences. For instance, he found that Black alumni donors were more likely to respond and give higher amounts to solicitations that focused on Black students and other students of color at their alma maters.
If you’re using a single mainstream narrative about your organization with your Black donors, your solicitations may be doomed before you even pick up the phone, hit the send button, or drop them in the mail. If you really value Black donors, take the time to talk to them individually about their perceptions of your organization and what would make them comfortable giving.
This is good news for fundraisers. We don’t have to wait for a major institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion effort to begin making these changes. While structural change is essential, we have the power now to engage Black donors in ways that respect their experiences and interests. Fundraisers decide who gets a visit and who doesn’t. They determine who gets called and who doesn’t. They choose who gets an event invitation and who doesn’t. And they decide who makes the prospective donor list and who doesn’t.
It’s time to use this power of choice to extend equal opportunity to your Black donors; to recognize that their silence may be telling a completely different story about their lack of engagement. Through these small but powerful actions, we can help create the change that this larger moment of racial reckoning is challenging all of us to build.