The annual December scramble for donor dollars is now behind us. And as the New Year gets underway, many of us in the nonprofit field are taking time to reflect on our accomplishments and missteps. How did year-end campaigns perform? What lessons were learned? What needs improving?
Importantly, this analysis should include an honest examination of the messages nonprofits market to the public and how those messages affect the way donors measure an organization’s success.
In the fierce competition for funding, nonprofits often rely on vanity metrics to sell their effectiveness — numbers that sound impressive and convince donors to give, but don’t always reflect the real value of a charity’s work.
As more organizations join the vanity-metrics chorus, our collective voice is creating a misleading narrative about what sustainable social change looks like and how it is achieved. Take it from me — as a charity communications director, I’ve been part of the choir for more than a decade.
Charity marketing teams, such as the one I lead at the Fund for Global Human Rights, now operate in a climate in which nonprofits peddling big numbers or seemingly cost-effective and quick outcomes have a monopoly on the donor market. This forces other organizations to compete on their terms by altering the way they talk about their work — and sometimes by altering the work itself — to meet well-intentioned but misinformed donor expectations.
Many nonprofits — including the one I work for — tout how many people, partners, communities, and countries their programming reached during a certain period. Such data may show the breadth of an organization’s work, but conveys little about its efficacy.
Beyond this, nonprofits feel compelled to highlight how little it will cost to achieve an immediate outcome — $5 to feed a child today, $50 to train a farmer, $200 to provide a family with water. All are noble causes, and such metrics provide donors a sense of what’s possible through their giving. But metrics like this also obscure the reality of what it takes to address the underlying causes of poverty and inequality, and perpetuate the belief that impact should be immediate.
Addressing systemic issues and creating sustainable social change takes time. It requires long-term investment in groups tackling the laws, policies, and societal norms that enable and perpetuate problems such as poverty, inequality, corruption, and the climate crisis. At the Fund for Global Human Rights, this looks like supporting domestic workers in Mexico who have spent years fighting to secure minimum wage and social security to lift themselves out of poverty, or funding a collective of LGBTQ+ people working to overturn a colonial-era ban on same-sex relations in India and prevent legally reinforced mistreatment.
Work of this kind can’t always be measured with a simple metric. Producing concrete and quantifiable results may take years, even decades. But when those results do happen, their impact lasts for generations.
Donors hold the power to make or break these efforts with their support. That’s why the narrative nonprofits create about what makes for effective charity matters. Nonprofits must do more to communicate how sustainable change is achieved, and donors must look past metrics to find other ways to assess the effectiveness of an organization.
Show the Steps
They can start by seeking out nonprofits that provide regular updates about the incremental steps they are taking toward that larger, more transformative win — an indication that they have the resolve and know-how to continue the fight even if they aren’t seeing immediate results.
Donors should also look for organizations that are transparent not only about their finances but also about what they are learning. Most charity annual reports include multiple pages on the year’s achievements. But do they highlight what went wrong that year, what that means for the organization, and how they will adapt and improve? The ability to be honest about and learn from changing contexts and occasional mistakes is what makes for stronger organizations — and is a reality for any nonprofit pursuing long-term structural change.
Finally, grant makers and individual donors should ensure that the groups they support are led by, deeply rooted in, or have truly equitable relationships with the communities they serve. Gone are the days of charitable workers swooping in from Europe or North America to “fix things.” Many large international charities built on this colonial model have been forced to fundamentally rethink their approach. Some have made important commitments to change. Others may falsely claim to be shifting power to local communities but have changed very little about how their work is carried out.
Avoid ‘Helpless Victims’
Donors need to see past the façade. They need to look at who leads the organization and where their staff members come from. They should seek out charities that accurately attribute their strategies and wins to the local communities they serve or work closely with, instead of taking credit themselves. Likewise, the most effective nonprofits actively promote a range of diverse voices and showcase the power and ability of the communities they work with, rather than presenting them as helpless victims.
The unfortunate reality is that the nonprofit field is built on big ambitions to change the world, but there are too few resources to go around. My team has mere seconds to capture the attention of a scrolling prospective donor before we lose out on their support entirely. This encourages charities to show donors what we think they want and adds fuel to the false narrative about how sustainable change is achieved.
I’ve been guilty of playing along — both in my work and as a donor. I’ve scoured internal reports looking for stats to pad a public report. I’ve given to causes that sounded impressive on Instagram. But my experience in the nonprofit world has taught me that lasting social change doesn’t happen overnight. It requires long-term investments and constant learning. And to have any hope of lasting, it must be led by the communities affected by the work.
As a communicator, I’m committed to doing more to change the narrative about what sustainable change really looks like and how it is achieved. I hope donors will hold me and every charity to those higher standards.
