What Barbie Taught Me About Fundraising |
Jul 22, 2009 |
A former boss once instructed all 20 of us in the development department to color a sheet she had copied from a Barbie coloring book. She then posted these, Andy-Warhol-style in the hallway of our development office.
In the scene, Barbie is daydreaming of what she will be when she grows up and guesses that a career as a fundraiser might be fun and easy—lots of fancy charity dinners to attend, friends to make, and all for a good cause!
(It was my unfortunate task to explain to our advertising agency that The Boss wanted all agency employees who worked on our account to, um, color. They were puzzled until they remembered they billed us $89 an hour to work on our account, so they promptly submitted a dozen colored sheets and a bill for $2,300.)
The Boss’s point (I’m guessing here; this was never entirely explained to us worker bees) was that, unlike Barbie’s conception, we were professionals of rigorous training and fervent commitment who were solemnly conducting God’s work to help the less fortunate.
However, if I’m honest, I saw more than a few Barbies (and Kens) parade through that organization and the others I’ve worked for since. You’ve seen them too, the well-dressed, glamorous, good-looking, smooth-talking people who are supposed to bring lots of fabulous and influential people with them to whatever fundraising job they take. And they take lots of (high-paying) jobs over their careers, some statistics suggesting that the average length of employment for a professional fundraiser is just 18 months.
Why has an entire industry of “development professionals” been built on the Barbie/Ken model? Because most nonprofit organizational structures require it. If the task is to separate checks from wallets, by whatever means necessary, then it doesn’t really matter if Barbie has nothing going on upstairs—in fact, her plastic personality and empty head may be a benefit.
Unfortunately—tragically-- the people who come to my Mission Increase Foundation fundraising workshops typically don’t believe that they can “do fundraising” because they don’t identify with Barbie. They don’t look the part, they don’t have any rich or influential friends, and furthermore, they wouldn’t choose to be Barbie even if they could.
But, and here’s the really great news, if your nonprofit organization structures or restructures itself in a way that encourages champions to grow in relation to the shared cause of the ministry, then the primary development task becomes one of discipleship.
Think about that for a second. The primary task of the development professional in a champion discipleship model becomes one of coaching and teaching people into places of maturity relative to your shared cause. This means that we need development officers with entirely different makeups and skillsets, and Barbie goes back where she belongs, up on the shelf.
