Working with nonprofit professionals like you, our mission is to grow the human capacity to love. And we will do so by employing the latest ideas from the science of philanthropic psychology or Phil Psych®.
So – you care for your donors and are nicely donor centric. You probably have all the right pronouns in your communications and you celebrate donor successes rather than organizational successes. You’ve also learned that satisfaction, commitment and trust are at the core of supporter relationships and you may even have started to employ these measures to assess the quality of your fundraising.
But is there more to learn about caring for the people who love you, love what you do and share a vision for how the world could be a better place? Could you be having a more profound impact on them and their sense of who they are, when you interact and communicate?
Fundamentally we believe that fundraising has become too focused on money. Witness the metrics that Boards use to assess its performance and the criteria against which we are routinely evaluated for our work. We believe the role of fundraising should be to steward the love that is at the core of philanthropy and specifically, to grow the human capacity to love others as well as themselves. Fundraising viewed through that lens is practiced and experienced very differently and can revolutionize the impact we have on both donors and those they help.
Philanthropic psychology is NOT behavioural economics. The practitioners of behavioural economics care about different things from us. They want to compel or nudge individuals to take actions. Actions a third party believes are good for them or more usually actions that are deemed good for an organization. They care little for how those actions might make people feel or how they might contribute to (or detract from) an individual’s sense of wellbeing.
Philanthropic psychology is different. It begins and ends with the individual. It focuses on who they are as a person and creating loving experiences that will feel genuinely warm to them. There are an abundance of ways in which we could choose to invest our time and money, but investing it in the love of others speaks uniquely to who someone is. We should be taking the time to celebrate those identities and to grow that love.
It turns out that caring for donors in this way can typically DOUBLE GIVING, but that’s only part of our motivation. Caring for people and stewarding their capacity to love is at the core of what we do and ultimately it’s the only way as a society that we will both grow philanthropy AND sustain it.
Interested?
Why not join a select group of fundraisers who will forever change the way that fundraising will be practiced?
Get in touch today.
