Fundraising more, helping less?

By Vuk Vukovic

Where am I coming from? 

Whenever I speak with human service nonprofits, I ask them two questions:

• When you successfully fundraise, how many people in need use your services?
• When you successfully fundraise, how many people in need avoid your services?

Most can answer the first question. So far, none has answered the second. The goal of my PhD is to help them find the answer.

What appeals to donors does not necessarily appeal to people in need

Nonprofits primarily serve two stakeholder groups: donors, who fund their services, and people in need, who are expected to use them. Academic literature has offered a great deal of insight into what makes nonprofits appealing to donors, but much less into what makes them appealing — or, more importantly, unappealing — to people in need. This imbalance seems to rest on the assumption that once resources are mobilized and services are made available, people in need will automatically use them.

Yet some researchers challenge this donor-centric research and argue that even when people have needs they often do not use nonprofit services to meet them [1] [2].  Over the past two decades, this line of research has demonstrated that while receiving nonprofit assistance brings benefits (hence the common use of the term beneficiaries), it can also involve significant logistical burdens, moral dilemmas, and psychological costs [3] that may discourage people in need from using nonprofit services (hence the increasing critique of the term beneficiaries).

I position myself between these two lines of research. Making nonprofit services more appealing to people in need is the ultimate goal. At the same time, one might argue that these services can become available only if they first appeal to the donors who fund them. The logic seems straightforward: if donors do not provide sufficient funding, there is little basis for encouraging people in need to use nonprofit services. But what if, precisely because nonprofits appeal to donors, they become unappealing to people they seek to serve?

Consider, for example, the well-established finding that a single, vividly identified victim attracts more support than a much larger group of unidentified people – a phenomenon described as psychic numbing [4], compassion fade effect [5] and identifiable victim effect [6]. This finding suggests that the more nonprofits highlight the identity of those in need, the more appealing they are to donors. But how does such an effective fundraising approach affect the people it is meant to help? Evidence suggests that when people in need are vividly depicted and identified, they often feel, to say the least, uncomfortable [7] [8]. However, whether these negative feelings translate into negative behaviors, such as avoiding nonprofit services, has not yet been systematically investigated. This is the question I aim to explore in my PhD.

Research with, not about, practitioners

Investigating this question without partners from the nonprofit sector does not make much sense. Fortunately, my early engagement with ERNOP enabled me to start building partnerships between academia and practice. As a practitioner, attending the ERNOP conference helped me begin my PhD. Now, as a doctoral researcher, ERNOP helps connect me with nonprofits that may benefit from my research.

I try to contribute to that effort myself. So far, I have published two research notes that communicate academic research to a practitioner audience [5] [11]. I have also used my network to help expand ERNOP’s panel of philanthropy experts [12]. And whenever I attend conferences, I publish recommendations on how sessions can be facilitated in ways that foster real dialogue across sectors, rather than parallel monologues [13]. It is normal for academia and practice to speak in different dialects, but they should still speak the same language.

So let me use this opportunity to extend the same invitation to you: if you find this blog relevant to your work, please reach out to me. You may also want to explore the work of my colleague Tayyeb Hadi and my supervisors Tine De Bock, Irene Roozen, and Siegfried Dewitte.

Vuk Vukovic is a Doctoral Researcher at KU Leuven with a record of 15+ publications on philanthropy. He holds a master’s degree from Central European University and has worked as a researcher at Ipsos and Catalyst Balkans. He often shows sings of tsundoku syndrome: buying more books than he manages to read.