Fundraising Best Practices, Meet Russell Brand.

Can we break through the anxiety of self-image in our solicitation letters?

It’s fundraising season. Requests for donations repeat themselves in twenty different ways in our mailboxes. “Save a life today.” “Give the gift that counts.” And leaders of service-based non-profit organizations around the world wonder if they will raise the funds needed to continue to live out their visions and missions.

As one of those leaders, this season fills me with urgency and dread. We must make the budget goals, and we’re not sure how, or if, it will happen. This is enough to cause a bit of anxiety, but the source of my uneasiness may be something slightly deeper.

Each year in November, I inevitably end up with a blank piece of paper on which I am supposed to express what my organization believes, what we have been doing about that belief, the immense success we are having with those activities, and our urgent and ongoing need for your support.

There are books and workshops that teach the best practices of fundraising letters. Is the problem clear? How will a donation solve that problem? Is it chatty and personal? Does it say thank you? Is there an interesting P.S.? Is there a clear “ask” in the P.P.S.? Is the signature scanned in blue pen to look authentic?

Sometimes I wonder if it would be more “clear,” “chatty,” and “authentic” to go sit outside the mall with a simple sign, a smile, and a jar for these sixty days.

Staring at my blank piece of paper today, I chuckled at the idea of heading to the streets with my jar. But I also began considering more deeply the source of my ongoing anxiety around fundraising.

In the echoing silence of this consideration, a memory from the video of comedian Russell Brand being interviewed by talk show host Jeremy Paxman came to mind. You may have seen it—the video went viral a couple weeks ago. Russell Brand is apparently starting a revolution by getting spiritual, political, and entertaining all at once (he recently edited an issue of the New Statesman). There is much to discuss of his revolution, but what specifically came to mind in this context was how the interview began. Jeremy Paxman says with unedited scorn, “Russell, who are you to edit a political magazine?”

Brand handled himself well despite the attack, which in addition to the opening question included a moment when Paxman calls Brand a “trivial man.” Now here’s how the dots of my thinking connect: I believe the fear of the fundraising letter is really about that inner “Paxman-like” voice that says, “Who are you to do what you do and ask for the money needed to do it?” This voice often goes on, like Paxman did, to say, “What’s your plan? It’ll never be enough… You’ll never change the world… People will see that you’re not enough… You’re really quite trivial.”

This voice of shame, which comes from both within and outside of us, cripples us; shuts down the voice of truth and authenticity; makes us seek comfort in simple, repetitive, and often meaningless messages; forces us into traditional frameworks and business-as-usual systems; and sometimes even convinces us to embellish the facts or manipulate emotion with our words and actions.

When our work is a representation of what we believe, it can be immensely vulnerable to share it freely and, in doing so, to enter into dialogue with the world. We are easily rendered voiceless if we don’t build our own inner platforms of worthiness on which to stand. This time of year is full of triggers for us. As we too often measure worth in capitalist society through money, the success or failure of the end-of-year appeal letter becomes tied up in an odd type of personal identity affirmation or rejection. This is why we play it safe. This is why we edit back our dreams or we don’t talk of our struggles, insecurities, and failures. This may even be why civil society gets stuck and why non-profit organizations mimic the very systems they are trying to change.

We cast ourselves and others into roles that are safe, simple, and fit in dominant cultural frameworks so that we have the best chance possible of having our beliefs and identities affirmed. While this is a normal pattern, it causes us pain. Not only is there pain to us in limiting our identities in this way, there is a more weighty bad karma to introducing this kind of attachment to self-image in our service. As Ram Dass and Paul Gorman put it in their book How Can I Help?, when identity gets tied up in service, we are “buying into, even juicing up, precisely what people who are suffering want to be rid of: limitation, dependency, helplessness, separateness.”

If, in our letters, we write ourselves and others into identity prisons (helper, helped, supplicant, philanthropist, etc) in order to get the gifts, all of us—from the people writing to the people reading to those seeking services—may end up feeling lonely, separate, fragmented, and voiceless. There has got to be a better way.

First, I think we need to accept fully that organizations, institutions, and systems don’t write letters, people do. To aspire to be “clear,” “chatty,” and “authentic” as the best practices say, we must really know our own true voices and let them be heard as ours. It is all too easy to hide behind the systems and structures we’ve created. It is more comfortable to place the “ownership” of voice on an organization than it is to grapple with finding our own voices. And, of course, voices will inevitably change over time, which from the lens of authenticity will require we personally and professionally acknowledge our own evolution and fully engage in the journey of our own beings.

Second, I think we’ve watered down what it really means to be in relationship with others. Perhaps due to or as a result of our attachment to identity, role, or self-image, our organizational relationships often become transactional, and therefore profoundly isolating. When we work to cultivate authentic relationship, we can see and accept one another deeply, wholly, and completely as fellow human beings; we may understand more deeply how we are all just making our way through this world of ideas, causes, concerns, and communities; and we will realize the interdependence of all life is a fundamental truth out of which our words and actions can grow and flourish if we let them.

Grappling with voice and relationship is profoundly difficult work at times. It requires tending to our own spiritual development by tackling the big questions of identity, belief, belonging, and purpose. It is not easily done in the few hours allotted to writing our solicitation letters, but the practice can most certainly begin in that time.

Russell Brand concluded his interview by emotionally asserting his right to engage in political discourse despite his identity as an actor and his decision not to vote. I’ll conclude by appealing each of you to assert your rights. If by dropping our attachment to self-image, we can leverage voice and relationship to unlock the sacred freedom and connection that helps make the world a better place, why wouldn’t we try? If that kind of freedom and connection is the birthright of humanity, let’s take the steps to reveal it within and among us. What is getting in the way?

Personally, I can only hope that these questions will lead me to uncover and share my authentic voice this year while also engaging the voices of others more deeply and openly. I also hope I am inspired and changed in the process. For, this is the praxis of freedom and connection in community. Thank you.