In philanthropic fundraising, our ethical guidelines define us. They are the roadmap of our profession. They exist to guide our actions in our everyday activities. They tell us how to treat our donors, how to interact with the public and how to safeguard the best interests of our organizations and the communities we serve.
Most charities in Canada depend on fundraising to fund their operations and their missions. Without fundraising revenue, delivering on our missions becomes impossible. Fundraising is a most unique endeavour in the business environment. The charitable sector is the only sector of the economy where revenue is received not in exchange for goods or direct services but rather in exchange for a promise. There is nothing transactional in securing gifts from donors for they receive no tangible goods in return. Rather, our donors receive the promise of future good work in our communities. Whether it’s feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, investing in better health care or saving species and natural habitat, all we offer our donors is that undertaking of future good work. Sometimes that is weeks or months into the future, and occasionally it takes years before we deliver on our promises.
So what makes reasonable, savvy people give us their hard earned cash if there is typically no immediate tangible return to their philanthropy? In one word, TRUST! They take a leap of faith in handing over their gifts to our organizations. This trust is built over years and decades of ethical hard work. It is based on the credibility we generate in our communities by delivering on our promises. It is augmented by professional fundraisers operating ethically in designating donations to specific projects, entering gift agreements with donors in good faith and stewarding gifts in a transparent way.
Our profession exists and thrives because of this trust. It is the most crucial ingredient in our business model. One would think that we would be most reluctant to tamper with this recipe and yet in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis we hear many voices suggesting and calling for actions that would do exactly that. How else can we interpret calls for spending down endowments? Or calling for the removal of restrictions that limit charities to only providing funds to qualified donees?
Such misguided positions risk the charitable model as we know it because they challenge the very trust and credibility on which every philanthropic donation depends. Disregarding endowment agreements and/or redirecting donor designated funds tells donors that any agreement they make with a charity may not stand the test of time. There are superbly good reasons why certain practices and regulations exist in our sector. Doing away with the qualified donee provisions creates potentially conflicts of interest that the sector might well not survive in the long run. Any short term benefits such actions may give us must be weighted against the long term good of the sector and, most importantly, the communities we all serve. This crisis should not become an excuse for a “the end justifies the means” attitude by the charitable sector.
This pandemic, as serious and challenging as it is, shall sooner or later pass. We must make sure that there is a credible, trusted charitable sector to continue to deal with the problems we are mandated to solve when we return to more normal times. Otherwise we may find that in our haste to react to this crisis we may have destroyed that which took decades to build, namely our credibility and eventually our sector.
Dino Sophocleous has over 25 years of experience as a professional fundraiser and senior executive in the charitable sector. He has served with small, community-based organizations and large regional and national charities. He sits on the AFP Canada Board and in 2021 authored the ethics chapter in the second edition of Excellence in Fundraising in Canada. He is the President & CEO of Hospitals of Regina Foundation, and holds a CFRE and a BA (Specialized Honours) in Economics from York University. He can be contacted at Dino.Sophocleous@hrf.sk.ca
Cover photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash
