Fund-Raising and Program Goals Often Clash, Say Charity Officials

As director of development at the Public Justice Center, Jennifer Pelton seeks to inspire donors with stories of people whose lives have been changed by the Baltimore legal-advocacy group. At the same time, the charity’s lawyers must remain sensitive to the needs and privacy concerns of the Maryland families they represent in cases aimed at protecting the rights of poor people.

Those two goals are occasionally at odds. The fund-raising appeals that tend to bring in the most money—those that feature detailed accounts of real people—at first made lawyers and other program staff members nervous about the confidentiality of their clients and worried that the broader tale of the group’s work to change the legal system isn’t getting told.

Charity officials say that kind of tension between fund raisers and the people who carry out programs is a fact of life at nonprofit groups.

International aid workers sometimes feel that marketing appeals objectify the people they serve or spread misinformation that fighting poverty is simple.

Artistic directors may want to give highest priority to performances that can bring the most critical acclaim, while arts-group fund raisers may prefer to focus on those that can attract bigger audiences and more donors.

Doctors can clash with hospital fund raisers over whether to ask a patient for a gift or when to focus on raising money for easy-to-sell pediatric care as opposed to research that may be harder to pitch to donors.

Accepting earmarked gifts, admitting to donors that a program isn’t working, allowing a journalist to interview a charity’s clients: Such situations can all produce conflicts between fund raisers and program staff members.

That inevitable friction is not always resolved as smoothly as at the Public Justice Center, where Ms. Pelton has worked with the lawyers to assure them that clients’ stories can be shared in a way that makes the clients feel empowered, not taken advantage of. Some charity officials say fund-raising strategies that win big sums from donors can actually harm a nonprofit group’s work.

Robert Carter, vice chairman at Changing Our World, a New York firm that provides fund raising and other advice to charities, calls the dynamic a “constant tension.” But, he adds, “people don’t like to talk about it because it can feel like airing dirty laundry.”

Questionable Gifts

Even the best-run charities come across situations in which a fund raiser’s goals are misaligned with the people who run programs. Getting those goals in sync takes communication, creativity, and a sense of shared goals, say experts.

For instance, going after specific grants and gifts can boost a fund raiser’s numbers—but it might put program staff members in a bind.

Sherilyn Adams, executive director of Larkin Street Youth Services, in San Francisco, says that on more than one occasion, a fund raiser has approached her with what seems like happy news: A donor has offered to pay for a new sports program for the runaway youths in the charity’s care. But Ms. Adams has to temper the fund raiser’s enthusiasm, because it doesn’t make sense for the staff members who work directly with the youths to start new programs devoted to specific sports.

But charities don’t always say “no” to questionable gifts—and they often pay the consequences. For example, an international aid group decided to work with a wealthy donor who wanted to pay for a soccer field, even though the project didn’t fit into the charity’s work. Fund raisers hoped, however, that the gift would be the first of many, according to an employee of the group who did not want to be identified because she did not feel comfortable speaking on behalf of her organization.

Buying land for the field proved difficult, the donor got angry, and the project collapsed—but not before it sucked up many staff members’ time. “We should have said no from the beginning,” says the employee. “I think a lot of major- and planned-giving officers don’t understand enough about how programs work and might not see the logic in someone saying, That doesn’t make sense.”

Nonprofit employees say that holding regular meetings between program staff members and fund raisers, and making sure that everyone knows what the charity’s fund-raising and program priorities are for the coming year, can help avoid such trouble.

Connecting to Recipients

Fund-raising efforts that give donors the sense of a direct connection to the people their money is helping can also make charities’ work to serve those people more difficult.

For example, international charities often encourage donors to “sponsor” a child, but in reality many of them direct contributions to the community where a child lives, not to any specific child. Nonetheless that earmarked support can still tie aid workers’ hands, forcing them to send aid only to particular villages even if more urgent needs, such as natural disasters, arise in nearby areas.

Also, maintaining communications between donors and the children they sponsor can add more work for people who run a program overseas. It isn’t necessarily the best use of aid groups’ time to take photographs of children, encourage them to write letters to their sponsors, and process those letters, nonprofit workers say.

But fund-raising appeals that give the impression of a direct link between donor and recipient are proliferating because they are so successful.

At a time when many people are skeptical about how their donations will be used, fund-raising appeals that ask donors to “buy” a goat for a family in Senegal or “lend” money to a beekeeper in Malaysia are all the rage. Even though the fine print may say that a gift is “symbolic” or that the money may be used where it’s most needed, many donors probably still believe that their money goes to buy exactly what they select as a charitable gift.

“The worry is that people hear about certain things, certain types of approaches that speak to a little bit of a simplistic remedy, and it could lead people to believe that poverty can be eradicated through simple gifts alone,” says Michael Delaney, director of humanitarian response at Oxfam America, in Boston.

Sharing stories about people served by a charity can also create a tug-of-war. Years ago, Larkin Street Youth Services agreed to let a reporter from a local newspaper interview one of its young clients because it felt the article would raise awareness about how common homelessness was among young people who had been in foster care.

The story got that point across—but it also revealed details about past abuses in the client’s life that angered that person’s relatives. Now, Ms. Adams says, the charity has many steps in place for approval of such requests, with fund raisers and marketing and program staff members working closely together to determine when to take a young person’s story before donors and the public.

Marketing materials can pose other challenges, too. Lauren Hines, now the development director at the Council for Court Excellence, in Washington, recalls a time when the artistic director of a small theater where she worked in Columbus, Ohio, got so angry at a photograph the board had decided to use for a marketing material that he threw the image across the room. The artistic director felt that the dancers in the photograph looked sloppy and unprofessional, but the board liked how arresting the image was and felt it could draw a bigger audience.

The Numbers Game

Another way that charities can give donors the wrong impression about their work, some program staff members say, is by putting a price tag on saving a life or pumping water to a village.

Ned Breslin, chief executive of Water for People, in Denver, says his group has moved away from touting simple numbers. During his years working on water projects in southern Africa, he says, he always worried—but was never sure—that programs in other parts of the world got the green light to expand more quickly because their cost-per-project numbers were lower than where he worked.

Yet short tag lines about how much can be done with tiny donations do jump out to donors.

Some groups are trying to find a middle ground. Charity: Water, a New York group that raises money for water projects, including Mr. Breslin’s, has long told donors that it costs $20 to provide clean drinking water to one person for 20 years. That $20 figure is the average of what it costs in the areas of the developing world where the group works, says Scott Harrison, the charity’s founder. “We lead with a simple and true story that has integrity and allow people to discover the complexity of our work as they have time and interest,” he says.

But Charity: Water recently backed off the claim about the 20-year time line, because it felt it couldn’t guarantee that the projects would last that long.

“It was an integrity thing for us,” says Mr. Harrison. He says that while other water groups tell donors that a $10 gift can provide clean drinking water, he’d be more likely to increase the $20 rather than stop supporting water projects that raised the average cost.

His group also tells donors when projects don’t work. Every year, the charity provides a live Webcast of the drilling of a well; last year, the drilling failed to hit water.

Many nonprofit workers say they believe donors are more open to hearing about the realities of nonprofit work—and aren’t necessarily turned off by failure. But it’s also up to charity fund raisers to help donors develop that appetite.

At the same time, program employees need to recognize the pressures that face fund raisers and help them in every way they can, nonprofit experts say.

At the Public Justice Center, Ms. Pelton says she has struck a good balance. The Baltimore charity’s more recent donor appeals feature the faces and stories of people like Earline Augustus-El, whom the charity represented in a case that helped end delays for people in Maryland who’d applied for emergency aid.

The fall mailing with Ms. Augustus-El’s story brought in at least $1,200 more than the charity’s autumn solicitations in either of the previous two years, which featured more-general descriptions of the charity’s work. That was extra money that the Public Justice Center could put back into serving others like Ms. Augustus-El.

BALANCING FUND RAISING AND PROGRAM PRIORITIES: TIPS FROM EXPERTS

• Ask program staff members to review fund-raising materials.

• Encourage fund raisers to read news and blogs about the cause for which they are raising money.

• Involve both fund raisers and program workers in discussions about the charity’s planning and priorities.