My Citizen Generosity Discoveries

I think we can all agree that some people in the world are stubbornly unconcerned about others, but I have found such people to be a relatively small percentage of the population. Instead, I have found with the majority of people in the world is this:

1. While a person’s life experiences and resulting interests in seeing a particular non-profit cause addressed may not yet have been expressed as generous financial donations, that does not mean that latent citizen generosity is not resident in such a person. A classic example of this is the not infrequent arrival of a bequest to a charity where that charity has no record of ever previously receiving a donation from the bequester.

2. Citizen Generosity is released in proportion to an increase in a yet-to-be donor’s knowledge about the work of a charity. They, like the rest of us, don’t know what they don’t know. What you want to hear from a potential or existing donor is, “wow. I didn’t know you guys were achieving all that!” How can they know if you don’t tell them?

3. Most people innately want to help their fellow citizens if they can. To varying degrees, it’s in our DNA.

4. Many of those same people (yet-to-be-donors) don’t know that a philanthropic gift can be the best way to help. That is especially the case when the nonprofit sector often (wrongly) reinforces that the best way to help is to buy a ticket and attend a charity event, such as an auction night or some other fundraising event. They (yet-to-be- donors) don’t know any different because they have not been taught otherwise. The opportunity exists for nonprofits to do the teaching.

5. Asking donors and yet-to-be donors to give is not an uncomfortable process for them unless the nonprofit doing the asking makes it so. The worst mistake a nonprofit can make is to try and persuade a person to donate when that person’s life journey to that point in time has not made them predisposed to do so. That is where most discomfort towards a charity tends to originate for yet-to-be donors. But when a match is found, asking is easy.

6. If a potential donor does not want to give their surplus cash to a particular nonprofit, then that is because there is a mismatch between what that nonprofit told them they are doing in the world and what the potential donor wants to see get done. Again, it does NOT mean they lack latent generosity. More than likely, another good cause is a better match for them. Once a mismatch becomes apparent, a wise nonprofit representative accepts their decision graciously and stops hassling them and trying to manipulate them to act against their will.

7. If a nonprofit continues to bother people who don’t have that good cause in their top preferred charities/causes, then the donor or yet-to-be donor is being disrespected, and they are justified in getting pissed off. If a nonprofit does piss them off, the wise way is to apologise, thank them for their time and leave them alone.

8. For an array of reasons, latent Citizen Generosity is an amount of money that is either withheld or spent by a citizen on other nonessential things instead of being donated to charity. But, importantly, the money is there, waiting for the right match and waiting for a nonprofit representative to ask for it.

9. If a non-profit finds a group of people who are a match for their good cause (i.e. a group who would donate money to that good cause if they had the power of the US President and the money of Bill Gates), then the non-profit is well on its way to cracking generosity.

By uncovering Citizen Generosity through:

 routinely talking with hundreds of generous individual donors over two decades, who have donated millions to good causes,

 undertaking my random “If you Ruled the World” surveys (see the sampler book below for more detail),

 analysing the trends in public spending in the Western world,

 and from my findings in my ten-charity study, I find myself continually returning to this one fundamental finding:

The idea that there is some limited capacity that individuals and organisations have already reached preventing them from giving more money to charities than they currently do is more delusion than truth. For no fault of your own, if you subscribe to this view, you have probably been misinformed.

So, can I encourage you to dive deeper into where Citizen Generosity becomes the citizen generosity transaction in the sampler of my book Cracking Generosity below?