My Citizen Generosity Discoveries

I think we can all agree that some people in the world are stubbornly unconcerned about others, but in my experience they are a relatively small percentage of the population. Instead, I have found that:

1. While a person’s interest in seeing a particular nonprofit cause addressed may not yet have been expressed through 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 bequestor.

2. Citizen generosity is released in proportion to a potential donor’s knowledge about the work of a charity. Yet-to-be donors don’t know what they don’t know. But then, how can they know if you don’t tell them?

3. Most people innately want to help their fellow citizens if they can.

4. Many of those same people (yet-to-be-donors) don’t know that a philanthropic gift can be the best way to help. This is especially the case when the nonprofit sector wrongly reinforces the idea that the best way to help is to buy a ticket to yet another charity event. The 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, that is because there is a mismatch between what that nonprofit told them it is doing in the world and what the potential donor wants to see get done. 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 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 angry. If a nonprofit representative does annoy them, their best next step 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 non-essential 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 nonprofit finds a group of people who are a match for its good cause, then that nonprofit is well on its way to cracking generosity.

By:

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

 undertaking my random “If you Ruled the World” surveys

 analysing the trends in public spending in New Zealand and across the Western world

 analysing the findings of my ten-charity study

…I have become convinced that:

The idea 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. If you subscribe to this view, you have probably been misinformed.