History and Inspiration: "Red Rosa" by Kate Evans

I end up reading a fair number of graphic novels. The thing is that I normally just grab them from the library because I hate paying what is a higher price for a book that I will read much faster than a normal book. It makes my dollar per entertainment hour ratio increase and I’m sure that’s how most normal humans judge if they should buy a book. I am, however, glad that I purchased this book, because I can support my favorite radical publisher (Sorry, Haymarket) and I have a book I can pass along to like-minded friends – a book that most likely would not have been in my library anyways.

And it’s a good book. Before reading Red Rosa, I was only vaguely aware of her as the writer of Reform or Revolution and the General Strike. I also knew that she was a martyr to the cause of worldwide socialism. What I didn’t realize was that she had to fight her own party to not just go along with the bourgeois parties, like for example voting  to a man (and they were all men) for entry into WWI,  and instead work towards the last lines in the manifesto – “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” It is these lines that illuminated and drove her life from a precocious young woman in Poland to a death before her time.  Well worth reading for both history and inspiration.

A T-Junction of the Soul: Mohamed El-Erian's "The Only Game in Town"

I picked up this book because of the bright yellow and black cover. What can I say, I’m superficial. And it had some good blurbs on the back. Hadn’t read the author before, but I thought I’d take a chance when finally getting to the flap-text.

I was finishing it up in bed last night, and my wife was asking about it, and the best I could do to recommend it was that I wanted to finish it. I found it a slog mostly, but it was interesting enough to want to engage with all the way through. The author has two key points he kept hammering. One is that the potential for the future has turned from a normal to a bimodal distribution – the status quo will no longer have the chance to be the status quo. This leads to the other point, the T-Junction, where we will no longer get to muddle along because we are out of options. We can’t just drift on monetary policy, but we will have to make some choices. The gist is that we should follow the author’s prescriptions to get to the more desirable hump on the bimodal distribution by taking the correct turn. The second half just drags and the best thing I can say is that I did finish it, but I don’t recommend it. The author is obviously smart, but ultimately his argument lacks because of a missing story-telling verve.

Fundraising in the Digital Age

I was thinking about the telephone campaigns, and the one thing that really struck me was that no one in my generation really uses their phones. The irony is that we carry around these devices that are small computers that dwarf the power of those a generation ago - and we still call them phones but the voice communication part is just a small forgotten part of the phone’s functionality. So that made me think of how this fits into the philanthropic environment. I read that over 80% of those 35 and under prefer texts to phones (and I bet a lot of the 20% is in the older part of the generation - I just barely fit under the cut-off and if I text it is done awkwardly). The benefit of the phone is that you have someone on the spot. There’s a certain immediacy to it, and thankfully a lot of people are too nice to say “No”.

There have been some campaigns where there have been text components. I’m remembering after the Haitian earthquake where people could text to the red cross and the money would come out of their bill. I think some agencies tried to get on that bandwagon, but that would seem to cultivate one time donors who were responsive to a tragedy - not something that is really going to grow your donor base. Our book, so far, doesn’t address the future of fundraising. I’m not sure what it is though, since texts and emails are so easy to dismiss. Is it just sending more out there in the world and accepting a lower response rate? I don’t know.

The Ethics of Your List

Is it ethical to pay to acquire personal and/or mailing information (data mining) for potential donors? What what conditions should an organization pay or not pay to acquire such information?

I subscribe to a magazine that has a disclaimer saying “from time to time we will share your address with like-minded organizations” or something of the sort. Other places will say that they will never share your information with third parties.  I’m at the leading edge of the generation that grew up with computers in the house -- though we didn’t have the internet in my house until I was in high school. I think that our generation is accepting of the idea that we are being tracked. This is most likely online, where cookies attach to your browser and then the ads follow you around, trying to sell you something you were browsing for earlier in the week. We are such that when Snowden came forward with information about the government tracking us, for a large part there was a sigh of “so, what?”, because  tracking is just part of the system.

Thinking on this question, my first reaction was “Why wouldn’t it be ethical?”. After all, virtually no large-scale, sophisticated direct mail program is possible without the use of rented lists”. Given the number involved, between a 1-2% success rate, you need a lot of addresses, and I don’t know how you would go about getting those unless you had access to a third party. The fact that these third parties have information about your potential donors that goes deeper than their address is a huge strength for making your potential solicitation more successful. If I’m trying to raise money for aid to landmine victims in east asia, I’m going to strike all the people from my list who work at Acme Landmine Company.

It’s hard for me to see where it would be unethical. A piece of mail isn’t intrusive. If it doesn’t interest me I’ll throw it away. The only thing I could see is if your list assumes something about a person that might be embarrassing or damaging to the person receiving it. There was the much talked about incident where Target was able to identify pregnant women through their buying patterns, and they sent coupons to a teenage girl - outing her pregnancy to her family when they called to complain to the company. I just don’t see most nonprofits being at that level, so there seem very few ethical barriers to me.

Dani Rodrik's "Economics Rules": Too Narrow

I grabbed this book because it was making a minor stir in the blog-o-sphere.

It was kind of a let down. Rodrik is a bit of a rebel when it comes to economics discourse (once wrote a book doubting fully the benefits of globalization *fainting couch). But even then the options that he looks at seem narrowly circumscribed - mostly macro from new Keynesian to new classical! To his credit, Marx raises his head, if only to be dismissed.

What I really like is the framing of the book as looking at models, and how they are useful and how they are not as necessary simplifications of the real world - he even cites one of my favorite Jorge Borges stories to tell about the necessity of simplification. He also looks at the fox / hedgehog divide, in that true knowledge is knowing what model to use when looking at the explanation of a past event, and not over reliance on a strong theory that will too often lead you astray.

The big problem for me was that the model using is almost all backwards looking. If you know what happened and you can pick the right model you’re golden, but he discounts being able to know the future. Maybe I missed something, but isn’t a large part of trying to understand the past so that you can more accurately predict the future? If there is no ultimately one correct model and they do grow horizontally (a multiplicity) instead of replacing dead models as he calls it vertically, are we doomed to be having the same arguments generation after generation only with more powerful computers and fancier math?

The ACLU's Blind Spot

One of the things that have struck me as I was looking into the ACLU was that it does frame itself as the “guardian of liberty,” protecting constitutional rights, the organization is often perceived as a left-wing organization. One of my earliest political memories was the election of 1988, where the Democratic Governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, was running for president against the sitting vice president, George Bush in a time where you did not have to specify which George Bush anyone was talking about. Now, aside from the visual rhetoric of Dukakis looking silly in his tank commander helmet and the Willie Horton soft on crime advertisements, one of the attacks that stuck was that Dukakis was a "card-carrying member of the ACLU" (qtd in “Election”). In this exchange, it was the affiliation with the ACLU that was supposed to show Dukakis’s liberalness, and even his un-Americanness, but I did not really understand what was going on. I ended up growing up to be very liberal, but at the time I was young, and living in a military household in a military community, so much of what I heard was supportive of conservatism and militarism in a late- cold war atmosphere. Even then, I never understood just how these two ideas were related – that the ACLU was a liberal organization. 

            The organization is cognizant of this critique. In their own material, they point out three things to know about the ACLU, they put it like this: “We protect American values. In many ways, the ACLU is the nation's most conservative organization. Our job is to conserve America's original civic values - the Constitution and the Bill of Rights - and defend the rights of every man, woman and child in this country.” (Guardians of Freedom). In the same section, they strive to point out that “We're not anti-anything. The only things we fight are attempts to take away or limit your civil liberties[.]” (ibid).  In their works, they strive towards the same sort of balance, highlighting their advocacy for the Kul Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis to have the rights accorded to them in the first amendment for freedoms of speech and freedoms to peaceably assemble. The problem here, and what makes the ACLU seem a liberal organization is that it has worked to expand the umbrella of rights to a greater amount of people. The status quo has many staunch defenders, so any challenge to that brings those defenders out of the woodwork or wherever else they were hiding.

           

         This means that my proposal may be controversial because even though the ACLU strives to show itself as nonpartisan, in fact many of the big defenders are liberals – George Soros is a well know backer. My proposal is that the ACLU expand its donor base by not just keeping its focus on the five freedoms of the first amendment and instead look further afield in the bill of rights and muscle into a niche held by other organizations. Specifically, I am proposing that the ACLU target for its advocacy and fundraising supporters of the second amendment. There are as many guns in this country as there are people, and gun owners are a large plurality of the population. Looking around at the material the ACLU has, I found nothing where they speak of defending gun rights. This is important because the whole ground has been ceded to the NRA who currently takes an absolutist stance supporting a freedom that in its wording is ambiguous at best: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” (Archives).  By ceding this space it gives ground to the rigid stance of the NRA and allows itself to be painted as a liberal organization which closes off the potential donor base. There is a huge caveat that such advocacy might degrade the donor base if this route is taken, but for me this is a huge blind spot for the organization.
 

Resources

ACLU. “Guardians of Freedom” (n.d.) American Civil Liberties Union. Accessed at https://www.aclu.org/guardians-freedom

The Bill of Rights: A Transcription. (n.d.). Retrieved February 07, 2016, from http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html

United States presidential election, 1988. (n.d.). Retrieved February 07, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1988

Donor Mix

Is it better to secure funding from multiple small donors or one single huge donor?

What I really want is a deep-pocketed donor who is loyal to the cause. I want someone who never changes his or her mind. I want someone that is persuadable towards new projects and programs.

But here’s the most important part.

They have to never die.

Realistically though, choosing to secure funding from multiple small donors or one single huge donor, there are two sides here with the question.

Smaller donors mean that you’re going to have to spend more on each dollar you bring in. That’s more mailings, more admin time dealing with the donations, etc. The good side is that you are less reliant on any single donor. In addition, there is the thought that you can cultivate their giving as they grow in their careers.

One big donor is nice. The real big issue is that you become reliant on that donor. If you lose your funder for whatever reason – they have their own money issues, a relationship internally diminishes, there’s turnover at your agency, a new governor comes in and wants to prove his conservative bonafides by cutting social service – and then you have to scramble. So that means that it is nice to just have one relationship to cultivate, but there is a huge risk in dependency.

That’s why ultimately I think that the many small donors is better given the dichotomy, but ultimately you do end up with a mix of donors of many sizes. That means you still have the weaknesses of both of the two extremes, but you have more flexibility because you are not wholly dependent on one funder and you can also have a base to grow and nurture.