Oceans of ink have been spilt in recent weeks to describe and explain the causes and likely consequences of the review of fundraising regulation led by Sir Stuart Etherington.  But the fundamental issue has not received the attention it deserves.  This is not the relative (de)merits of a Fundraising Preference Service, the bonfire of the regulators, or even the need for greater trustee awareness of fundraising, necessary as that is.  Rather the key is, I think, a culture of short-termism in parts of the industry.  This is not directly addressed in the report in any length, and, in terms of proposed solutions,  only perhaps greater trustee oversight will help to remedy it.  Neither a FPS nor extra regulatory muscle will make the slightest headway with short-sighted management, nor the confusion of donations for affinity, where these things exist.  Short-termism is not only a problem for fundraising; far from it.  Al Gore, Prince Charles, the Chief Economist of the Bank of England, and US Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have all commented recently on the perils of ‘quarterly capitalism’, where organisations sole focus is the next quarterly profit statement.  But an important question is whether the Etherington proposals will have traction on thinking that says ‘as long as this appeal washes it’s face, it’s fine. We’ll cross the next bridge when it comes’.  Because the next bridge has arrived and, as the best Prime Minister Britain never had once said, ‘the first rule is: when you’re in a hole, stop digging‘.

Let’s be clear. Larger and more prominent sectors than our own have struggled with the slippery issue of culture change in recent years, not least financial services and media. Neither, as I write, has resolved the serious cultural issues they sought to change following various scandals and crises. In finance, ‘too big to fail’ is still with us, and, were Lehman 2.0 ever to transpire, the resolution would be no less messy than first time around.  And in media, reforms proposed by Lord Leveson are still far from effecting a paradigm shift in culture.  These major, systemically important industries have spent millions of pounds and thousands of man-hours trying to understand how to regulate away toxic cultures existing in parts of their industries.  And they have failed in important respects.  That failure stands testament to the fact that changing culture is hard because measuring it is impossible. The nearest we have to a unit of culture is a ‘meme’, and no one even pretends to know how to use memes as a working metric, even forty years after the idea was introduced by Professor Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene. But it is a modern axiom that ‘what gets measured gets done’. So how to fix a culture which we cannot measure in any meaningful way?

Two works by Professor John Kay could hold some of the answers for fundraising.  First is the report, commissioned in 2011 by the Coalition Government and published the following year, on tackling short-termism in finance. Of the 17 recomendations made in the report, most relevant for short-termism are the abolition of quarterly profit reporting; the development introducing a broader stewardship responsibilities for directors; consulting major, long-term investors in board appointments; and the recommendation that companies “should structure directors’ remuneration to relate incentives to sustainable long-term business performance”.  For fundraising, the takeaways are that management reporting should include metrics on the long-term wellbeing of the organisation, not just short-term financial returns, that investment must be aligned with long-term priorities of innovation and new product development, and that risk analysis should be both granular and broad-view, incorporating current, as well as planned, activity. Using these measures would have a demonstrable effect on the ways our organisations set their priorities and structure their activities, and would help to remedy charity short-termism as it has begun to with business, although there is still obviously more to do.

Another of Kay’s works may be even more relevant.  In his 2010 book ‘Obliquity‘, Kay lays out a convincing case that achieving objectives is often best done by working obliquely.  He lists example after example of businesses focused ruthlessly on quality and innovation being massively profitable, often leading their respective fields for decades.   He also highlights the ‘profit-seeking paradox’, whereby firms, (most notoriously Enron, Parmalat and WorldCom, but also stalwarts like ICI who lost their way), whose explicit focus was profits and growth, failed, often spectacularly.  Fundraising would be wise to heed these lessons.  As an industry whose raison d’etre is profit, the message is loud and clear: focusing only on money will not raise more money.  To grow giving, the industry focus must move to incorporate much more than pound signs, and should, where it does focus on income, use a broader range of more nuanced measures.  Fundraising consultant Nick Mason has spoken persuasively of the need for charities to focus less on a narrow toolkit of ROI/cost per acquisition plus one or two other measures, and to take a broader view of the metrics used in guiding strategy.  These include the Internal Rate of Return, Net Present Value and the Hurdle Rate, all commonly used indicators in other sectors.  This is partly in recognition that income targets alone do not beget income; building donor relationships is vital.  As Kevin Schulman has said, the first not-for-profit who can make each and every donor interaction a joy will clear up pretty quickly in a field where customer service levels are often mixed.  The sooner this happens the better, as stronger donor relationships will enable charities to build a true ‘value proposition’, and move the business model from Primark to Waitrose. This will in turn engage whole new segments of society, for example those neglected groups in middle England who could pretty comfortably donate in the neighbourhood of £2,000-£20,000 on a regular basis, but at the moment are not solicited for those amounts, or not stewarded to at the appropriate level for those sums.  Focusing on relationships could, obliquely, be the direct way to raising more.

In all this, it is important to consider the role of regulation. Whatever form it takes, the new regulator will be an essentially reactive institution. Cf. the Charity Commission who, as a body, can barely keep up with major regulatory events such as the Cup Trust saga.  The handling of this episode led a scathing National Audit Office to conclude that the Commission “makes little use of its enforcement powers, for example suspending only two trustees and removing none in 2012-13”, adding that “[the CC can also] be slow to act when investigating regulatory concerns…Furthermore, the [CC] does not take tough enough action in some of the most serious regulatory cases. It is…reactive rather than proactive, making insufficient use of the information it holds to identify risk”.  Margaret Hodge MP, then-Chair of the Parliamentary Public Affairs Committee was more blunt in saying that the Charity Commission “[obviously] has no coherent strategy and has been simply buffeted by external events” adding that “[i]t is clear that the Charity Commission is not fit for purpose.”  Even with a smaller remit, the new regulator will be at or close to capacity from day one.  We must recognise, therefore, that culture change among not-for-profits will come not from an army of regulators monitoring our every move.  It will come from performance management and incentives set by the sector itself. The new regulator will be a fire service, (and not a particularly well-funded one), called out to the deal with the most serious accidents or offences, not a police force patrolling the beat.  In important senses, we have to fix our own mess.

How we define and measure success will be at the heart of achieving this.  Internal reporting, governance and performance measurement to prioritise donor satisfaction, engagement and affinity, and to dethrone ROI and  RFV, (indeed, to ensure that “no one metric is sovereign“), will be critical in moving from ‘has this appeal covered its costs?’ to proper relationship fundraising.  Developing governance, management and methdologies to ensure donor relationships are at the heart of what we do will be the oblique, but also the most direct, way to growth.  The proposed Etherington reforms do not address this issue, and they will not cure the myopia suffered by bits of the sector.  The solutions will come from not-for-profits themselves recognising the need to change.  Hopefully, oceans more ink will not be needed before that happens.