Rights-balancing fundraising ethics

In recent years, fundraisers have become increasingly focused on major gift solicitation while donors have been making larger gifts to fewer organizations. As this trend continues, some have begun to question whether major organizations and/or wealthy individuals now have too much control over the work of nonprofits and the communities they serve. While it is true that major gifts are important and can made a noticeable, positive impact, in some cases community members might see their impact as intrusive. In situations such as this, what is the “best” course of action? How should fundraisers consider, balance, and address the perspectives and rights of their organization, donors, and community members? This paper creates a framework for fundraisers as they consider not only their responsibilities to their organization and constituents, but also their responsibilities for promoting equity within their community as a whole. This paper draws on the social‐ecological model, as well as concepts from intersectionality, to explore how fundraisers can increase involvement from all community members in a nonprofit's work to create a participatory and community‐engaged process, with a special focus on including those who are typically marginalized, rather than maintaining a hierarchical system of power. It also draws on the theories of rights‐balanced fundraising ethics, community‐centric fundraising, and other ethical frameworks of fundraising and public administration to compare what is being done by fundraisers to what should be done to encourage ethical practices in fundraising. The paper is supplemented by examples of the impact of implementing (or not implementing) community engagement in fundraising practices. This paper aims to create a community‐engaged philanthropy framework for fundraisers as they consider not only their responsibilities to their organization and donors, but also their responsibilities for promoting equitable distributions of power within their community. This framework provides specific guidance for fundraisers as to how they can balance these multiple (and sometimes competing) responsibilities while also keeping ethics at the forefront of their actions. It demonstrates how, by taking a community‐engaged approach to their work, fundraisers are able to bring about better long‐term outcomes for their organization. Specifically, the framework considers: (1) To whom are fundraisers most responsible, and to whom should fundraisers be most responsible—their nonprofit, their donors, or those being served? (2) For what rights of community members must the fundraiser account when soliciting funds, and to what extent is the fundraiser responsible for upholding these rights? (3) In what ways can an invitation from a fundraiser to make a gift also invite some level of power or control over the organization's work? (4) To what extent do fundraisers have the responsibility to maintain an equitable power balance among their constituents, including donors and those served? (5) How can fundraisers help ensure that all community members are able to participate in the organization's work to extent that they are willing and able?

Section: Results: Applying the Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methods: Building the Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Community‐engaged philanthropy: The role of the fundraiser in building equitable communities

Keegan

2021

Normative fundraising ethics: A review of the field

MacQuillin

2022

The ethics of fundraising has received scant attention in the academic literature, while there is not a huge amount in the grey and practitioner literature either. There is little that explicitly describes normative theories of fundraising—broad concepts of how fundraising ought to be practised, from which recommendions for applied ethical practice can be drawn. This is the first review of the literature on fundraising ethics, articulating, synthesing and naming (often for the first time) 14 ethical theories/lenses that can be inferred (few are explicitly stated as normative ethical theories) from the literature. In so doing, this review provides scholars and practitioners with a much firmer conceptual foundation for examining and developing professional fundraising ethics, and for analysing applied practice and finding solutions to the ethical dilemmas in applied practice.

“The sweetest songs”—Ethical framing in fundraising through the agency of service users/contributors to tell their own stories

MacQuillin

Crombie

Smyth³

2022

Much of the discussion on the ethics of the framing of service users in fundraising and marketing materials focuses on the ethical dilemma of whether the means of using negative framing and negatively-framed images-which it is argued are more effective at raising money-justify that end if they cause harm by stereotyping and "othering" the people so framed, rob them of their dignity, and fail to engage people in long-term solutions. Attempts to find the right balance between these two ethical poles have proved elusive. This paper posits a new ethical solution by removing these two poles from the equation and making the ethicality of fundraising frames contingent on the voice and agency of service users/contributors to tell their own stories and contribute to their own framing: as the Niger proverb says, "a song sounds