The immutable laws of philanthropy

Carve these laws of philanthropy in stone

Feel free to carve these immutable laws of philanthropy in stone and put them at the front door of your nonprofit’s head office.

They are: 1. While there are people on the earth, you are more often wrong than not if you think that no one else is interested to see the specific charitable thing you want to do, get done.

2. Financial donors don’t give to charitable organisations. They give to the beneficiaries of the charitable organisation’s Good Cause Enterprise.

3. For donors, it matters that as much of the profit from their donations benefit the beneficiary of the nonprofit as is humanly possible.

4. The closer you are to a person who gets what it is you are doing or wanting to do, the closer you are to finding a person who will give you money to do it.

5. The people most inclined to be inspired to donate to your good cause became so due to previous influences in their lives that had the effect of converting them in your favour well before they ever heard of your nonprofit.

6. The reasons you think someone should give to your cause matter little. But the donor’s reasons matter a lot.

7. Most philanthropic people want to give more money to help a cause than they already do but won’t give more until they know more about how you used their last donation.

8. Increasing conversations that include increased asking leads to increased donations.

9. If you don’t or won’t ask, you won’t get.

Some say the last immutable law should go first. I don’t agree.

We all know that for many people, asking others for money is a painful experience. However, it becomes much less so when you realise that asking can always be very gentle and comfortable once you have established the first eight immutable laws of philanthropy in your mind and heart. In short, if your mind and heart have embraced and applied these laws, then you will find new donors and hold on to your existing ones.

With those laws understood and adhered to when talking with a person already indicating a deep interest in the work you are doing (i.e life has predisposed them in your favour), asking them to donate becomes a simple follow-on.

As I expect that asking is not something you are comfortable doing personally, I will be going into more detail about asking in a later step in my book (Step 9: Get Comfortable with Asking).

In my book, I show how to put these laws to work to find you a bunch of donors who think – no – more than that – who know, that your charity rocks.