Rogare’s director Ian MacQuillin visited Australia and New Zealand in September with the support of Rogare Associate Member Giving Architects. In this blog he considers various aspects of that trip:
- Rogare’s ethics of school fundraising project
- The implications of this project being conducted in Australasia
- Alternative conceptualisation of a fundraising profession
- Māori philanthropy and fundraising.
Ethics of fundraising for schools
This is Rogare’s most recent project, which we announced at the start of September. One of the main reasons for my trip was to present our initial ideas at the Educate Plus Conference in Perth and then again to a group of school fundraisers in Auckland the following week.
The feedback we got from school fundraisers is that this initiative is sorely needed. The consensus is that there is definitely a gap in the toolkit of those fundraising for schools and that the work we are doing is going to go a long way towards addressing this.
The projects working group aims to have developed new tools and frameworks to be available to school fundraisers by the middle of 2025.
There are some truly groundbreaking and innovative ideas in our work already and I think we’ve even made a contribution to the development of the field of education ethics (or EdEthics, as it’s known).
We had several fundraisers from universities come up to us and ask if we were going to do similar work on the ethics of fundraising for higher education, so this is something that is definitely on the agenda for late 2025 once we have completed the work on school fundraising ethics.
That the school fundraising ethics project is being done in Australasia
This project is being carried out in Australia, New Zealand and possibly wider afield in SE Asia and the Pacific Rim (we had interest from a fundraiser in Jakarta about joining the working group).
Partly the reason for this is that Giving Architects does a lot of work in schools in Australia and New Zealand and they wanted to support this work, so it makes sense to do it where they are.
But it is also a good thing that new ideas are being generated outside of the USA and UK, from where so much research and thought leadership emanates. This is by no means to criticise everything that comes out of those two main loci of thought leadership. Much of it is very good; a great deal of it excellent (some, however, is less so).
But not everything has to be developed and devised by fundraisers in the US and UK and then exported to our colleagues around the world. Having different loci of thought generation and leadership might bring novel insights and approaches. Admittedly, Australia and New Zealand might not be that different, conceptually, to the UK and US. But there might well be other ideas from other countries and cultures that are crowded out by a global predominance of ideas emanating from Anglo-American fundraising. That brings me to the next section…
(Incidentally, the school fundraising ethics project is the second major project that Rogare has done that is centred outside the US or UK (even though most of our work is designed for universally application, irrespective of where it originates from) – the other being our work with AFP in Canada).
Alternative approaches to fundraising professionhood
As I said above, it’s possible that there are many novel ideas about fundraising that don’t get the chance to be heard because Anglo-American practice and thinking is predominant in global fundraising.
But not only that, it’s possible that some of the predominant Anglo-American ideas are not the most appropriate for local cultures of philanthropy.
At Rogare we have had a project on the back burner for at least a couple of years that aims to examine how universally applicable some of the predominant Anglo-American ideas about fundraising are; and to consider best practices, ethics and structures might shape professions of fundraising if they truly reflected local cultures of philanthropy, and how different they might be from what we commonly understand to be the profession of fundraising
We’ve already made some overtures for contributions to this project include, through Alice Ferris at Goalbusters, Hope Nation fundraisers in Arizona.
While in on this trip, I was able to broach possible engagement with fundraisers in Japan, Singapore and Indonesia, as well as having some in-depth discussion with two people from the Māori community.
Māori philanthropy and fundraising
Māori fundraising and philanthropy could form an interesting case study as part of Rogare’s proposed aforementioned project. These observations are derived from short meetings with Mere Pohatu and Ti Miringa Sherman. I apologise if I have mischaracterised any of these insights.
First, Māori society is genuinely and truly intergenerational, often with 150-400 year objectives. In the debates around decolonisation and being community-centric, philanthropy from non-Māori (pākehā) sources to support Māori community initiatives could throw a light on different ways to practice community-oriented philanthropy, and thus fundraising.
Second, an ask for money would be inappropriate in Māori society. ‘Koha’ is the Māori custom of giving as a token of gratitude in return for hospitality or care – for example, if invited to a local marae (a sort of settlement or homestead, which may involve sharing kai (food), the visitor should offer koha with local iwi (tribe) who are hosting them. What and how much you give is up to you. It’s usually left to be opened later (nowadays koha is sometimes via bank transfers), so the recipient will not know how much the koha is until after the event, and the giver does not expect to be thanked. Koha is something that is expected, but no-one would actually ask for koha.
However, there are often times when Māori communities have a need for support. One such occasion happened recently when a storm devasted a school. The appropriate approach is to tell the story of the storm and its aftermath in a way that people reading or hearing the story will know that koha is expected of them. Our discussion highlighted that story telling is often the subtle art of inviting giving, knowing that there is a time-honoured tradition of responding with generosity.
This will almost certainly chime with many Western/Northern/anglophone fundraisers who might receive this as a validation of their notions that fundraising is not about ‘asking’ for money, but rather presenting a case in such a way that the donor ‘wants’ to give rather than feel that they have been asked, much less ‘persuaded’ or ‘pressured’.
However, there is probably a key difference between Māori koha and anglophone charitable giving: charitable giving is completely and entirely voluntary and the would-be donor can choose not to give; but koha is expected and is thus obligatory. To put it into technical jargon, charitable giving is what’s called ‘supererogatory’ (goes beyond the call of duty), but koha is an obligation, even though freely-given.
My third insight is that gratitude is a huge and important component of Māori life. Koha is an expression of gratitude, Māori are a Polynesian people, whose gratitude-based ‘gift economy’ culture was famously studied in the 1920s, and, as some Māori writers have set out, Koha is a form of gift economy – see here and here, for example.
In a book published in 2000, Marilyn Fischer derived a system of fundraising ethics that conceived of charitable giving (and thus asking for donations) as part of a gift economy (for an outline of Fischer’s ideas, see s5.1 of my review of the field of normative fundraising ethics in the Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing).
I think it is difficult to apply these ethics to charitable giving and fundraising as we understand it. However, it might be the ethical lens we need when thinking about the ethics of giving in Māori society, which in turn might lead us to a better appreciation of how to apply this in Northern/Western fundraising practices.
Thanks and acknowledgements
I’d like to extend my sincere thanks to Clive Pedley at Giving Architects for making this trip possible (it literally would not have been possible without his support); and to Fundraising Nest’s chief nester Michelle Berriman for inviting me to speak at the two Nest Fests. Thanks Michelle, these were such great events. I’d also like to thank Precision Group, which Fundraising Nest is part of, who are joining Giving Architects in support of Rogare’s work in Australia and New Zealand. The last time I was in New Zealand was 2016 for the FINZ conference. I really hope it won’t be another eight years before I can return.
