Fundraising in poor communities

by Merritt Clifton, editor, ANIMAL PEOPLE.

It is dismayingly evident that many people trying to do humane work in poor nations are still under the illusion that fundraising is essentially the same thing as begging, and that it can only be done successfully if the beggar seems even poorer and more miserable than everyone else on the street. This is absolutely and utterly 100% dead wrong. Successful fundraising, ESPECIALLY IN POOR COMMUNITIES, depends upon the fundraising institution managing to project itself as a center of community pride, to which everyone contributes and from which everyone derives benefit, including the benefit of feeling more hopeful about the possibility of changing adverse conditions.

We have seen this over and over again all over the world. This is the fundraising prescription that has worked for organized religion since the dawn of time, and it works for animal protection charities too. Remember: you are not begging. You are voluntarily providing a community service, just as a priest or a monk or a nun does. You are asking fellow citizens to contribute to humane work on the same basis that built the Vatican, Mecca, Ankor Wat, and Shaolin, to name just a few of the world's great temple cities. Your goal is the common benefit--because if you establish in your community that no dog shall starve, no child shall starve. If you establish in your community that no dog shall be beaten, no wife shall be beaten.

If you establish in your community that no dog shall be cast out, no elderly person shall be cast out. If you establish in your community that every sick or injured dog shall be treated with kindness, sick and injured humans shall be treated with kindness, because the bottom line for what society accepts is what society allows to be done to dogs, and if you raise the standards for the care and well-being of dogs, you raise the standards for the whole community. This is a cause to which almost every person in the community can be inspired to contribute, if you make plain the value of your work. If St. Francis could found the Franciscan Order of the Catholic Church around the mission of helping lepers, as he did, at a time when there was no cure for leprosy and no disease was more feared, you can raise the funds you need to cure street dogs of mange and prevent rabies and dog overpopulation.

Remember, though, that St. Francis did not beg. He went to the marketplace of Assisi and explained to the merchants that his institution helped their business by keeping begging lepers out of the market and helped the merchants' souls by treating the lepers mercifully, with the merchants' generous help. St. Francis was the most successful charitable fundraiser of his time, not because he begged, but because he sold the concept of kindness to lepers--and later to animals--as a point of community pride.

Successful animal protection institutions thrive, no matter how poor their surroundings, if they project a positive image and inspire support as a beacon of pride and encouragement. Success sells success. Any community big enough and rich enough to have traffic congestion on market days is quite big enough and rich enough to support basic humane services, including low-cost vaccination, sterilization, animal rescue, and emergency sheltering--and I must emphasize that sheltering animals should only be an emergency response. If you are doing an adequate job of preventing surplus dog and cat births by means of sterilization, 95% of the animals in your community will never enter your shelter, even though they all benefit from the services and public education you provide.

Unfortunately, many shelter operators mentally equate soliciting funds with street-begging by the severely disadvantaged and destitute, not with obtaining voluntary support for essential community institutions. Even the people who most devotedly help animals in other ways are often unwilling to ask for money, because they do not wish to be seen as beggars. Those who do ask tend to rely on descriptions of misery--and then they find that more people turn away in disgust and horror than actually contribute. Take a lesson from your dog. Your dog does not feel unwanted and unworthy when your dog solicits a pat on the head, a treat, a walk, or a meal. Rather, your dog knows you want to help because your dog is a fine dog, a good and loving dog, and you are a good and loving person. Your dog is confident that you think well of him, or her, and wish to reward your dog for excellent behavior. Your dog gets what your dog wants and needs.

Your shelter dogs and cats could get what they want and need, if you were even half as good at asking for it, beginning with having a positive attitude: you will get the contributions you need because you are worthy. You will prove that you are worthy by doing tricks, if necessary; but you will never doubt that good deeds will be rewarded. The very strength of your expectation will help to persuade the prospective donor to live up to your hope. Bear in mind that when you invite people into your shelter, you are inviting important guests not only into your animals' temporary home, but also into their own homes, in a sense, because they will form their impressions of how animals should be kept and how animals will affect their lives from what they see, smell, and hear. If your shelter looks like a prison, stinks like a cesspool, and sounds like hell in full cry, you will never be successful, because no one wants to invite more misery and chaos into their lives.

There is no such thing as an animal shelter which cannot afford to be clean, neat, attractively lighted, odor-free, and quiet. The only kind of poverty that causes a shelter to be bleak, stinking, and intolerably noisy is poverty of the imagination. That is the same kind of poverty--and the only kind of poverty--that prevents your shelter from winning adequate community support.

Reference: www.animalpeoplenews.org

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