Our standard narrative of the history of modern fundraising is simplistic and doesn’t contain as many truths as it could do. Marina Jones explains why we need more complexity in our study of fundraising history. Oh, and that as soon as we look for it, we find that women have had a major role in the development of our profession – a role that has previously been obscured.
Fundraisers and historians have at least one thing in common. They both love a story. For the fundraiser, stories allow them to get a case across simply and effectively – eliciting sympathy, driving action, empathy, and action preferably in monetary, form.
Conferences are full of workshops on how to tell better and more compelling stories. We know it can be more effective to keep the story simple, info-lite, and negative-but-solvable. Yet the complexity of the needs that our charities try to address, and the efficacy of the solutions offered, do not fit into a neat narrative or case study. Too much information can overwhelm supporters, slow down the decision-making processes, and make our asks less effective. The donor can be placed in the centre of the story as the hero who can provide the solution so we keep it simple, and focus on the story.
For the historian, stories are about condensing complex social, cultural and political movements of people, power and place into compelling narratives. We want a narrative arc. We want to link an assassination here with a coup there (wider history not fundraising history), or we want to trace the origins of this war in the peace treaty 20 years beforehand. We know it is more complex, and that correlation is not causation, but to make it understandable we tell it as a shorthand of events and moments. As the Cambridge history professor John H Arnold says: “History is to society what memory is the to the individual.”
“When we come to explore to the history of fundraising, we often grasp for the unusual – the fundraising ‘firsts’ – and try to weave them into a narrative arc (the fundraiser’s need for a story dominates!).”
Both fundraisers and historians stitch together the elements of the available facts that serve the story’s purpose – to raise funds; to try and tell us what has happened and how we got there.
Is it any wonder, then, that the history of fundraising to date has hooked on to a ‘great story’ – the origin myth of the evolution of fundraising being led by Charles Sumner Ward as the modern father of fundraising. And if you want a recap/reminder (from our timeline of the 20th and 21st centuries):
Charles Sumner Ward (1858-1929) is widely credited as the founding father of modern fundraising. In 1900 he was general secretary of a YMCA branch in Michigan, where he spent much of his time fundraising using what we would recognise as standard major donor practices. However, in 1905, given the task of raising $90,000 for a new YMCA building in Washington DC, he decides to achieve this through an ‘intensive’, or ‘whirlwind’ mass appeal public fundraising appeal. He masterminds and oversees many other similar appeals for other cities, using what became known as the ‘Ward Plan’. He repeats his success in England, and throughout World War One he repeats this campaign model for the American Red Cross and United War Works. In 1920 he founds the fundraising firm Ward, Dreshman and Reinhardt in New York.
Even when we do not have a coherent historical narrative to tell (as is arguably the case with fundraising), we nonetheless like to have a story to tell – both as fundraisers and humans. Stories are stickier and easier to remember. Perhaps that is why the Sumner Ward story has stuck.
But as with all history, the history (or histories) of fundraising is not that simple. Is there a different story we can tell?
An alternative historical narrative – women to the fore
In 1893, it was estimated that there were half a million women working semi-professionally in a full-time capacity in auxiliary societies in the UK. Around 20,000 were paid officials supporting fundraising and soliciting funds. Auxiliary societies were democratic voluntary associations that worked together to finance philanthropic work (from missions to temperance movements). The auxiliary was a regional branch of a large ‘parent’ society and members paid subscriptions to support the work and additionally raised funds to support the cause they cared about. In America, 30,000 African-American women were active in church-associated clubs similar to auxiliaries.
The limited scholarly exploration and the glimpses that we see gives a richer, more nuanced and more female-led approach to raising funds and running charities. This extensive involvement of women in the fundraising in the 18thand 19th centuries calls into question the standard origin myth of modern fundraising as having been driven by a few ‘great men’, such as Charles Sumner Ward and Lyman Pierce, in the early 20th century.
The alternative historical narrative that emerges from the second fundraising timeline we have constructed as part of Rogare’s fundraising history/historiography project (covering the period 1500-1899) shows the much more active role of women to raise funds – as evidenced by the charity bazaar movement (see the entry for 1685) and that the first charity shop was established to sell goods made by women (see 1859).
Collating entries for this second fundraising history timeline has revealed a much more nuanced, sophisticated and complex fundraising practice existing in the UK and the US. Many of the methods attributed to as firsts by Pierce and Sumner Ward had been used in other campaigns throughout the 18th and 19th centuries by active fundraising professionals in the UK and the US, including segmentation, mass publicity campaigns, short-focused appeals raising big gifts for capital projects, utilising mass printing of pamphlets, and mass mailing.
As an aside from someone who has been involved in several major capital projects, the level of excitement, size of gift, and ‘noise’ that capital campaigns make may have aided Sumner Ward’s success. Capital projects create physical buildings that come with naming rights and are different to the ongoing and continuing revenue/business-as-usual funding requests.
“By 1893, there were half a million women working in auxiliary societies in Victorian England – a huge number that bears repeating: Half a million! And 20,000 of them were working and supporting themselves as semi-professional fundraisers.”
And as with the study of philanthropy, the same is true of fundraising – money talks! We tend to bias our attention towards the major amounts fundraised and the philanthropists who gave those amounts, and ignore the hundreds and thousands of smaller gifts from hundreds and thousands of donors who were asked to give by thousands of fundraisers. Campaigns preceding the major YMCA appeals and British Red Cross of Ward and Pierce were incredibly successful and widely supported (which does not to dismiss or diminish the success of Sumner Ward and his evolution of campaigns and establishment of practice).
Now to return to the half a million women working in auxiliary societies in Victorian England – a huge number that bears repeating: Half a million! And 20,000 of them were working and supporting themselves as semi-professional fundraisers.
The challenge with the history of fundraising, as Beth Breeze pointed out in her 2017 book The New Fundraisers, is that too often it is only the fruits of the labour of fundraising are known and recorded – the ultimate outcomes such as the laws changed and the votes won – but not the fundraisers. But this dismisses the work to feed, clothe, educate, and care for those in need, and the lives saved or transformed.
There are also wider questions of what, and who, has archived this knowledge, and where we can find the evidence for it.
The substantial literatures on the suffrage movement, the education reform bill, the temperance movement, or the anti-corn law movement have been studied as history and politics, informing us about our political, social and cultural past. But that same literature has not been as systematically studied for what it tells us about the history of fundraising. And that’s despite renowned British social historian Frank Prochaska arguing that the sophisticated organisation of female-led charity collections in the early 19th century paved the way for the suffrage movement.
Fundraising is seen perhaps an adjunct, a means to an end, and not the focus of the academic or scholarly work to date on this archive. We need to use these well-archived areas to explore our fundraising history.
But to keep and develop an archive you need to have the power and resources to store and keep records. In the USA, the so-called Jim Crow Laws banned the right of association, restricted education and curtailed literacy for African Americans. This had a huge impact on the records that were kept about African-American clubwomen, and their role, influence and legacy has been under-explored and under-valued as a result.
Some of these records of the clubwomen have been explored through the lens of Black studies, women’s studies, and economics, but an explicit fundraising lens or academic practise has not been established or analysed (although that is changing – do read of Tyrone McKinley Freeman’s Madam CJ Walker’s Gospel of Giving – Black Women’s Philanthropy during Jim Crow).
One of the reasons for creating the timelines of the histories of fundraising as a first step in Rogare’s history of fundraising project is to highlight these missing stories. The stories that are not documented. The stories that are not archived. Issues of intersectionality further enhance the discrepancy of what is recorded and studied.
As with all historians gathering information, we are drawn to what is novel (the parrot taught to ask for donations in the collecting box), our own time interest, cultural understanding of philanthropy and the importance of philanthropists, and so we find what we were looking for.
As a result, when we come to explore to the history of fundraising, we often grasp for the unusual – the fundraising ‘firsts’ – and try to weave them into a narrative arc (the fundraiser’s need for a story dominates!).
Yet it would be as easy to create another timeline of all the under-researched and unknown aspects of fundraising – the missing stories, the lost, the hidden, the non-literate, those working in secret or fearing persecution. This of course includes the aspects of women’s active role in fundraising, which we are trying to correct. But often we lack the points of entry to that research by our own limits and biases, or what has previously been recorded and studied. As Tyrone McKinley Freeman of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy says: “There is so much more to them and the history they give us access to if we can ask deeper and more historical questions.”
Embrace the historical complexity
As we publish the second part of the history of fundraising timeline, it is important to acknowledge its inadequacies and the cultural absences and silences. The short version you can see is only a snapshot, and the whole ever-growing timeline runs to hundreds of entries. It will be shared so you can see it (including the parrot example), and add your own items.
We’ll continue to include those fundraising firsts – because they are interesting in their own right. But, as we continue exploring our histories of fundraising, let us find ways to find more points of entry to finding these stories. Let’s not shy away from the complexity of these stories in building up a picture of the histories of fundraising and let’s keep asking better and deeper questions about how fundraising has got to where it is now, what the past tells us about our present, and how it should or might develop.
I’ve already quoted Tyrone McKinley Freeman as saying we need to ask deeper historical questions, and to direct those questions in different areas than we currently do. British historian John H Arnold (who I also quoted previously) says that “history both begins and ends with questions; which is to say it never really ends, but is a process”.
We often want simplicity in fundraising, which is why we adopt the KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) approach, because this simplicity often works in our day-to-day practice. We can’t be so simple in our approach to fundraising history. The answer to many historical questions we ask is likely to be “it’s complicated”. Our role as fundraising historians is to acknowledge and embrace that complexity, and to keep asking questions.
- Marina Jones is deputy development director at English National Opera and leader of Rogare’s fundraising history/historiography project.
Further reading
- Rogare project on the history and historiography of fundraising.
- Timeline of fundraising history – 20th and 21st centuries.
- Timeline of fundraising history – 1500-1899.
- NEWS: How should we study the history of fundraising?
Critical Fundraising 
One thought on “NEW THINKING: The history of fundraising is more complex than our simple narratives suggest”