Consider these two scenarios and pay attention to your initial reaction to each:

Scenario 1: You’re making a $50 donation on a nonprofit’s website. Before you check out, the nonprofit asks if you wish to add $2 to help cover their administrative costs. The total cost to you is $52.

Scenario 2: You’re purchasing a takeaway meal, online, and the meal costs $25. At check out, a $2 convenience fee is automatically included, plus you add a $3 tip — and there’s an 8 percent sales tax. The total cost to you is $32.40.

The first scenario is more money, but the $2 added administrative cost is 4 percent of the total. The takeaway meal, on the other hand, has added costs of 30 percent. How many of you read the first scenario and tilted your head, while the second scenario felt like a routine Thursday night dinner?

I’ve worked in and around nonprofits for more than twenty years, and as it relates to inviting people to cover administrative costs, I routinely hear comments like: “Why should I help pay for this nonprofit’s overhead?” My response is usually something like: “Because the emails don’t send themselves!”

Would people feel the same way if donation transaction fees were automatically included, instead of being presented as a choice? They probably would, because we’ve been conditioned this way, and because nonprofits are often woefully behind the curve in how they talk about what they talk about.

For things like takeaway food, concert tickets, and airline travel, consumers don’t flinch when companies automatically add fees. But for many nonprofits, there’s a glitch when it comes to applying the same concepts to the lifeblood of our field (philanthropy), and in some ways, it’s the result of poor branding.

It’s about impact over output

One of the mistakes I made early in my career as a nonprofit fundraiser was trying to apply Pizza Hut logic to philanthropy. Let me explain. With marketing from Pizza Hut or any other fast-food chain, they’re usually not trying to convince you about their social benefit. They’re selling you pizza. You see the marketing, you want pizza, so you give them money to get pizza.

There’s no grand impact from the transaction, only the output of you getting pizza. It’s a give/get.

When I was starting out in the nonprofit sector, I fashioned my fundraising the same way: “If you donate $50, here’s what you will get from our nonprofit.” This might work for the “investor face” of philanthropy, but it doesn’t exactly tug at any heartstrings — and there are many different types of donors out there who give for myriad reasons.

With Pizza Hut philanthropy, there would be no incentive for a donor to add $2 to help an organization cover administrative costs. Presented as a give/get, the transaction is already branded as a purchase, rather than a donation. But if you talk about impact and outcomes, the world becomes infinitely more interesting. We are seeing a slow shift in this across our sector, though nonprofits still don’t always do an effective job of translating all the good they do.

Sometimes numbers neither lie nor tell the whole truth

A recent year-end fundraising campaign I saw struck me as relevant to this issue. One of our city’s beloved arts organizations sent a solicitation under the theme “togetherness,” with an eye toward the end of the pandemic when people can once again enjoy gathering in person. The organization boasted about its impact and milestones reached, but its materials spoke only of hard numbers — like the number of social media views and scans of QR codes.

While at face value these numbers were high and impressive, there was no mention of outcomes. The campaign sought funds to make it possible to “continue forging a path for connectivity” — but to what end?

All I knew from the mailing was that my donation would check a box — another five livestreams or one new collaboration. Nothing about how a patron’s life was so transformed by art that she signed up for singing lessons, or how a student’s family was brought closer together because of an experience.

In other words, it was all outputs and nothing about outcomes. Sometimes nonprofits confuse and conflate the two in their marketing and fundraising campaigns. Outputs are the different things you make and provide, while outcomes are the differences made by those things. In fundraising, outcomes are king, because, as the strategist Deb Mills-Scofield notes, “Outcomes are the difference made by the outputs.”

Last words

Nonprofits do a tremendous amount of good. If they didn’t, I and twelve million of my closest friends wouldn’t spend so much time working with them — and donors wouldn’t continue to increase their philanthropy on a year-over-year basis.

Especially at this time of year, thousands of nonprofits have no problem letting everyone know about the important work they do. But as a sector, we need to talk about how we talk about our work, especially as it relates to money. If we get better about this — and lead from a place of impact over output — people may just stop tilting their heads when we ask them for an extra $2 to cover administrative costs.

Evan Wildstein is a fundraiser and nonprofiteer in Houston, Texas.