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Outstanding idea?! ... Let the donors select the research projects to fund

For the 30 years I've been in community benefit work, the conventional wisdom of non-profit voluntary health organizations (like American Heart Association, where I worked for 21 years, or March of Dimes, where I worked for 8 years, or American Cancer, or American Lung, or American fill-in-the-blank-with-a-disease-or-body-organ) was that one of the values that the organization adds is its expertise in selecting the most scientifically meritorious or promising research projects to fund.

As a consequence, these organizations have traditionally frowned on donors who wanted to restrict their gift to a specific scientist or institution, and certainly nixed the notion of letting the donor actually choose which project their money funded. The closest we could get was accepting very large (six or seven figure) gifts restricted to very broad research areas.

Plus, the financial accountants put down any effort to attract this kind of support. Their reasoning: the cost of tracking all of this and making sure a specific gift went to a selected project ... well, that outweighed any possible benefit.

So, even if you wanted to restrict your gift to the broad function of research (as opposed to education or community programs), you still had to give at a certain level ($1,000 or $5,000) to make it worth even bothering with from the charity's perspective.

But of course, that was before the technology-assisted online tools of today. Now, in the United Kingdom, a unique way to support cancer research has been launched. It allows the donors to:

• choose which area of their work they want to support


• choose the specific project that most interests them


• follow the developments of the work they've helped to fund

Projects that need funds are described with a blurb about the science behind it, where the work is happening, and a photo/bio of the investigator, together with a thermometer showing how much has already been raised, and how much more is needed.

True, the charity, Cancer Research UK, has already committed to supporting the projects they promote. In this sense, a donation is not really leading to a go/no go decision on whether the project will proceed.

But the donation is, strictly speaking, restricted. It won't go to any other purpose. And once a project reaches its target, the system automatically stops accepting donations for it, and adds new projects to the site for donors to choose from.

It's all currently in beta, but I think it's a fascinating trend, and I'll very much be looking forward to the results. I would predict increased donor satisfaction and retention for repeat gifts. Plus, there's big potential for donor involvement, with donors becoming fundraisers, spreading the word about a project that's piqued their personal interest, using the usual social media forums.

Donors can form Giving Groups to join together, forming a little community, as it were, of friends and family, with all their gifts going to the same project.

Like I said, tradition-bound health organizations have hated this concept in the past. They have long disliked accepting funds with strings attached, even for efforts that are directly aligned with their purpose and plans. I understand their preference for unrestricted funds that can be used for whatever the organization thinks it needs. But the mindset still flies in the face of developing a donor-centered philanthropic culture.

This whole notion is crowdsourcing at its best ... trusting the wisdom of the many over the elite, behind-closed-door decisionmaking of a few.

I hope it succeeds big time. It will go to prove a point of view I've been espousing for years: Restricted gifts are not a bad thing when they are restricted to something you've already decided you wanted to do anyway. To the extent that donors choose a specific project, such resources are "fungible," meaning the funds that were committed to this approved project can now be freed up for something else the organization wants to do.

It's a no-brainer, if you ask me ... and it will be interesting to see how quickly the "disease" organizations catch on here in the US.