Many NGOs have a ‘blame culture’, fundraising consultant says

Gunes Yildirim tells the International Fundraising Congress that this risks repeating mistakes

Many NGOs have a “blame culture” that leaves them badly prepared to deal with a crisis, according to the fundraising consultant Gunes Yildirim.

Speaking at the International Fundraising Congress in the Netherlands yesterday, Yildirim said too many organisations were failing to learn from past mistakes. Talking openly and honestly about mistakes would help organisations to improve their culture, she said.

“Many NGOs are suffering from a blame culture where people take an approach to leadership in which they decide to ask only one question: ‘who did it?’” she said. “This is not the same as accountability.

“We need to look at the context and root cause of the failure, and instead of just focusing on who, we should ask what has happened and how and why it happened.”

Key signs of a blame culture, she said, included frequent attempts to cover up mistakes rather than fix them, indecisive staff who felt the need to check every decision with management and conversations that excluded part of the team.

Yildirim, who founded the Turkish School of Fundraising in Istanbul, said managers were often too quick to treat a failure as a “blameworthy” failure, rather than recognising that some failures could be the result of unforeseen circumstances or part of the process of innovation.

“At some point every crisis comes to an end,” she said. “But then the learning part starts: it is the key element of the crisis, and we generally skip it. Only a few organisations and departments really focus on learning after a crisis. It’s unbelievable that some organisations are not documenting either their learning or their failures.”

This, Yildirim said, made it difficult to move forward and risked repeating the same mistakes in the future.

She said it was also important to cultivate an atmosphere that encouraged testing.

“When you label something as testing and inform others that this is testing, it becomes easier for both the accountable person and the rest of the staff to understand if it does not go entirely to plan,” she said.

“This creates a safe environment where we say that failures can happen in here and it becomes a calculated risk.

“It’s hard to talk about failures and mistakes, and we have a tendency to cover them up, but we need to talk about them. If you are willing to talk about your failures, it becomes easier for others to talk about theirs.”

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Diversity is the sector’s Achilles’ heel, says fundraising consultant

Carol Akiwumi tells the Institute of Fundraising’s annual convention that charities must stop doing the same old, same old with the usual suspects

The lack of diversity in the charity sector is “an embarrassment” and an “Achilles’ heel”, according to the fundraising trainer and consultant Carol Akiwumi.

Speaking at the Institute of Fundraising’s annual convention yesterday, Akiwumi said increasing diversity would help the sector face the challenges of the future with the help of different perspectives.

She was speaking at a panel session exploring what the “next big thing” in fundraising and the sector as a whole was likely to be.

“My idea for the next big thing is diversity,” she said. “At the moment it’s an embarrassment, an Achilles’ heel.

“The world is changing and the sector must keep up. That means getting past doing the same old, same old with the usual suspects.”

If charities really wanted to find new ways of doing things in order to raise funds and achieve their objects they would have to increase diversity, said Akiwumi.

“There are all those people who have such amazing ideas and who could help us by giving us alternative views,” she said.

“Because if the people who are closest to you are all like you, you have blind spots. All of us have unconscious biases – that’s why we need a 360-degree view.”

She challenged delegates to “get out of your comfort zone” and implement effective diversity strategies in order to find ways of “getting comfortable” with new and different perspectives and ideas.

“Dare to dream bigger,” Akiwumi said. “Dare to imagine that you can harness not just the ideas from the places that you would be uncomfortable with, but whole communities. We can actually begin to reach communities that we don’t traditionally target in our campaigns.”

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