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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Culture change needed in volunteer management to attract more people, says NCVO manager

Kristen Stephenson, volunteer development manager at the umbrella body, says charities should allow volunteers greater flexibility in how and when they offer their time

A broad culture change in volunteer management is needed in order to attract more volunteers, Kristen Stephenson, a volunteer development manager at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations has said.

Speaking at a joint event held by the NCVO and the Office for National Statistics on trends in volunteering in central London today, Stephenson said charities needed to allow volunteers greater flexibility in how and when they volunteered in order to keep them engaged.

Many charities failed to take into account the fact that people’s engagement was an ongoing journey that depended on what else was happening in their lives, heard delegates at the event, which was held as part of National Volunteers’ Week. 

For example, they might volunteer as students, then less when they find full time work or have children, but then get re-engaged through children’s groups, she said.

“There’s a broader culture change that’s needed in terms of volunteer management, so that we create a culture of volunteering where people are able to volunteer in different stages of our lives and we can build in the flexibility and also the pathways to allow people to do that and support them on this journey,” said Stephenson.

She also said that organisations needed to embrace the fact that volunteers might have a more fluid relationship with them because people have become more focused on causes than organisations.

“It might mean we might need to change our mentality a bit from one that recruits volunteers to do a very specific role that we define, to one where we enable people to give their time and talent,” she said.

“So is might be that we are seen as volunteer enablers rather than volunteer managers in the future.”

She said charities should look to sharing volunteers and enabling them to move between organisations easily rather than thinking about protecting or keeping them loyal.

Matthew Hill, a senior researcher at the NCVO, agreed and said the sector needed to be careful about the way in which it viewed time as a barrier to volunteering.

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Many studies had shown that those who were busiest, for example, in full-time jobs and caring for children, tended to volunteer more, he said.

“We should be honest about what does it really tell us when people say they don’t have enough time to volunteer,” he said, pointing to data shared earlier in the session by Chris Payne, a  senior research officer at the Office for National Statistics, which showed that non-volunteers tended to consume more mass media.

“I think we all know mass media means boxsets, which we watch instead of volunteering,” Hill said,

“So I think we’ve got to be realistic that it’s not that people don’t have time to volunteer, it’s more the data shows that people are choosing to do other things with their time rather than volunteering.”

He said it often was not the overall amount of time that was needed to volunteer that presented a barrier by the idea of a regular, open-ended commitment that tended to deter people, so more flexible opportunities needed to be offered.

Stephenson said one solution was to design volunteering to fit around people’s lives – pointing to Projects such as Good Gym, where people go running but stop off to do activities for their communities along the way.

“In those roles the volunteering is almost secondary – it’s about how it fits into their lifestyle,” she said.

“If we want people to choose volunteering over watching a boxset we need to think about how we make it easier and how we really highlight what the other selling points are of that activity.”

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