Exploring ‘Extractive Empathy’ and the Dynamics of Nonprofit Fundraising
In this episode of the Nonprofit News Feed, hosts George Weiner, Chief Whaler of Whole Whale, and Nick Azoulay, Digital Strategist at Whole Whale, dive into the intricacies of nonprofit news with a focus on the concept of “extractive empathy.” The episode begins with a discussion on the palpable anticipation in the social impact space surrounding upcoming elections, which could influence strategic planning and decision-making.
A key highlight of the episode is the introduction of “extractive empathy,” a term coined by Whole Whale to describe the use of emotionally charged personal narratives to drive donations on crowdfunding platforms. This approach, while effective in generating immediate financial support, often overlooks long-term community needs and sustainable solutions. The conversation references a study showing that individuals with higher incomes raise more funds due to expansive social networks, emphasizing the imbalance in crowdfunding dynamics.
The hosts critique this approach by pointing out how platforms like GoFundMe prioritize individual stories over systemic change, which can exacerbate inequities. They suggest strategies to mitigate these issues, such as implementing an “overflow” system where excess funds beyond a set goal are directed to designated charities.
In the latter part of the episode, George and Nick discuss a new report on U.S. charitable giving trends, highlighting an increase in donations from both individuals and institutions. However, they note that a small percentage of donors account for a significant portion of total donations, underscoring the growing influence of high-net-worth individuals in philanthropy.
The episode wraps up with a feel-good story about an Austin-based nonprofit providing free English lessons to Afghan refugee women, showcasing grassroots efforts to support displaced communities. Despite the heavy topics, the hosts inject humor and encourage listeners to engage with these critical discussions.
Key Takeaways:
- “Extractive empathy” highlights the challenges of relying on emotional narratives for fundraising, which can divert attention from systemic solutions.
- The increasing role of wealthy donors in philanthropy necessitates tailored strategies to engage high-net-worth individuals effectively.
- Grassroots initiatives, like language classes for refugees, play a vital role in community support and integration.
Reflective Thought: As the nonprofit sector navigates these complex dynamics, it’s crucial to balance immediate fundraising needs with long-term, equitable solutions that address root causes rather than symptoms.
Transcript
This week on the nonprofit news feed. My name is George Weiner, the chief whaler of Whole Whale. And we have Nick Azulay. I’m going to see if the AI transcription gets that right. Azoulay, digital strategist at Whole Whale talking about geeky nonprofit news stuff, because that’s, that’s what gets us going.
What do we got this week? Oh, actually. What’s new at Whole Whale? Like, what are we, what are we talking about internally right now? Yeah, George, I think there’s a lot of topics of conversation. We don’t talk about it explicitly, but I think everybody’s holding their breath in the social impact space a little bit for the results of this.
Next week, I think that regardless of outcome, the mere fact that the election is over and concluded will add some sense of an understanding of what the next couple of years will look like in terms of trajectory. So I think a lot of folks are just kind of in a holding pattern for any major strategic or business decisions until that happens.
So we’re seeing that that playing out across the landscape and also internally. Promotion wise we are super happy to again promote that whole will you are full suite of education resources for nonprofit marketing professionals is again on sale in this end of year course bundle. So go to whole dot com slash university to learn more.
Awesome. There you go. Plugs plugs done. I’m curious now well, I’m not curious because I wrote it. We have a new definition term. We’re sort of entering into the market. Can you walk us through what extractive empathy is? Absolutely, George. So extractive empathy is a term we coined here at Whole Whale.
And we like to think of extractive empathy as. as a description for what happens when compelling personal narratives drive donations, in particular on crowdfunding platforms. And while those donations are great, they often fail to address root causes. Issues. So extractive empathy, empathy in our explicit definition, we say is their strategic use of emotionally compelling personal stories to elicit strong empathetic responses from donors.
It focuses on generating immediate financial support by prioritizing emotional impact over actual community needs. It involves repeatedly leveraging vivid and often distressing narratives to monetize empathy, reinforcing biases, and resulting in temporary fixes rather than promoting sustainable long term solutions.
And you might be thinking, what’s an example of that? Well, George, you put in the work and research, and it turns out that researchers in an article we linked to in Cookson, Gallagher, and Mulder Highlight this exact phenomenon on the platform. Go fund me. So this study that was released last year showed that higher income individuals raise on average 25 percent more funds on the platform because of the advantage provided by expansive social networks.
In particular, they were looking at funds raised from the platform. Wildfires. And this network advantage effect enables wealthier individuals to attract more donations. And that kind of makes sense, right, George, because it kind of compounds what we know about wealth, wealthier people one are probably more readily able to access and Use and are aware of platforms like GoFundMe, but also have networks of people are likely to have better networking opportunities, better support structures, that kind of thing.
And I think we argue in coining this phrase, extractive empathy, that in the process of people donating those peer to peer fundraising, the crowd funding platforms themselves focus on individual stories and Your ability to essentially market yourself to an audience in a way that’s not necessarily sustainable for systematic change or long term development or improvement over the long term.
So we have some strategies that we think are useful to mitigate the impact of these effects. But George, what else do you want to add about extractive empathy? I was just trying to rethink when I was like looking at the next round of disasters that were happening with the various hurricanes hitting the South about like what I was seeing and folks like literally front running before hurricanes would even hit land being like, got to get my GoFundMe up there as opposed to, you know, groups like AmeriCares, groups that are working on the ground in an organized way with the The you know, the infrastructure that’s there to, to deliver resources in a more equitable way, which actually matters quite a bit when you’re talking about disaster recovery and rebuilding.
And when I looked at it, I was like, how do I package this? Like what’s going on? The concept of, you know, extractive. Being like what I’m taking, taking from the, you know, the natural resources of compassion in the moment of crisis was being channeled into donation based crowdfunding for individuals as opposed to organizations.
And I’m aware. There are organizations out there platforms like GoFundMe that have also the ability to raise for nonprofits. However, when you go and search and look, what shows up at the top is what’s trending, which shows up at the top is, and you can filter for this. Almost done 75 percent there.
And that makes you feel like, Oh, I’m going to help them get over that, that hurdle, get them to the edge. I want to get them to the end. People want to help once they know it’s more likely to succeed. And so part of this is, yeah, don’t be surprised that if I did this analysis of, Hey, guess what people with wealthy networks get more money, take two seconds and go to the not, which is a leading.
Wedding registry, the knot. com, right? Go to a wedding registry. That’s what that is. Hey, can I have all of this expensive stuff, please? Friends of mine. It just so happens. All of my friends are high net worth individuals and I get more money. Ta da, but it’s different. And it’s different because let’s say it was not instead of not, but Hey, wealthy friends get me started.
So that the community sees that this is gaining traction. That it’s trending, that it’s almost toward completion, and then show me up in the search for people that are, in the moment, compassion in crisis, motivated to give, show up. So I think it’s a little bit more problematic than just saying like, hey, you’re not getting angry at wedding registries and wealthy people giving more to couples that have them in their friend network.
It’s different. And I just want to point this out because the New York times edited a huge story on it last year. And I think it’s something worth looking at because I think it ties to a lot of other threads that are worth looking at.
No, George, I think that’s exactly, I think that’s exactly right. And, and we’re not even getting into, because quite frankly, there’s not a lot of scientific research that we can tell that has to do with, you know, biases in fundraising, you know, There’s racism and, and all these other kind of biases and, you know, I haven’t seen academic research that’s really measuring that explicitly as directly, I think that’s right.
That’s harder to, to, to research, but I think to some extent you can be sure that’s there as it is in the real world, right? As it is in the real world with nonprofits. That’s, that’s not surprising, but George, I think if you were, you know, To critique this concept, one might say, Hey is it equitable?
Maybe not. Is there inequities and how these donation this fundraising is raised? Um, Yeah, maybe maybe there’s inequities, but that’s money that people weren’t going to donate anyway. People donating on GoFundMe, maybe that’s a different audience than the people who are going to the Americares, the American Red Cross, etc.
So what would you say to people who say, hey, this is This is in addition to the traditional nonprofit infrastructure, and in some ways, it’s actually outside of it, right? And and people have valid reasons to maybe be concerned about traditional philanthropy and how money gets allocated in that kind of way.
And you’re like, Hey, This is a direct way. I know exactly where my money’s going, even if there’s inequities in the platform. Like, I’m making a direct difference and I’m not the kind of person who’s gonna donate to the big multinational NGO. What would you say to that critique of this concept?
You can’t doubt the perceived, I’m not using that word accidentally, the perceived transparency giving to an individual because it is very real. Here is their story. And by the way, they’re being competitively placed against other people who have to sell their story to, to get these donations.
There’s nothing wrong with people asking for support from their community at all. There are frankly more platforms that would pop up tomorrow if it’s like, Oh, here’s the answer. Shut them down. Not a thing, cyberbagging literally grew up with the internet. Like we have seen it, it has evolved. And these are just sort of the current players in the game.
And I hear that critique, but also when you look through in terms of some of the vetting that is, that is going on, it’s difficult to try to do that for all of these individuals. I’m not saying that you know, there’s X percent of fraud on any platform, but the perceived transparency is very real and something that nonprofits.
Large, small need to be reminded, re reminded of, I look at one of the pinnacles of this is donors choose, which is phenomenal for brokering this and saying, Hey, here are the exact resources of the exact school. You can filter and find it. Like it is a beautiful model has always been. One of the things I point toward in not just sort of shaking my fist at the sky, which I am want to do at times, but to be a bit more solutions oriented is the concept of the overflow.
I think if you hit your goal, huzzah, I needed 15, 000 to help sprinkles my kitten. Get a new tail. There’s no world where sprinkles needed 25, 000. And in that world, I think you should have designated an overflow ASPCA local to your area or ASPCA national that gets the overflow money that sprinkles tails surgery didn’t require.
And I think that is a sort of responsible way to operate a donation based crowdfunding platform. And not just sort of say, Hey, look, we have nonprofits too. You can choose to fundraise for them. Like. That, that’s called you’re just trying to compete in a peer to peer software fundraising game, like, that I think is pretty transparent to me, at least, but the overflow of saying like, look, if you hit your goal, you set your goal, you hit it, congratulations, and guess what, now you’re raising for this, because you designated that charity.
You hit your goal. It goes there. Asterisk. The problem is that like your competitors will be like, Hey, everything you raise here stays with you no matter what. And you’re like, all right, for large players, I think that would be my suggestion. Yeah, George, that makes a lot of sense because my understanding is currently you can just keep raising your goal.
As, as the money flows in kind of Sprinkles needs a new tail, man. New tale for sprinkles. And I, it’s unfair for me to just say like, go fund me. They happen to be the largest player with over 15 billion raised a hundred million donors active in 19 countries. But there are others like Fundly, YouCaring, GiveForward.
There’s all of Facebook fundraisers. Like what am I like, what about that, George? Like CaringBridge HelpHopeLive. There are a number of these. Platforms that that are, I think, in some flavor leveraging extractive empathy.
Yeah, George, it’s a really, really interesting, really interesting take. And one I’m sure we’ll get some response to, which is always fun. We love engaging with the broader community. George, what did you mean by that? Please take a short clip of this and take it out of context and send all your anger into the YouTube comments.
I love it. All right, George. We want to go to our next one.
This article from the Guardian reports that more than 60 climate scientists from nine countries, including the UK, US and Australia, have signed a real zero pledge, arguing that carbon offsets are completely ineffectual and actually obstruct meaningful climate action. So the pledge is organized by Lethal Humidity Global Council.
That’s a mouthful. And they assert that true emission reductions are what’s needed, not the net zero strategies relying on carbon offsets. By the way, the idea of carbon offsets is if you’re some big corporation dumping whatever into the atmosphere, you can offset that by planting trees or preserving trees or some other kind of offset.
But scientists like Professor Michael Mann and Johan Rockström stress that offset programs, often based on forest preservation, fail to provide lasting emission cuts because there’s droughts and wildfires. And for the very same reasons that climate change is a problem, the carbon offsets provided by Forests and new planting are actually less effectual and what the article doesn’t talk about so much is very much that I think this has kind of been used a little bit as like a get out of jail free card for actually talk tackling the root causes of climate change in in a somewhat unhelpful way.
So what are your thoughts about this? I love this so much. This is just great work. I hope more people write about it. It deserves that sort of front page attention from major journalism outlets that, and it’s dangerous that you can basically you know, buy your way to buy your way out of bad corporate behavior by simply like, Hey, we’re carbon neutral.
Cause I paid this other company to go. Plant trees, do something as a carbon sink in the ocean, resell me, by the way, this says actually haven’t resell me areas of a preservation that other people have also bought, and so you have these like preservations that are getting sold and resold in exchange for carbon credits.
I think there is, I am going to be. Zero surprised as more articles come out about like, Hey, we, we looked at the past decade of carbon credit work and actually it was companies charging other companies and, and selling them to, you know, be able to get out of jail free for bad behavior. I do think there has to be like, just truthfully, like, look, there are companies that are going to be using and chewing up more energy than ever.
Ever before there has to be some sort of carbon credit system, but you know, you, you got to follow the money and follow the impact all the way to where the carbon goes and those solutions go. And they really point out that natural sinks, such as oceans and forests are already overburdened and they can’t compensate for ongoing high emissions.
Other studies have shown that if you covered this planet, like every spot you see with a tree and you’re like, go plant a tree, like it won’t cut it. So it, you know, doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Bad idea. I love this work. It’s fantastic. The guardian covered it. I recommend reading it, looking at it.
And like, there are so many other stories. If you were in the environmental sector, like go after this, pull the thread, write about it. I think you don’t need to research for more than like 30. Minutes to be like, Oh, no, yeah, it’s, it’s like lipstick on a pig, right? It’s like ESG portfolios on the stock market.
It’s like, you know, a clever way to get out of actually doing the hard work of, you know, removing hard labor from your supply chains or carbon from your emissions. But it’s real, it’s really going to matter as we move into the energy intensive work that AI requires. Every single time you generate an image with DALI 3, according to some research, it’s basically taking up the entire charge of a cell phone.
I want you to think about that. How many times we’re iterating and generating the many hundreds of millions of images a day because I need to make sure Sprinkles the cat has a good background for my Throwback, go fund me, to get the the tail replacement work. Oh man, we owe Sprinkles a treat after this.
Sprinkles has been through enough. Poor tail. I’m sorry. No, George, are you a dog or a cat person? I, you know what, I I grow where I’m planted. I’ve had both in my life, and I appreciate both dogs and cats. I have nine right now. I have children, which are a different variety of, uh, insanity. I, I, I believe it.
All right, George, I’ll take us into our next story. This one comes from non profit pro. And they write about a new report called Dollars and Change, which is released by Candid, Giving Tuesday, and Network for Good, which analyzed U. S. charitable giving trends from 2015 to 2022. And it provides a detailed view of capital flows within the non profit sector.
So the report highlights an increase in donations from both individuals, which were up 58 percent over this time frame, and institutions, which were up 74%. In this time frame with significant contributions from large donors, where 0. 3 percent of individual donors accounted for 45 percent of all donations and 0.
1 percent of institutional grant makers represented over a third of total grant dollars. So even though the numbers are going up, the amount of people who are contributing to significant portions is fairly small. There’s a lot to unpack in this report, George. But I think. An interesting dynamic for me, right?
As we talk a lot about the nonprofit we’ve had some soft. You know, giving Tuesdays and contribution supports and nonprofit financial struggles, but in the broad term, the past decade’s definitely been a boon for philanthropy, right? I think we could probably mark that as this report kind of inadvertently did with an increase in probably political activism and social change work and philanthropy in those spaces, but what do you make of this report broadly?
I especially saw this in 2023, where that trend really continued for decreased participation, but still marginal increase in donations. And it tacks back to what we talked about last show about Veblen giving and the macro trend of the fact that, you know, There are rich people and they are richer than ever before the 99 percent and the 1 percent the 1 percent having disproportionately more and more representing the bulk in terms of volume of net gift than individuals and individual participation declining.
And there are. Headwinds on that macroeconomics, decrease participation in religion, decrease participation hangover, I think from COVID and not being in and among communities as, as much those things may be starting to come back, but the, you know, the micro of analyzing giving Tuesday, I think helps in his very telling of the larger story going on.
On the point of Veblen giving is again, not to shake the fist at the sky saying like, Oh, these rich people giving money. Like it is just acknowledging that you shouldn’t be selling McLaren’s to people that want to buy M and M’s. You shouldn’t be selling M and M’s to people that want to buy McLaren’s McLaren’s very expensive cars.
Your high net worth individual donation strategy must be taken, I think, more seriously Then ever before, especially as participation drops. And if your single metric is participation, our number of donors is decreasing, where our fundraising team is screwing up. What are you guys doing? Like. Hold on, let’s, let’s look at the whole picture and also pay attention to the net gift, which something tells me like, you’re like, ah, participation does matter.
I agree. However, there is a threshold where after, let’s say 100, 200 donors, after you have a list of 10, 000, 20, 000 people, you have to acknowledge that there is a power law. 1 percent of those people have 99 percent of the wealth. They’re willing to buy. McLaren’s from you make large named gifts. for your capital campaigns, for your long term visions of change.
And it is a stacked strategy, but one you can’t ignore.
No, George, absolutely. I think that’s exactly right.
All right, George, I think it’s time for a feel good. And this one comes out of Austin. Particularly written by the Austin American Statesman which reports about how Afghan refugees are learning English through free nonprofit lessons provided by the organization, Ladies, Let’s Talk the Austin based organization providing classes to refugee women from Afghanistan.
In particular, completely free of charge and George after the United States withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ensuing takeover of the country by the Taliban. The flow of refugees from the country skyrocketed. There’s an estimated to be over 6, 000, 000 Afghan refugees in the diaspora spread across the world.
Most of them fled the country within the past couple of years, according to the United Nations. So, of course, there’s a lot of Afghan refugees in the United States and awesome to see organizations like this even small, small efforts, right, to help people find their footing in, in communities is great to see.
Yeah, actually in that. UNHCR report, they say that globally, nearly 11 million Afghans remain displaced almost all within their country or in neighboring countries due to the conflict, violence and poverty. Yeah, absolutely. It’s Yeah, it’s a, it’s a really sad situation and not, not to get into it, but what’s been happening in Afghanistan is, is devastating because it’s, it’s decades of, of progress and civil rights and access to education and all these things that were almost overnight taken away which is really devastating.
All right, George, after that, I think we need a joke. Was that supposed to be a feel good story? Did we mess up the ? I, I, I know George. Sorry, on that one. Oh, boy. Well, I got a great joke for you, George. One of my best. Are you ready? I am, I’m prepared as, as much as possible. Okay. Why were the corporations plans to tackle climate change?
So ineffectual I don’t know why. They were all just carbon coffees of each other. That’s the carbon’s the problem. Hey, I can’t fake laugh as well as you 📍 can, but I give that like a three out of 10, which gets you like, all right. And now I’m like, okay. Carbon carbon copies. Yeah. George, that’s three higher than I think you’d usually get.
