Soliciting small donations is called fund-raising. It involves straight-forward requests, bake sales, pay-per-mile jogs, and beef-steak dinners. It is not glamorous. Soliciting large donations is called development¹. It is glamorous. It involves managing relationships (see: SalesForce, Convio, Kintera.) People who work in development are ostensibly paid a premium because they either have or are capable of building a network of high net-worth contacts from which funding can be extracted. The more general the cause they advocate for, the more important they become.

Most not-for-profits favor development over the solicitation of small donations. This preference was probably justified in the past but now exists as a historical artifact — a philanthropic appendix.² The cost of building and maintaining a motivated army of constituents was much higher twenty years ago than it is now. However, with the advent of internet-based communications, it can now be practically free in terms of time and money. This preference may now persist due to certain cognitive biases. It may appear as though finding one large donation is more likely than finding N small donations of equal aggregate value.

For small highly-focused organizations, I believe this nearly ubiquitous preference is sub-optimal. The constituent beneficiaries also have networks of contacts: their friends and family. The relationships between the constituents and their friends and family are likely to be far stronger than anything a development professional could build. I have been impressed by the generosity of my own family and friends in supporting my cause. I was also impressed by the initial strong push made by the Chordoma community in general after I offered them a fund-raising tool. Unfortunately, the initial success of community fund-raising was soon marred by swift appearance of fund-raising fatigue. Ignoring the poor quality of the first implementation, I completely missed a very important feature set: feedback. I believe that novelty combined the promise of proactivity resulted in a strong drive at first. However, after funds had been collected, there was a post-endeavor funk. Money had been raised, but there was no obvious coincident progress made on the non-monetary front. (Such an expectation is not rational nor was it encouraged, but I assume it was a quietly held assumption nonetheless.)

I believe feedback mechanisms could alleviate this problem in the same way that repetition in marketing leads to consumer interest. Early on it was decided that coaching mechanisms — nagging reminders, occasional notifications of non-monetary progress, and reports on historical donors that have not given recently — would be beneficial. Unfortunately, life intervened and I never implemented those features. This is unfortunate as I subsequently concluded that such mechanisms are crucial. (I think MoveOn.org’s email campaigns are a paragon of good feedback mechanisms in fund-raising. Ignoring the accompanying inane commentary, they are brutally effective.)

I should also note that in favoring beneficiary empowerment, the organization does not preclude the possibility of receiving large donations. Again, exploiting the social connections of your constituents gives you a far deeper social reach than that offered by development professionals. For causes that affect people randomly across socio-economic parameters, you’re going to find some potentially wealthy individuals. The constituents are engaging in the search for wealthy donors at no expense, in time or money, to the organization. If they tease out a potential large donor, why should they then be referred to a development professional? The potential donors interest is already piqued. Now they need to be convinced that their money will not be given in vain. They need to be sold on the efficacy of the organization. The development professional could (and basically does) play this role. However, since it has already been established that the donor is a strong lead, this role could also be played by someone intimately involved in the actual decision making of the organization.

Obviously, I have made a lot of assumptions in asserting the superiority to community-style fund-raising over top-down development work. Some of these assumptions are known to me, but I am probably ignorant of others. I encourage the reader to leave comments to help guide me while building Fundify, which will act as a test of my fund-raising hypothesis.³ Expect to see an alpha with active deployment sometime in late December / early January.

Notes:

1. I strongly dislike the term development in this context, but it’s part of the industry nomenclature. In the non-profit world, development means a combination of marketing and one-on-one salesmanship.
2. Medical g33ks: I understand this might not be strictly true. Please refrain from commenting that this not a perfect analogy.
3. Actually, Fundify is being built to raise money for Chordoma research, a rare type of cancer. I have Chordoma. I would like to not have to worry about Chordoma. That being said, focusing on testing my hypothesis is a better motivational tactic. Intellectual curiosity is a robust motivator; Terror inspired by mortality is a persistent drain.

Cancer was cured decades ago. It is only because of the insidious activities of Big Pharma that these wonder drugs are not publicly available. Or at least, this is what a significant portion of people actually believe.

In truth, cancer is remarkably complex. The human body is both incredibly fault tolerant and very diligent when it comes to eradicating badly functioning cells. In order for a major cellular mistake to form and continue to multiply unchecked, the genetic aberration has to be extremely well-positioned. While modern medicine is impressive, it is still largely groping in the dark. It is not by greed’s hand that we have no cure for cancer; it is by the hand of complexity.

Furthermore, as is the case with most addle-minded conspiracies theories that pin the world’s ills on the activities of capitalism, this argument falls apart for a simpler reason: science is a team effort. It is highly unlikely that only one person would know of such a silver bullet. The set of people who make a career of medical research only to make money is dwarfed by the set of people who make a career of medical research to help the sick. In order for curative treatments to be mothballed in the name of profit, both the unbelievably greedy and the commonly compassionate would have to be convinced to keep quiet. What compensation would be required to silence both sets of people? Many of these researchers have dedicated their lives to demolishing specific diseases. It is highly unlikely that once doing so, they would take a massive payoff while sacrificing those whose lives they were hoping to save.

One common and valid argument in favor of non-profit research projects and against Big Pharma concerns profit incentives. Pharmaceutical companies do have a greater incentive to find treatments that require long-term (or permanent) reliance on their products than they do in finding curative drugs. It takes a monumental amount of money to search, select, develop, and bring a new drug to market. In order for a drug to be viable from an economic perspective, there must be a sizable market to offset these costs. It follows that treatments that are more likely to be approved while showing some efficacy — such as chemotherapeutic agents — would represent their more rational choice when allocating research and development budgets. Most Chemotherapeutic agents exploit small differences in the tolerance for damage between healthy and unhealthy cells. This requires the relative simplicity of observing rates of cell death after exposure to chemicals. Highly targeted molecular agents require a far greater understanding of the cell, accounting for pathways rife with feedback and cascading signals. It is far easier to design a carpet bomb than it is to design a cruise missile.

However, this does not mean that large government research efforts are the solution to the problem of this incentive structure. For one, they too have a similar incentive to pluck the apparently low hanging fruits represented by crude but simpler treatments. While their funding is not tethered to the democracy of market mechanisms, they are (almost as) accountable for results or lack-there-of. A highly-risky, speculative research project — one that has the potential to greatly advance the field of medicine — is judged only by its outcome. If a risky project fails to yield any useable knowledge or therapies, those who worked, approved, and funded the project will be judged harshly. Consequently, it often makes sense for decision makers to fund less risky projects (under the banner of “good science”). They can claim that were not expecting a miracle, only incremental advances. They fail to recognize (or state explicitly) that these minor incremental advances may be climbing a local minimum in the search space for therapies — the payoff may never come.

Assuming that both the for-profit and government inspired research projects are biased towards projects that, from the perspective of those afflicted with a disease, are suboptimal, a third source of research endeavors emerges — the non-profit sector. Researchers who want funding for projects that lie outside the comfort region of traditional sources of project funding would likely find the non-profit sector to be a strong ally. There is a general willingness — if not insistence — of cancer survivors to be part of any movement that marches towards cures and more humane treatments. If presented with projects that promise the possibility — however remote — of significant advances most cancer survivors are willing to contribute financially. While there is a risk of exploitation by quackish actors soliciting funds for poorly formed or entirely fraudulent projects, lightweight organizations acting as intermediaries between the researchers and donors would greatly reduce this threat. These organizations, being numerous, would increase the diversity of the portfolio for medical research.

While methodical, incremental research represents the bedrock of science, it is important to recognize that it is the large leaps resulting from the exploration of entirely new areas that often causes true progress. Large pharmaceutical companies and government research initiatives underweight the value of riskier projects for organizational reasons that are unlikely to change. Consequently, the burden of funding these projects falls to those more willing to take on risk — those affected by the diseases.