To the readers of Philanthropy Daily committed to strengthening civil society, fostering a thriving philanthropic sector, and serving others through their work: thank you.

These civic holidays are important days of rest not only for individuals, but for the opportunity they provide for friends and family to enjoy the spoils of civil society as they rest and spend time together. Labor Day in particular is an occasion not only to rest, but to remember those whose hard work built this great nation where we find our homes and identities—even as we join our labor with theirs in the work that lies ahead. 

Happy Labor Day!

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Now, though? I’m looking for ways to make AI useful. No doubt you are too. After all, generative AI is garnering comparisons to the printing press . . . nuclear bombs . . . and the invention of fire. Who wouldn’t want to harness the power of fire if it’s going around? No one wants to be the last caveman pounding out strips of raw meat.

Hence this article, which will almost certainly look comically naive and off-target in a few years. That aside, I want to take a stab at answering the question: How can ChatGPT (and other generative AI programs) help you produce the fundraising copy you need?

Here are a few preliminary observations, three cautionary and three suggestive, to set you on the path towards harnessing the power of generative AI in your day-to-day fundraising operations.

First: Garbage in, garbage out.

ChatGPT produces things for you with blazing speed, but it’s very difficult to get it to give you what you’re actually looking for. In wrestling with it through numerous rounds of promptings and revisions, I start to feel like Arthur Dent in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, spending untold hours talking to the Nutri-Matic beverage machine only for it to invariably produce “a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”

This is probably the most important thing to understand about ChatGPT: The results it gives are only as good as the prompts you give it. Ask a lazy question, get a lazy response.

For example: In writing this article, I put in the following prompt: “Please write me a 500-word article about using generative AI programs like ChatGPT in fundraising writing.”

And here’s the opening paragraph of what it churned out, a little ditty called “Leveraging Generative AI Programs like ChatGPT in Fundraising Writing”:

The intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and fundraising is a fascinating convergence of cutting-edge technology and the timeless art of inspiring generosity. As the demand for personalized, relevant, and engaging content increases in the fundraising sector, AI-driven tools, especially generative programs like ChatGPT, are taking center stage in addressing these needs.

Meh. It’s not awful (I like, for instance, the “convergence of cutting-edge technology and the timeless art of inspiring generosity.”) But for the most part, it’s boring . . . soulless . . . exactly the kind of dreck you’d expect a computer to spit out.

But look at the prompt I gave it. There’s precious little in those instructions besides “write me a piece about X.”

So I tried again, this time giving it guidelines on style, content, tone, and temperature (basically, how much or how little randomness and variability the algorithm will accept in producing new language). Here’s my prompt:

“Rewrite the article in the style of an Atlantic Monthly article, beginning with a striking anecdote. The revised article should integrate the five points into a more coherent flow, with several quotes from expert sources. The tone should be witty but concerned, and the temperature 0.7.”

And here’s what it gave me:

When a Machine Wrote an Appeal: Generative AI’s Foray into Fundraising

On a chilly morning in October, Susan, the director of a mid-sized nonprofit in Boston, received an appeal letter unlike any other. It was from a charity she’d supported for years, but this letter was uncannily perfect, tailored in a way that seemed to understand her past donations, her interests, even her passions. Two weeks later, at a charity event, she discovered the secret behind the letter: it was penned not by a human, but by an artificial intelligence program called ChatGPT.

Fundraising, the sacred dance of human connection, empathy, and generosity, is on the cusp of an AI revolution. From personalized outreach to crafting compelling narratives, programs like ChatGPT are reshaping how organizations communicate with their donor base.

“I’ve seen shifts in fundraising strategies over the decades, but AI-driven content? That’s an entirely new ballgame,” remarks Dr. Elizabeth Grant, a leading expert in nonprofit strategy at Harvard University. “It brings efficiency, but we need to ask, at what cost to the authenticity of our message?”

Pretty impressive, no? Still has that patina of soullessness, but it’s trending in the right direction. In my experience, the AI does its best work when you ask it to match styles. But the above example highlights a second problem with relying on generative AI.

Second: You cannot trust AI to provide you with reliable information.

Sad but true. In the above example, for instance, “Dr. Elizabeth Grant, a leading expert in nonprofit strategy at Harvard University,” was completely fabricated. Needless to say, there’s no evidence (on the internet, anyway) that this fictional person in fact discussed new ballgames or authenticity. ChatGPT made it up—as it did with the other two “expert quotes” requested in my prompt.

This is a problem. If we have no guarantee that generative AI programs won’t “hallucinate” our requested information, we gamble our accuracy and credibility every time we ask an AI program to come up with details for us.

It’s not just in generating new material, either. A few months back, I asked ChatGPT to summarize a long form essay I’d just read. Two of the four “takeaway points” it gave were fundamentally wrong—misrepresenting or inventing what was in the article.

Third: ChatGPT seems to suffer from short-term memory loss.

Maybe the problem is with me (if so, let me know in the comments!), but I cannot get ChatGPT to remember preceding steps or instructions, which makes complex operations difficult. When I tell it I’m going to teach it a style by feeding it different examples, it forgets after the first example what it’s doing and starts offering unwelcome analysis and pointers about the examples. When I give ask it to revise a document in one way, it forgets what the preceding requirements for the document were. In my experience, it struggles with complex writing in large part because it can’t remember anything you told it one step previously.

If you’re hoping ChatGPT can step in and handle all your writing needs, those are some hurdles you have to clear. It churns out boring, soulless prose. It makes stuff up. It can’t remember what you asked it a little while ago.

But did I mention it’s fast? Amazingly fast. That’s what an awful lot of its allure boils down to. It might give you subpar material, but it gives it to you instantly, with almost zero work on your part. It could be the holy grail of America’s obsession with low-hanging convenience.

Such snark sells generative AI short, however. This is a powerful tool. Here are three ways you can make it work for you:

1. Use it as an instructor.

Instead of relying on generative AI to catch a fish for you, ask it to teach you how to fish. It can generally crank out very good, detailed guidelines for how to write a specific kind of genre. It will provide you with templates and bulleted lists, putting you well on the way towards a solid first draft.

2. Use it for feedback.

There are certain things I would never trust ChatGPT on, such as making editorial adjustments. In one letter I asked it to evaluate and revise, almost every sentence it changed was changed for the worse. Its advice also skews milquetoast and establishment: it cautions you against things that might be edgy, controversial, or upsetting.

That said, it is tremendously useful when you ask it for a bulleted list of corrections or suggestions. It catches mistakes and makes good suggestions. It’s great at highlighting complex or confusing language. And if you give it specific terms to evaluate (“How could I make this email more donor-centric?”), it often offers very astute suggestions.

3. Give it discrete tasks.

As I mentioned in the first part of this article, if you ask ChatGPT (or any such generative AI program) to produce something long or complex, you’ll probably end up frustrated—in possession of a wealth of text that looks almost right but isn’t actually useful.

Your chances of success skyrocket when you assign short, discrete tasks. Ask it for ten teaser ideas for your mailing. Request that it outline the main objections to your argument or product pitch. Ask it to turn a complex paragraph into a simple bulleted list. Ask it to summarize and restate the main idea of your letter for the postscript. It can summarize, simplify, outline, rephrase, and much more. If you get a hang for using ChatGPT in the small things, it will almost certainly save you time and money.

Think about ChatGPT like a swift, indefatigable intern. You’re not going to trust the intern to handle highly sensitive material or produce distinctively excellent copy, but that doesn’t mean the intern isn’t useful. And this one doesn’t ever get confused, show up late, or eat all the Oreos.

“World’s fastest intern” might not sound like something on par with the invention of fire, but we’re only scratching the surface of what these generative AI programs can do. In a few years, when the robots are nuking the last human strongholds, this will all seem terribly quaint. Until then, good luck working ChatGPT into your fundraising writing. It can do remarkable things. Don’t forget to sound like a human, though.

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If you haven’t got time for the waiting game, as we crest into this new month, at least make time for Walter Huston singing September Song. Well, you may not call that “singing”—but then how would you describe the crooning of Bob Dylan when he recounts that the times are a-changin’? Or ponders the possibility of feeling like, well, a rolling stone? Gravelly works.

(By the way, isn’t that a nifty little nuance of our great language, adding the “a-“ and cutting the “g,” then caboosing an apostrophe, so stuff is “a-happenin’” and maybe we’re even “a-dancin’”?)

One last time/song/September reference before we get a-linkin’: In “The Fantastiks” (to which, back in 1982 or so, Yours Truly was able to take Then-Girlfriend-Now-Mrs. Yours Truly during its bajillion-performance original run down at the no-longer-there Sullivan Street Playhouse), the late and great Jerry Orbach (a member of the original cast) advised us to Try to Remember a certain kind of September. What a lovely and wise tune. Pay him heed.

Wait! Permit one truly final time / song / September / remember / rolling stone reference: Sunday will be the 3rd, a day that is always to be remembered by one family, the one whose Papa Was A Rolling Stone.

Sadly, all papa left them was alone. Here, we leave you (a-happily) with a bonanza of wonderful recommendations to kick-start your Labor Day weekend.

The Moss of Intelligence Grows Fat on This Rolling Stone of Recommended Readings

1. At National Review, the great David Bahnsen worries that the American economy may seem like it was Made in Japan. From the analysis:

From 2010 until the Covid year of 2020, there was not a single year of negative real GDP growth—there was no recession or even mini-recession to damage the data—and from 2010 through 2013, we were even in post-crisis recovery years, traditionally among the most robust for GDP growth owing to a “rebound” factor. And yet, alas, for 15 years now, the U.S. economy has averaged precisely half of its post-war real GDP-growth rate: just 1.6 percent net of inflation per year. Furthermore, not a single year in this period reached the 70-year average level of 3.1 percent, except 2021, when Covid reopenings pushed the number cosmetically higher but mostly made up for a huge lockdown-induced contraction the year before. Altogether the 2020–21 period averaged 1.6 percent annual growth—exactly the same as the decade prior to Covid. It is surreal to think of 2018 and its 2.95 percent real GDP growth as the high-water mark of the post-financial-crisis era. Fresh off the Trump tax cuts, a fair amount of domestic investment following the repatriation of foreign profits, accelerated expensing and bonus depreciation for various business expenditures, and a surge in business optimism after various 2017 economic-policy implementations, we got up to a 2.95 percent growth rate—for one year!

The lack of a recession in the postcrisis period has distracted us from the most significant economic story of our lifetimes—that American economic growth is stagnating before our very eyes and in a truly secular and embedded sense. Unlike a jolt of economic change or an idiosyncratic event such as Covid, the last 15 years have seemingly become a “new normal,” with depressing implications for the future. Many economic bears look to depressions, recessions, and significant episodes of distress as their markers, but the new U.S. economic story has become something altogether different—and in many ways worse. It has become Japan.

2. At The 74, wise man Bruno Manno explores a new survey of high-schoolers and their hopes and anxieties about their future. From the piece:

But education today is in a time of disruption and transition. In many respects, it’s not meeting the needs of young people as they enter a changing workforce.

Maybe it’s time to ask high school students what they need most.

The June 2023 “Question the Quo” nationally representative survey of high school students ages 14 to 18 does just that. It documents Gen Z high schoolers’ views and shifting priorities on education and work. It was conducted by the nonprofit ECMC Group in partnership with VICE Media, the seventh survey report since 2020.

It turns out that Gen Z high school students have new and sensible ideas about the relationship between their K-12 education, going to college and starting a career. They want K-12 to provide them with practical knowledge and skills that lead to more education, training and career options after graduation than they now have. Policymakers and educators can and should take these views into serious consideration as they map out new programs and reforms.

3. At City Journal, Samuel Kronen makes the case for the continued importance of the late life-affirming author and psychologist, Victor Frankl. From the essay:

It was here that Frankl’s vision really took hold. The nihilism of the modern age that lacked moral concern for suicide, Frankl later argued, was, at bottom, the same antilife sentiment motivating Hitler’s euthanasia programs.

In Yes to Life, Frankl takes us through the counterarguments to the proposition that life has intrinsic value, going through all the ways that life could be stripped of sense—incurable or terminal illness, mental illness, disability, loss, imprisonment, sterility—to make a case for the inherent sanctity of life. No amount of anguish or adversity can truly take away our humanity, he says. Being human precedes our capacity to be productive, functional, or even mentally sound.

Frankl tells many stories of seemingly hopeless situations in which a person was ultimately able to transcend his circumstances—not by changing them but by changing his attitude toward them. He once treated a young man who was a successful advertiser before he became paralyzed with a spinal tumor. Instead of falling into self-pity and depression, the man achieved a sense of life and purpose by doing everything he still could in his passive state—reading, having stimulating conversations with fellow patients and staff, and so on. As his condition worsened, however, he could no longer do even these things. One evening, he beckoned Frankl to his bedside and told him that he thought it was probably his last night alive, and asked for his dose of morphine now, so that he would not disturb Frankl later and the doctor could prioritize other patients. The man held on to a kind of grace to the last. For Frankl, anecdotes like this were not the exception but the rule.

4. At Law & Liberty, Graham McAleer dives into Albert Camus’s The Rebel and discerns its cautionary advice for a West that fails to accept the limitations of the cosmos. From the essay:

Camus argues that German despair was brought on by a collapse in value consensus: “There was no longer any standard of values, both common to and superior to all these men, in the name of which it would have been possible for them to judge one another.” America is roiled by debates about fairness, care of the migrant and unborn, the proper spheres of government and corporations, and even nature’s great standard, the difference between a man and a woman. As we whittle value consensus down to the vanishing point, Camus would predict rising despair. He would also not be surprised. The ideological strains on Germany in the ’30s were not unique to that country, he thought, but a feature of Western civilization. The problem, according to Camus, was a bad philosophy of history, and the problem had been festering for a long time. At the Nuremberg Trials, Hans Frank, the Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland, testified that Hitler had a “hatred of form.” That is where we are today, too. Even nature’s most basic forms are now discussed in terms of phobias.

Camus tags Hitler as a convulsionist, someone bent on self-creation because he is utterly intolerant of the limits placed upon us by the cosmos. Inherited, settled forms of thinking and behaving were all cast off, and all emphasis was placed on will, propulsion, and energy. “Neither by culture nor even by instinct or tactical intelligence was he equal to his destiny.” Camus’s point is that Hitler’s murderous dynamism was a phenomenon of our civilization. At Nuremberg, only at times did “the real subject of the trial, that of the historic responsibilities of Western nihilism” come into view. The reason is clear: “A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization.” As we puzzle over our own convulsionists, we can usefully ask Camus’s question again: How did the West—heir to the Pantheon in Rome and the Cathedral in Chartres—end up believing in formless history? What changes in ideas unmoored us from the cosmos and tied our sense of well-being so thoroughly to novelty instead of the ancestral?

5. At Front Porch Republic, Anthony Esolen remembers Little League before the times got a-changin’. From the essay:

That field on Laurel Street was in the middle of an old neighborhood, so the people who lived nearby would hear the sing-song of the boys in the field as they encouraged their pitcher to “fire one in there,” and then the cheers for a nice catch in the field or a double smacked down the line. Parents and siblings showed up to watch the games, often leaning against the chain-link fence that bounded the field, chatting about this and that. In my early years, we didn’t even have paid umpires; we took volunteers, usually a man behind home plate and a teenage boy out in the field. You never wanted your father to be an umpire, because then all the close calls would go against you; that’s one of the things learned in that mysterious School for Fathers that has no walls and no curriculum, but is to be found everywhere and in all ages.

Little League then was only for boys, and that was right. The girls didn’t mind. We did have, for a while, a Miss-E Softball League, but it soon folded. Still, why not have those early-growing tomboy-girls play baseball with the boys? People had an instinctive sense that it wasn’t fitting. The result was that you had many more boys playing than otherwise, because the less athletic or the more slowly maturing among them didn’t have to sweat out competition against girls, and this helped them define themselves as boys, giving them a good experience of boyish camaraderie and teamwork.

6. At The American Conservative, Alexander Zubatov makes the indictment against public education. From the piece:

That our public spaces and even the overwhelming majority of our families would be abject failures at educating children is the juncture at which we have arrived by outsourcing the task to the priesthood of “professional” educators. Those educators serve their own masters and have their own agenda, which is not ours. As I have previously explained, today, a disturbing proportion of that agenda comes from a single 1968 tract written by Paolo Freire, a Brazilian Marxist who saw education in its rightful form as laying the bedrock for a revolution. To an extent, Freire’s was a misguided response to the very circumstances Brownson had warned against. Freire saw the high priests of pedagogy treating students as passive receptacles into which deposits of knowledge could be made. That knowledge was of a sort that merely prepared those students to become cogs in the machinery of their own oppression.

Freire’s proposed countermeasure was a dialogic, problem-posing education in which there were no teachers, no students, and no preconceived curriculum, but rather, student-teachers and teacher-students who learned from one another and wherein the students’ experiences, interests, and worldviews would anchor their own learning and guide the course of their studies. And yet Freire’s gesture of swearing off any curriculum animating the educational mission cannot be taken at face value: The ultimate end-goal of revolution, the preparation of these students to overthrow their masters and oppressors, was never far from his sights, and he made that goal perfectly explicit. Liberation is “the objective to be achieved,” he explains. The student learns through “participat[ion] in the revolutionary process,” as “the revolutionary process is eminently educational in character.” His brand of education through dialogue segues into a “cultural revolution” as “a necessary continuation of the dialogical cultural action which must be carried out before the revolution reaches power.”

7. At Public Discourse, Sarah Reardon realizes that gardening is beautiful but insufficient . . . but maybe also compensatory. From the essay:

Yet there are other gathering places and activities that could strengthen social ties even more powerfully. Gardening demands a certain amount of labor that a bar doesn’t require of its customers, for the garden’s central endeavor is not relaxation but loving and patient work. Thus, a garden promises less entertainment and amusement than a third place does, demanding instead focus, effort, and attention. Because it’s not passive or consumptive, it is less conducive to the conversation and dialogue that a bar or diner might allow. A garden, therefore, is not a place for discussion and debate where unexpected consensus might emerge.

But one look at social media suggests that mere cultivation of public conversation cannot create a spirit of friendship. The free-speech optimists who think open conversation is sufficient for civic cohesion rely on a utopian view of human nature: we need only rub elbows at the pub and talk things over, and our issues will eventually resolve themselves.

Spontaneous agreement and goodwill, in other words, are unlikely to emerge by convening at third places. Today’s local establishments—many of which donned rainbow flags and signs declaring that “hate has no place here” last month—indicate that many modern commercial places by themselves are insufficient to create common ground. The ground of the garden poses a different possibility for connection, one that compensates for some of the deficiencies of third places. At shared gardens, neighbors connect through a shared project. Fellow gardeners enjoy the increasingly neglected endeavor of working the ground.

8. At Plough Quarterly, Mary Townsend unpacks the practice of hatred and creating enemies. From the article:

Indeed, I have even heard it argued among authors of my acquaintance that it is pleasant to do a certain amount of conscious cultivation of this sort, taking an ordinary human with whom you have a vague rivalry, and enjoying the sensation of imagining this person into something of more importance, someone to scheme about, to rejoice or moan at any failure or triumph. Partly, this is a way of keeping yourself on your toes, particularly if other people happen to have picked you to cultivate as their own cheerful enemy-project. It also gives you a sense of importance, as someone distinguished enough to have an enemy, as you might own a particularly expensive watch. (Of course, this elevates the importance of the enemy as well.)

But amidst all this comedy, it should be obvious that it is terrible, actually, to have a real enemy, and probably worse than having a testy neighbor. It is no fun to get a nasty email, or even to be cut from a party, not to mention if someone tries to get you fired, or spreads malicious gossip. . . .

So why then does that temptation to invest in something as really dangerous as an enemy remain? Consider what making an enemy out of someone concretely does to the shape of your soul. In a sense, to pin the tail on the donkey of a rival in this way animates something that was not, strictly speaking, alive before. Hence the saying to “have an animus” for someone, so much does hatred seem to be creative in its energies. This creative energy even extends to actual inanimate objects – when something as banal as a toaster or the kitchen sink doesn’t act as you like it, you treat it as though that toaster had a self, a self you could blame for your burnt toast.

9. At First Things, Francis Maier explores Pope Francis’s ongoing public acida with his American Catholic critics. From the commentary:

Critics are not always enemies. Some speak out of love, even when their words are heated.

Pope Francis’s distaste for the United States is not well disguised. As an American, I find that unfortunate, but also understandable. Washington has a long and often ugly record of interference in Latin American affairs. As an American Catholic, I wish he had more trust in our bishops, overwhelmingly faithful men, and more sensitivity to the intense challenges the American Church now faces. I also think the pope’s China policy is gravely unwise. But the Church has often played the long game successfully, so yes, I could be wrong.

What I’m not wrong about is the curious nature of the pope’s recent interview with the Spanish-language platform Vida Nueva, as reported here. The report is worth reading. Francis has a gift, intentional or otherwise, for unhelpful generalities. He suggests that a Vatican III would be premature because “Vatican II still has not been implemented.” That would be news to his two predecessors (three counting Paul VI) who, unlike Francis, actually attended the council and labored mightily—along with a great many other people, not all of them acceptably “progressive”—to incarnate its teachings in the life of the Church. Francis worries about corrupt restorationists, “right-wing ideologies,” and priests who go into neighborhoods to “dogmatize.” But they’re hardly the most dangerous problems facing the Church. Western civilization is drowning in elitist scientism, economic inequities, sexual anarchy, crackpot transhumanist dreaming, and assaults on marriage, family, and biblical anthropology. These might warrant some priority. And the unnamed “prophets of confusion” the pope mentions in his interview as undermining the mission of the Church might be found quite generously even among some of the Holy Father’s loudest supporters.

10. At Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty, Christine Rosen looks at conservatism and does not find the corpse Jon Askonas declared in a recent issue of Compact. From the essay:

Askonas never offers a proper definition of the role of tradition, but philosopher Roger Scruton’s description will do: “For the conservative, human beings come into this world burdened by obligations, and subject to institutions and traditions that contain with them a precious inheritance of wisdom, without which the exercise of freedom is as likely to destroy human rights and entitlements as to enhance them.”

Note that Scruton, like most conservative writers, more often speaks of traditions, plural, not “Tradition.” That is because many forms of tradition flourish in different communities, in different times and places, and of course not all of them (foot-binding, sati) are worth bequeathing to future generations. For conservatives, traditions are not static things; they can and must change to fit new circumstances. But conservatives also believe that such change should come slowly, thoughtfully, and with humility—weighing the benefits and drawbacks. As Kirk observed, “Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors . . . they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.”

Conservatives believe that traditions serve as moderating influences on the deeply human desire for change, not a means of suffocating that desire. As Edmund Burke wrote in a 1792 letter, “We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.” Or, as Kirk put it, “Conservatism is never more admirable than when it accepts changes that it disapproves, with good grace, for the sake of a general conciliation.”

11. At Tablet Magazine, Stuart Halpern finds among American politicians and activists a fascination with and affection for Daniel, he of the lion’s den. From the article:

John Adams, later to become America’s second president, believed that Daniel modeled leadership qualities for the young country. Writing to James Warren in April 1776, he said: “the management of so complicated and mighty a Machine, as the United Colonies, requires the Meekness of Moses, the Patience of Job, the Wisdom of Solomon, add to the Valor of Daniel.”

The struggle for the abolition of slavery, and later civil rights, also saw Daniel’s courage as inspiring the cause. A well-known spiritual used the story of Daniel in the lion’s den as a metaphor for deliverance from slavery and injustice. The spiritual begins, “didn’t my Lord deliver Daniel . . . and why not every man?” Frederick Douglass, in Chapter 11 of his autobiography, writes that he “felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions.” And in October 1864, Sojourner Truth, the escaped slave turned abolitionist and women’s rights activist, thought of the story while visiting President Lincoln. Truth, who never learned to read or write, was a devoted student of the Bible. She saw in the Great Emancipator shades of Babylon’s great visionary:

I said to him, Mr. President, when you first took your seat I feared you would be torn to pieces, for I likened you unto Daniel, who was thrown into the lion’s den; and if the lions did not tear you into pieces, I knew that it would be God that had saved you; and I said if he spared me I would see you before the four years expired, and he has done so, and now I am here to see you for myself.

Decades later, in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. drew comfort from Daniel’s friends’ faith amid the fire, musing: “Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved.”

12. Out in Oregon at the Philomath News, Brad Fuqua reports on a firewood fundraiser that raised big bucks for the local youth center. From the article:

From that 2001 effort, the organization’s firewood fundraiser took off. Sales reached more than 50 cords in 2010 and nine years later surpassed 70 for the first time. In 2020 and 2021 as the pandemic raged on, orders surpassed 90.

“It really is one of those fundraisers that is kind of unique to Philomath,” Van Vlack said. “It matches our community pretty well.”

This year, it appears the project will hit 100 cords in sales.

“The program has grown so much — really since 2019 was the year it exploded,” Van Vlack said. “We started out at about four cords, we got it up to an average of about 40 to 50 and now, we’ve been at 90 to 100.”

Lucky 13. At The Spectator, Bill Kauffman opts for Plan B and tells of vacationing in Scranton, west of Capri. From the beginning of the piece:

Our big adventure this summer was supposed to be a trip to the Capri for a young friend’s wedding, but there was a hitch in the plan. You see, in my six decades on this orb I never have gotten the hang of this whole money thing. (Whose idea was it, anyway?) But I am blessed in countless ways, not least by having married a woman who, when she moved east from Los Angeles, expressed a wish to see two places: Cleveland and Utica. So Lucine and I hitchlessly shifted to Plan B. Capri was out, replaced by an overnight in Scranton, Pennsylvania, followed by a visit to Centralia, the Keystone State’s ghost town, under which a coal-mine fire has burned since 1962.

Don’t think that I was acting out of tightfistedness. Rather, our trip was consistent with the aphorism of midcentury Western historian and essayist Bernard DeVoto: “Why see Paris, France, if you haven’t seen Paris, Illinois?”

I have long nursed a hypocritical disdain for travel, adverting in a pinch to the occasionally peripatetic American sage Ralph Waldo Emerson, who between far-flung lecture gigs declared, “I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that you have no task to keep you at home?”

So in opting for Pennsylvania over Capri we were acting in conformance with Transcendentalist principles.

Bonus: At Catholic World Report, Julian Kwasniewski questions the great Irish scholar Mark Dooley about the cultural fate of his native land. From the interview:

CWR: You have called Ireland the “woke capital of Europe.” Would you say that the rapidity of cultural and religious change in Ireland over the past 40 years is largely an attempt to prove that Ireland is no longer its historically backward, insular, and Catholic self?

Dooley: Yes, that is true to a large extent.

When we gained our independence from Britain, the aim was to establish a Catholic identity. Indeed, Irish identity was Catholic identity. There was no area of Irish life exempt from the Church’s influence. However, the appalling revelations regarding child sex abuse completely eroded the Church’s moral standing in Ireland, ultimately leading to its tragic decline today.

At the same time, progressive forces saw their opportunity and agitated for social changes which not only defied Catholic teaching but sought to eradicate Catholicism from every area of Irish life. And so now we have swung to the other extreme: a country that wildly embraces every woke cause and one that considers religion the enemy of freedom. Of course, the “freedom” they speak of is not freedom at all but license to do whatever one wishes.

Hegel called that “hedonism”, by which he meant addiction masquerading as liberty.

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. Last chance to sign up for the September 7th AmPhil “Scotch Talk” on grant writing and foundation fundraising. Joining host Jeremy Beer in the wisdom-share on these matters of profound importance to nonprofit aficionados will be Iain Bernhoft and Stephanie D’Anselmi, on hand to discuss writing polished and compelling grant proposals, wooing foundation officers, and plenty more. So get your favorite tumbler, fill it with some welcome libation, and join the conversation. Register right here.

Due. Get a-registerin’ for the forthcoming Center for Civil Society conference on “Rise of the Nones: How Declining Religious Affiliation Is Changing Civil Society.” It takes place on November 7–8 in glorious Scottsdale, AZ. Speakers include Shelby Steele and Mary Eberstadt (dang!). Get complete information right here.

Tre. Another reminder, this from Philanthropy Daily, where Jonathan Hannah tells of the 2024 AmPhil Fundraising Fellowship. From the piece:

The AmPhil Fundraising Fellowship is a nine-month leadership program where fellows will learn the history of philanthropy in American civil society, explore contemporary issues related to fundraising, and complete a personal project enabling them to bring value to their nonprofit organization.

Fellows will meet virtually on a monthly basis to discuss readings, workshop ideas, and examine the vocation of fundraising. Fellows will also have special access to AmPhil’s online educational opportunities, including our In the Trenches master classes, and will be invited to our annual Givers, Doers, & Thinkers Conference, which will take place in Southern California in October of 2024.

Interested? If so, you’ll find complete information here.

Quattro. If fundraising for nonprofits is your game, then you just gotta attend AmPhil’s forthcomg “In the Trenches” Master Class (Thursday, October 12th, via Zoom, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern), on “Integrating Direct Mail and Digital Outreach.” This session will be a goldmine of wisdom. Get your pick and shovel and sign up—easily done right here. (And one day, when our paths cross, you can say, “I’m so glad I took your advice about that class, Yours Truly!”)

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: Why did Arnold Palmer bring extra pairs of socks with him to the golf tournament?

A: In case he got a hole in one.

A Dios

James Buckley’s funeral was, as funerals go, or as anything might go, a beautiful service about a beautiful and holy man. His daughter Priscilla offered—grace-filled—what may be the most exquisite eulogy one could ever, or will ever, hear. She has kindly allowed National Review to publish it. You will find it here.

May We Seek and Be Blessed with the Wisdom to Know Every Season and Its Purpose,

Jack Fowler, who turns, turns, turns at jfowler@amphil.com.

The post When Life Was Slow and Oh So Mellow appeared first on Philanthropy Daily.

The two have overlapping themes. For instance, in dating, we have the courtship stage, where you spend a lot of time getting to know each other. Then, there’s the engage-and-commit stage, where you work hard on strengthening that bond through understanding each other’s needs and wants. And finally, there’s the partnership stage, where you have decided to commit to each other for the long term.

The dynamic between a nonprofit organization and a donor is quite similar—nonprofits spend the majority of time getting to know their donors, learning what drives their generosity, and communicating with them consistently to ensure relationship longevity. However, in the nonprofit sector, we tend to refer to these periods as donor cultivation, donor stewardship, and donor retention. And no matter what stage you’re in, one thing remains true: moving the relationship forward requires a delicate balance of listening, connecting, learning, and suggesting.

But wait, now it sounds like we just threw a bunch of jargon at you. What’s the difference between cultivation, stewardship, and retention, anyway?

Here’s a quick breakdown:

Donor Cultivation:

At this initial phase, a nonprofit and a potential donor are in the process of getting to know each other.
The goal is to persuade the potential donor of the organization’s worthiness for their support.
This is achieved by sending tailored messages to those who’ve shown interest in the cause but haven’t yet donated, using content that resonates with them.

Donor Stewardship:

While cultivation introduces and persuades, donor stewardship deepens the relationship post-donation.
Donor stewardship involves segmenting donors based on where they are in their donor journey and communicating the ongoing case for support.
The emphasis here is on making donors feel valued, ensuring they’re inclined to give again—keeping your organization top of mind.

Donor Retention:

Donor retention is the art of keeping a donor engaged long-term.
Regular, impactful interactions are crucial to maintain the connection.
Beyond the initial gift, it’s about fostering a lasting bond. Through consistent appreciation and relevant communication, the relationship with your donor doesn’t just endure but thrives.

Stewardship aims for the next gift; retention plays the long game. Yet, it’s the steady rhythm of donor stewardship that keeps donors coming back.

Let’s talk about five donor stewardship strategies and how they can help build and retain healthy donor relationships.

1. Donor Stewardship Starts With ‘Thank You’

After a donation, an email receipt is just table stakes. But does your conversation with donors end there? If so, hit the drawing board and start building a donor stewardship strategy. Every donor, whether they chip in a little or a lot, needs more than a digital nod. They need a strategy that echoes gratitude. Without it, they might wonder if their generosity even mattered. And that’s a feeling no donor should ever have.

Prioritize Gift Acknowledgment

Thanking your donors should be a priority for your donor stewardship efforts. In today’s connected world, there is no shortage of charitable organizations to give to. The truth is even if you think your mission is unique, odds are there’s a nonprofit with a similar mission within a 50-mile radius. So, if you don’t take the time to thank your donors, how do you expect to retain them?

Donation acknowledgment isn’t sending one quick thank-you email. Your fundraising efforts should go beyond what a donor expects. Kieran Raval, Managing Director and Chief Solutions Officer of Amphil, emphasizes the need for consistency by recommending, “Thank donors multiple times across multiple channels, especially pick up the phone for lower-level donors.”

“Thank donors multiple times across multiple channels, especially pick up the phone for lower-level donors.”

Kieran Raval, Managing Director and Chief Solutions Officer of Amphil

Donor retention is more than getting a second gift—it’s engaging donors and unlocking their generosity time and time again. But again, if you aren’t properly thanking a donor—why would they want to give to your organization again?

Remember, it’s not just about the major donors. Donor stewardship starts with a personalized, meaningful thank-you to all donors in all giving capacities.

Do you need a better acknowledgment process, but you don’t know where to start? Mike Esposito, CFRE, Director of Growth and Strategy at Hudson Ferris, shares his strategy for ensuring a first-time donor comes back to give again, “Analyze your gift acknowledgment process and ask the following question: ‘Are our gift acknowledgment letters being sent out in a timely manner?’ If an organization forgets to acknowledge a donor or acknowledges their donation at a much later date, it will likely lose the donor.”

Esposito expresses the importance of urgency, “Development staff should be sending gift acknowledgment letters to their donors within 48 hours of receiving a donation.”

“Development staff should be sending gift acknowledgment letters to their donors within 48 hours of receiving a donation.”

Mike Esposito, CFRE, Director of Growth and Strategy at Hudson Ferris

Make Your Donor Stewardship Efforts Easier With Automation

By now, you likely understand how your donor stewardship efforts play a part in your retention strategy and are ready to update your gift acknowledgment process. At the same time, your team is already overwhelmed with its current list of to-dos. ‘

How can you alleviate staff burden but also find more time to commit to thanking your donors?

Take the pressure off your team and implement a solid donor stewardship plan with the right set of automation tools. With Virtuous’ responsive donor database, you can automate customized workflows at scale—including sending personalized and timely thank-you messages—to build donor loyalty and increase your donor retention rate.

Automating online communications in your donor database frees up staff time to perform more meaningful relationship-building tasks like personally calling donors to thank them or writing handwritten thank-you letters.

2. Share the Impact Your Donors Are Making

People donate because your cause strikes a chord. Whether it’s the mission’s pull or a story that hits home, something made them feel and act. They didn’t just give—they connected.

But how can you keep them engaged to continue giving? Sure, donor stewardship is about thanking supporters for their generosity. But after you’ve said “thank you” in a variety of ways, what else can you do to show them they made a difference and build a deeper relationship?

Donors don’t just give—they want to see the ripple. It’s personal. They link their generosity to your mission. So, show them the difference their dollar made.

“Bring donors into the life of the organization by showing how their gift made an impact.”

Kieran Raval, Managing Director and Chief Solutions Officer of Amphil

Examples of How to Communicate Impact in Your Donor Stewardship

Your donors deserve to know how they’re serving their community and why their donation matters. Giving them measurable impact allows them to understand how they’re affecting change and provides them with an incentive to continue giving to your organization.

“Let your donors know why their gift matters and the impact they are having on your programs. Reporting back should be done consistently and regularly,” Jocelyn Kwok, Principal Consultant of jskwok consulting, emphasizes.

“Let your donors know why their gift matters and the impact they are having on your programs. Reporting back should be done consistently and regularly.”

Jocelyn Kwok, Principal Consultant of jskwok consulting

Once a donor understands what kind of impact their donation has on your organization, they’ll be more inclined to return and increase their donation frequency—maybe even sign up for your monthly program. It all depends on how you’re communicating that impact and if you’re doing it in a meaningful way that inspires action and leads to loyal donors.

Ready to communicate impact to your donors to build a deeper relationship? Here are some ideas to consider.

HIGHLIGHT IN YOUR NEWSLETTER

If you’re already sending out donor communications via a monthly newsletter, designate a section to highlight impact metrics about your fundraising campaign. Get engaging elements in there like a fundraising thermometer so donors can visualize how much they were able to raise collectively as a community.

While it’s vital to share the total amount raised by donors, it’s equally important to show its tangible impact. For instance, if your mission is to protect endangered elephants in Asia and you’ve raised $100,000, don’t just state the amount. Instead, convey the real-world difference:”Together, the generosity of our donors helped us rebuild 25 habitats across six countries in Asia. Now, 110 elephants have a safe place to live and thrive.”

Make it fun! You can even gamify the experience by including something like “Top Fundraisers” if you recently launched a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.

SOCIAL MEDIA SHOUTOUTS

After your fundraising campaign closes out, do a social media roundup! It can be as simple as thanking donors collectively for their generosity and following it with what your organization is now able to do with those extra funds (e.g., bring clean water to 10 more communities or purchase school supplies for 500 kids).

You can even do individual shoutouts on your social media channels—with their permission, of course. If you do decide to go this route, make sure all the information you decide to include has been approved by the donor. Sometimes, people like to give anonymously and prefer not to have that information public. Other times, donors enjoy the extra recognition.

ONE-ON-ONE PHONE CALLS

Get personal with donors with a traditional phone call. They’ll appreciate the thoughtfulness of taking time out of your day to reach out to them individually.

Take advantage of the one-on-one time to get to know them more. Ask them how they’re doing, and then thank them for their recent gift. Don’t forget to share some impact metrics so they have an idea of how their contribution made a difference in someone’s life.

If you’re not able to reach them, don’t just hang up. Leave a voicemail briefly explaining why you’re calling and invite the donor to give you a callback.

3. Use Segmentation to Improve Donor Stewardship

Your donor stewardship strategy should include donor segmentation. Don’t make the mistake of sending one mass email to all of your donors. These types of messages often lack engagement since they address a broad audience. By segmenting donors based on their behavior and preferences, you can tailor and personalize your messages for greater impact.

There are infinite ways to create donor segments for your acknowledgment emails. For example, you can segment by campaign, by type of donor, by demographics, by the type of content they engage with—the list goes on.

Ben Domingue Director at Amphil offers practical advice for using segmentation to retain donors, “Segment where you are losing the most amount of donors. Is it major donors? Are they mid-level donors? Understand where they’re being lost, then devise a strategy to engage that segment. It could be visits to major donors, phone calls to mid-tiers, or a mailing reminding donors they need to re-activate their gift. Many times, donors just forget.”

“Segment where you are losing the most amount of donors.”

Ben Domingue, Director at Amphil

Using marketing automation tools like Virtuous—nonprofits can segment donors, create specific recipient lists, and automate email schedules based on donor actions. For example, if a one-time donor responds to monthly giving appeals and becomes a recurring donor, the system automatically shifts them to the monthly donor list. This ensures they receive personalized communications specifically designed for monthly donors, all without your team lifting a finger.

When you build these automated emails, just be sure to add personal information so the email doesn’t sound generic. Incorporate details like the recipient’s first name, donation amount, and campaign name using merge tags. This helps prevent the email from feeling like a generic message sent to everyone.

Another tip: Use a plain-text email instead of an HTML-coded one and have it signed by a member of your team. This personal touch helps donors feel appreciated and gives them a genuine person to connect with. Remember, people give to people—not marketing machines.

4. Build a Community of Long-Term Supporters

Community is an essential part of a thriving nonprofit. The organizations that are maintaining a high average donor retention rate are the ones that have fostered meaningful connections among supporters—thanks to an effective donor stewardship plan.

If you have donors, you’re already ahead of the curve. The foundation of any community is having like-minded individuals come together in support of something they care about. In this case, it’s your mission! So, how can you move the needle on this?

“One great strategy is to launch a donor club. This gives you the benefit of reminding donors their membership is an annual one and to activate now with a gift,” Domingue suggests.

“One great strategy is to launch a donor club. This gives you the benefit of reminding donors their membership is an annual one and to activate now with a gift.”

Ben Domingue, Director at Amphil

The membership element adds exclusivity to the group—plus, since they have to donate a certain amount to become a member, you’re retaining that donor for at least a year. Be sure to keep in consistent communication with these members and offer “perks” for being a member. This could be some kind of gift (like swag) or an in-person gathering to thank them for being loyal supporters.

Putting in the extra effort will keep them engaged throughout the year. They might even make additional donations along the way, which will add to their lifetime value.

Membership offers an exclusive feel to a group. By setting a specific donation amount to join, you ensure donor commitment for at least a year. Regularly communicate with these members and provide member-only benefits, such as gifts (like swag) or special events.

Putting in the extra effort will keep them engaged throughout the year. They might even make additional donations along the way, increasing their lifetime value to your shared cause.

Find Opportunities to Connect In Person

Perhaps the most effective way to build long-term relationships with donors and promote a sense of community is by organizing face-to-face donor appreciation and fundraising events.

Kwok encourages you to get creative, “Engage donors with your organization. Are there opportunities for donors to get an inside look at your program or to meet some of the beneficiaries?”

“Engage donors with your organization. Are there opportunities for donors to get an inside look at your program or to meet some of the beneficiaries?”

Jocelyn Kwok, Principal Consultant of jskwok consulting

5. Learn From Your Data and Improve Donor Stewardship

Your donor stewardship plans should reflect what information you have in your database. The data that you have in your CRM tells you everything you need to know about how your donors want to be engaged and what type of content they’re interested in receiving.

It all starts with having an efficient CRM system that can help you unlock these learnings. With Virtuous’ donor management software, nonprofits no longer have disparate data across different platforms. It allows you to house all of your donor data in one easy-to-digest and customizable dashboard.

As a best practice, Esposito urges you to track stewardship touch points in your CRM and incorporate automation and AI in your processes to increase efficiency.

So, how can you use your data to inform your donor stewardship plan? Here are four steps to consider, according to Diana Hoyt, Chief Strategist and Trainer of Formula for Fundraising:

Run specific donor analytics to understand where the issues are.
Attach donors to the numbers.
Create fundraising strategies based on those two pieces of information.
Use the strategies to develop the fundraising plan.

Good Donor Stewardship Practices Lead to Retention

By now, you understand the important role of stewardship in donor retention. Ultimately, if you want to retain donors and get those recurring gifts, it all starts with having an all-encompassing donor stewardship plan. That means you’re building an inclusive acknowledgment process so every donor understands how much you appreciate their support.

But it also means you’re optimizing, personalizing, and scaling your process to include data learnings, automation, and segmentation. Donors shouldn’t feel like they’re just part of a crowd—they should feel individually addressed.

Ready to take your donor stewardship plan to the next level? Remember, each donor’s contribution is personal. They deserve a unique journey based on their interactions and passions for your cause. Dive into the Donor Journey e-book to learn how to nurture these relationships effectively.

This article was first published on August 27, 2023, on software company Virtuous’s blog, here. 

The post 5 Ways to Improve Donor Stewardship appeared first on Philanthropy Daily.

Like many other small Christian colleges across the country, King’s had been struggling financially the past few years following the Covid-19 pandemic, as students and parents reckoned with health and safety concerns and online degree alternatives. While it would be easy to cite Covid as the reason for King’s demise, in truth, it was only one coffin nail. And unlike many other small Christian colleges across the country, King’s chronic financial crises were due to challenges inherent to an institution whose mission was inextricably linked to its location in New York City.

Originally founded in Belmar, New Jersey, in 1938, The King’s College has fought for survival in the heart of New York City from 1999 on. Its mission is to transform society by raising up virtuous students who were “good, brave, and ready” and would go on to “lead strategic and private institutions.” Over the past 24 years, King’s developed a liberal arts curriculum with a core of politics, philosophy, and economics, founded on a Biblical worldview. This curriculum, paired with its strategic location within a global hub of finance, art, and culture, enabled King’s to offer a unique opportunity to ambitious students.

For nearly its first 20 years in the city, King’s struggled to gain a foothold in New York’s brutal real estate market. Rent made up a massive proportion of King’s operating overhead, not just for classrooms and administrative spaces, but also its “on-campus” student housing. For over a decade, King’s held classes in the basement of the Empire State Building, before moving catty-cornered to the New York Stock Exchange in 2012.

I attended King’s from 2013 to 2017. After graduating, I joined the student development staff, overseeing student housing operations while also supporting student experience programs and serving as an associate advisor to student leaders. I cared deeply for the mission of the college and relished the opportunity to invest in students the way my advisors had invested in me.

At the end of my first year as housing manager, in the summer of 2018, King’s received a generous donation that enabled it to acquire its first piece of New York real estate, a five-story residential building on Greenwich Street that would serve as a dormitory for around 70 students. At the time of acquisition, there were also plans to lease out retail space on the first floor.

However, with the acquisition came the cost of converting the nearly 100-year-old building into a functional dormitory. The college sank hundreds of thousands of dollars into mold remediations, roof replacements, and general repairs and renovations. This was all done with the belief that in the years to come, the school would start to turn a profit.

Those years would not come. Like at other schools in America, King’s on-campus operations ground to a halt in March of 2020. As the 2020–2021 academic year approached, freshman enrollment was at an all-time low. King’s tried to implement remote and hybrid learning models, but such an arrangement proved incompatible with the school’s biggest selling point: its location. Prospective students weren’t interested in a partial or fully online learning model, and shied away from moving to such a densely populated area in the middle of the pandemic.

The following academic year, King’s was in crisis mode. Looking to ease some of its operating costs, the college paused faculty contract renewals and outsourced entire departments to Primacorps Ventures, a Canadian education company. Primacorps planned to implement an online program that it promised would bring in thousands of new students within three to five years. 

In less than two years, Primacorps had failed to deliver on its lofty promises and likely snuffed out King’s last hopes of survival. The college faltered after President Tim Gibson’s unexpected departure in the fall of 2022. He was replaced by Stockwell Day, a former Canadian politician with Primacorps associations. King’s and Primacorps ended their partnership in April 2023; Primacorps’s board spots were vacated and President Day resigned shortly after. Primacorps founder Peter Chung extended King’s a $2 million bridge loan to allow it to finish the 2022–2023 academic year.

By this point, things had gotten ugly. When King’s fell behind on paying rent, past due notices were posted on students’ apartment doors. The one dorm King’s owned sat vacant less than five years after its acquisition, listed on the market for a fraction of its purchase price.

King’s began a desperate fundraising campaign to “Save King’s,” with full acknowledgement of its dire situation. Some alumni, including Sadie Elliott (’17), started campaigns within their own graduating class, asking old classmates to make a pledge to try to save their alma mater. Over 130 current students, alumni, staff, and faculty participated in the TKC Letters Project, hoping to impress upon potential donors the positive impact that King’s had had on their lives and the world.

The need was simply too great, and King’s was out of time. The college managed to finish the semester and the class of 2023 was able to graduate, but when classes ended for the summer it was unclear whether they would resume in the fall. Well into the summer, the board stated that it was working through issues with accreditation and held out hope for the resumption of classes in the fall semester. At this stage, even the most devoted faculty were making backup plans.

When the board finally announced in mid-July that King’s would not hold classes this fall, it prompted disappointment but not surprise. In the same message, the board stated that faculty and administrative positions would be reduced or eliminated (staff and faculty directories have been removed from its website). Currently, it seems King’s will maintain its charter and continue to fight the accreditation battle, and the board will continue to explore partnerships with other out-of-state Christian colleges in hopes of reopening.

Though King’s has faltered, it may yet be resurrected. Whatever solution the board considers, King’s is not King’s if it exists anywhere else in the world. The nature of its mission precludes a campus in Minnesota, Texas, or even New Jersey. If King’s is to live again, it’s New York or nowhere.

The post The King’s College: New York or Nowhere appeared first on Philanthropy Daily.

The kiddies with matriculating aspirations are heading back to college, and it seems they might merit our national concern. Yep: A new Gallup survey finds the future big debtors are rife with worry, stress, and even loneliness.

Maybe it ain’t all college’s fault, eh? How about assigning some blame to our gain-of-function virus friend and all those lockdown protocols (word on the street is that mask-fanciers are beginning to feel their oats again) that sucker-punched society?

By the way, worry, stress, and loneliness aren’t exclusive to the quad and the campus center, a point made profoundly in Mr. Oliver Anthony’s tuneful analysis (you’ll not find much boolah boolah rhythms in it) about life south-of-Richmond in 2023.

That hit has prompted the usual suspects to round themselves up at their keyboards, in order to bash, slash, smash, and trash the tune and its author. No one should be surprised by the venom of the intellectual goon squads.

Meanwhile, returning to Wossamotta U, we recommend staying on top of all the higher-ed madness by regularly visiting The College Fix.

If You Can Count to 14, What Follows Will Be Your Happy Place!

1. At the aforementioned The College Fix, its great editor, Jennifer Kabbany, reports on the free-speech bomb dropped on Cornell University. From the beginning of the article:

One of the most active and relentless alumni free speech groups in the nation—the Cornell Free Speech Alliance—this week dropped a figurative free speech-bomb on its alma mater, publishing a 100-page report calling for sweeping policy changes on campus.

The group reported its email listserv reaches “over 50,000 Cornellians,” mostly alumni, and it has an active leadership board that refuses to accept Cornell’s public-facing claims of supporting free speech, academic freedom and intellectual diversity.

The alliance’s report recommends 20 policy changes, including adding free speech training to freshman orientation, implementing the famous free speech Chicago Principles, eliminating DEI course requirements, removing its anonymous bias reporting system, and providing students robust due process.

The group, which includes some faculty and students, wants campus leadership to also state “words are not physical violence,” and make viewpoint diversity a “prominent objective.”

2. At The Atlantic, Reihan Salam wonders aloud if “progressive elitism” is a spent force. From the essay:

And that leads us to why Ivy League eliteness may have peaked.

If progressive elitism has allowed selective universities to reconcile moralistic progressivism with the elitism that is the source of their desirability, what happens when Ivy League admissions officers’ power to reshape social norms is no longer undergirded by an appeal to racial justice? Since the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision curtailed racial preferences, legacy preferences have come under vigorous attack, not least from the Biden administration, which has launched a civil-rights investigation into Harvard’s use of the practice. Amherst College abandoned legacy admissions in October 2021, and Wesleyan University announced this July that it would follow suit. If Shamus Khan is right, although the symbolic value of an elite education for less advantaged students might persist beyond the end of legacy admissions, its value as a source of social and cultural capital will be greatly diminished.

This in turn could create an opening for a different set of higher-education institutions committed to a different set of values—perhaps even a revival of the midcentury vision of elite institutions that would promote social mobility while instilling patriotism and a sense of civic obligation.

That, at least, seems to be the impetus behind a slew of new higher-education initiatives in red and purple states, where many voters, policy makers, and philanthropists are wary of Ivy League progressivism. The School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, a public research university that has seen surging enrollment in recent years, is pioneering an approach to civics that welcomes debate and encourages a deep understanding of the nation’s founding principles. In Tennessee, Governor Bill Lee is creating a similar institute, which aims to inculcate an “informed patriotism,” through the state university system.

3. China or Bust: At National Review, the editors assess the depths of Red China’s economic malaise. From the editorial:

While the rest of the world is worried about inflation and too much consumer spending, China is worried about deflation and too little. While most central banks are raising interest rates, China’s is lowering them. While the West is, slowly but surely, recovering to pre-pandemic levels, China is falling further behind.

Numerous Chinese economic schemes are failing. The export-led development model that China had used in the past has been falling apart, and factory activity is contracting. The government-backed steel industry hasn’t been profitable for over a year, and forecasts don’t show things turning around any time soon. Chinese banks are making roughly the same amount of loans as they did during the global financial crisis, which demonstrates that the central bank’s efforts to juice borrowing aren’t working.

The Chinese housing market is caught in a deflationary cycle. Buyers expect prices to fall, so they aren’t buying, which causes prices to fall more, etc. China’s largest property developer is on the brink of default, and its sales are down 34 percent since last year. There has also been an increase in wealthy Chinese purchasing homes in other countries, suggesting they could be hedging for a worse economic future.

4. More NR: Dominic Pino questions Elizabeth Currid-Halkett about her book deep-diving into rural life, The Overlooked Americans. From the interview:

Now, I don’t wanna say that there’s not truth that parts of rural America are suffering. There are parts of rural America are suffering. I’m a regional and urban planner by trade, and I study and teach economic development. So for me, the problem is these are just too general. Even the kind of divide of urban and rural doesn’t make any sense. I mean, Akron, Ohio, and Manhattan: They’re like totally different universes in the same way that coastal New England and the heart of Appalachia are totally different. And so this idea of an impoverished rural country—it was actually unfair to the places that are impoverished because that’s where we will not then target policy and economic development that we should. But it also then stokes this fire, this kind of idea of urban and rural being at odds with one another.

So what I found when I looked generally and then I cut it up by region was that on the whole, rural America has low unemployment, lower in many places than in urban America. They across the board tend to have greater home ownership. Median income is a little less, but we’re dealing with like $9,000–$10,000, which, say if you live in like, Cambridge, Massachusetts versus living in like, coastal New England, or you’re living in Philadelphia versus rural Pennsylvania, that $10,000 doesn’t really get you very far in a major city. And so by that measure, income was also fairly on par.

So this economic data was telling the story that rural America wasn’t on the whole a place where people were really actually being left behind. Their quality of life was actually largely pretty good. And again, I do caveat this. I mean, I’m not inured to the fact that parts of the South are in huge trouble. I think that is absolutely the case, but it’s just, it’s too much of a blanket statement.

5. At Minding the Campus, Tony Vets presses the need to push back against arrogance and rebuild public trust in the sciences. From the reflection:

Over the past three years, the general public has been inundated with appeals to “Trust the science.” In spite of this, many have grown increasingly distrustful of both science and scientists. It is the height of hypocrisy to expect people to put their blind faith in scientific authority—for that is what “trust the science” amounts to—especially when science itself is based on a rejection of authority. Far from demanding that the public submit to science, the good scientist can rebuild the public’s trust by humbly welcoming criticism, debate, and disagreement.

Steeped in the rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Locke, scientific knowledge is the product of reasoning and experimentation, not revelation. In fact, according to Carl Sagan, perhaps the most renowned scientist of the latter half of the twentieth century, one of the greatest commandments of science is to mistrust arguments based on authority. . . .

Good science is rooted in skepticism, even skepticism of its own findings. Good science has a healthy distrust of itself. This is because all human knowledge, which includes scientific knowledge, is imperfect. Sagan wrote, “The history of science – by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans – teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.” Even Albert Einstein, arguably the world’s greatest scientist, said, “In our great mystery story there are no problems wholly solved and settled for all time.” Thus, even the best of scientific knowledge should be considered provisional, and any exhortation to “trust the science” should at least be followed with the disclaimer, “until we learn more.”

6. At Law & Liberty, Sam Gregg makes the case for free trade. From the essay:

In the 1990s, much of the argument for trade liberalization became associated with widespread hopes for a more harmonious world following Communism’s demise in Eastern Europe. Yes, appeals to national interest were made. The fact that it took 15 years of multilateral negotiations and two years of specific Beijing-Washington talks before China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) underscores how much such interests were in play. Nonetheless, much of the speechifying by political leaders had a perpetual peace tone to it. Nor was it hard to find American policymakers arguing that economic liberalization would help spark political liberalization abroad.

In the Cold War’s aftermath, such sentiments were understandable. But we’re not living in the warm afterglow of America’s victory over the USSR anymore. American domestic politics have changed dramatically, as have international relations. China, for example, has become more authoritarian, less market-orientated in its domestic economic policies, even less transparent about the true state of Chinese businesses and the economy, and more aggressive in its dealings with other nations.

These melancholy facts do not mean that inching America towards ever freer trade is a forlorn exercise. But it does mean making an explicitly realist case for free trade ever more imperative. And by “explicitly realist,” I mean free traders focusing their arguments unabashedly upon the benefits that trade liberalization brings to Americans and America.

7. At The Free Press, Julia Duin will not curse the darkness. From the piece:

Since 2001, the Tucson-based DarkSky organization, also known as DarkSky International, has led a movement to create places all over the planet where there’s little to no light pollution. In 2021, the Prineville Reservoir State Park became Oregon’s first state park to get a coveted International Dark Sky Park designation.

“There is the recognition of darkness as a valuable resource,” Ruskin Hartley, CEO of DarkSky, told me last month. “The world is getting brighter. Light pollution is growing by 10 percent a year. The brightening of the night sky is one of the most profound changes to the environment we’ve seen.”

Left unsaid in my discussions with him—and others—is the hard-to-express sentiment that a certain quality of life is at stake when one is unable to see a sky brimming with stars. From the Psalms to the Magi to Shakespearean sonnets, human experience has been intertwined with the firmament for thousands of years. The DarkSky website points out that Vincent van Gogh’s famous The Starry Night was painted in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, in 1889; but today, the Milky Way can no longer be seen from that location (perhaps due to light pollution from nearby Avignon).

8. At Public Discourse, Felix James Miller makes the quite-serious case for summer camp. From the commentary:

While people have contended with the wilderness since European settlers first arrived in North America, it took until the mid-nineteenth century for camping to become a widely recognized pastime in the United States. Americans like William “Adirondack” Murray and Horace Kephart helped popularize camping. Murray’s 1869 book Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks was particularly influential, helping inspire the modern conservation movement, the construction of over 200 grandiose camping grounds in the Adirondacks, and thousands of lifelong campers (at the time called “Murray’s fools” by some). While early American camping in the untamed wilderness was more limited to adults, Murray’s followers were part of a shift that helped initiate more children into the practice.

Englishmen like Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley had as much of a role in this change as Americans did. Hughes and Kingsley helped popularize a movement known as “muscular Christianity,” which reached its height with the election of Theodore Roosevelt as president of the United States. Adherents believed that much of modern Christianity misapplied St. Paul’s chastisement of the body. While the flesh can certainly lead man to sin, the body is a gift from God that can be used to glorify Him. They went further, arguing that an unhealthy neglect of one’s body is, if not itself sinful, certainly a cause of temptation.

Muscular Christians argued that modernity, with its bustling cities and loud machines, was preventing young people from cultivating healthy relationships with God, and that it had physically softened young people, especially young men. They were thus becoming not just physically weaker, but also less resilient and more liable to moral corruption. The muscular Christians’ antidote to this weakening was to push young men to nature, where they could cultivate physical strength through exercise, sports, and other outdoor activities.

9. Tempus Fugit: At Plough Quarterly, Zena Hitz gets busy with thoughts on what to do with time . . . if we were not so busy. From the piece:

We may not know what in the soup of our desires matters most to us. Often we discover it in times of trial or crisis: a difficult choice at work, a family member in a hospital bed—in other words, when we face sickness, poverty, or moral compromise.

What would happen if we tried to organize our lives around merely instrumental pursuits? We are not likely to order our lives around grocery shopping or paying taxes. But what about earning money? If I pack my swim bag, put on shoes, get my keys, and drive my car to the pool, only to find it closed, my goal of swimming is frustrated, and my string of actions is in vain. Suppose the pool is open and I get to swim: Why do I do it? I swim for the sake of health. I want to be healthy so I can work. I work for the sake of money. And the money is for the sake of food, drink, housing, recreation, and exercise—all of which make it possible for me to work.

I have described a life of utter futility. If I work for the sake of money, spending money on basic necessities, and if my life is organized around working, my life is a pointless spiral of work for the sake of work. It is like buying ice cream, immediately selling it for cash, and then spending the proceeds on ice cream (which one sells once again, and so on). It is just as tragic as working for money and getting crushed by a falling anvil on the way to cash the paycheck. For this reason Aristotle argued that there must be some activity or activities beyond work—leisure, for the sake of which we work and without which our work is in vain. Leisure is not merely recreation, which we might undertake for the sake of work—to relax or rest before beginning to labor anew. It is an activity or set of activities that could count as the culmination of all our endeavors. For Aristotle, only contemplation could be ultimately satisfying in this way: the activity of seeing and understanding and savoring the world as it is.

10. At The Spectator, Genevieve Gaunt reviews a book about the plight of insomnia, and the beauty that can be found in the affliction. From the piece:

Darrieussecq is best known for her surreal novel Pig Tales (1996), but Sleepless is an account of her search for a cure to insomnia and the solace she finds in discovering writers such as Franz Kafka (“the patron saint of insomnia”), Marcel Proust, Georges Perec, Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahmoud Darwish, Haruki Murakami, Aimé Césaire, Jorge Luis Borges and Tchicaya U Tam’si have all suffered from sans sommeil.

Reading about these “champions of fatigue” gives the distinct impression that to sleep soundly is terribly bourgeois. As Roland Barthes said: “Insomnia is classier than sleep. Only the tragic hero is an insomniac.” The aging Immanuel Kant was “an insomniac, besieged by ghosts” and once cried out: “Don’t switch the light off, Célèste . . . There’s a big fat woman in the room . . . a horrible big fat woman in black.”

In the quest for alleviation, Darrieussecq has tried it all—gravity blankets, the Alexander Technique, yoga nidra, cranial osteopathy, drinking alcohol and not drinking alcohol—to no avail. She is candid about her battle with wine and how it became her mandragora: “I had lost the freedom not to drink.” She uses literary medicine—“I’ve tried metaphors”—and real medicine: “I booze on benzodiazepines.” Pills work, but attack her short-term memory, echoing Proust, who complained that sleeping pills “make holes in my brain.”

11. At Providence Magazine, James Rowell contemplates a Shoulda Just War—Tibet’s defense against Red China’s 1950 invasion—and the absence of support for the tiny nation. From the piece:

The elephant in the room is that no one wants to leap into a ground war with China, the most populous nation on Earth, either today or seventy-three years ago. This is one reason that the war should not have been fought, it defies the sense of proportionality in terms of lives lost to lives saved. Another, that it had a viable chance of success, was a concern expressed by Nehru and rejected. Imagine, for a preposterous moment, had the war been waged, how it might have driven Communist China and the Soviet Union together, and thereby dramatically altered the Cold War’s trajectory. Some fights ought not to be picked because of tangible repercussions.

Yet anyone familiar with the plight of the Dalai Lama, and the impact of the Chinese annexation of Tibet, cannot help but be sympathetic. What could have been done, in hindsight, if neither non-violence nor just war were plausible options? . . . Over 1.2 million Tibetans are believed to have died because of war, famine, and occupation. Was there a just way to avoid this?

The Dalai Lama’s second-eldest brother, Gyalo Thondup, become involved with the CIA in resisting China and sought refuge with Chiang Kai Shek. That the Dalai Lama’s own brother approved of more forceful resistance to China is not well known but must have been a constant source of concern for Tenzin Gyatso. The Tibetan people weren’t aided because their plight fell into the cracks between effective non-violent and just-war strategies. We know on the one hand that an absurd sense of bravado would involve us in every just war, and further that it is political callousness never to fight one. If we must pick and choose our just war according to how well it aligns with national means and interest, this may well be a prudent realism at work. It is also a humbling lesson that we need to find ever more innovative solutions to promoting justice.

12. At KTVZ News 21 in Bend, OR, Noah Chast tells of a La Pine high-schooler who organized a successful “Pickleball 4 Patriots” tournament to raise funds for veterans in need. From the article:

Last year, 17-year-old Keaton Kalmbach had a vision to put together a pickleball tournament while helping a good cause.

This year, it not only went smoothly, but he raised well more than his goal.

Kalmbach, a La Pine High School junior, is the head organizer of the first ever Pickleball for Patriots event.

All of the money raised from his 64-person pickleball tournament went to Central Oregon Veterans Outreach.

“Our goal was $5,000, but ended up raising $6,258 to help veterans in need,” Kalmbach said.

The teen was inspired to help others from his family’s mission trips to other countries.

“I’ve been outside the US multiple times, and I realize how fortunate we are as Americans to live in this beautiful state and beautiful nation,” Kalmbach said.

Lucky 13. At The Imaginative Conservative, Bradley “Double B” Birzer tells of a youthful wrong-way train journey in Morocco, and a religious conversion that followed it. From the reflection:

At one point in the increasingly crowded train compartment, one of the men became extremely aggressive (I was still doing my best, trying to stay occupied and inconspicuous as I read an Agatha Christie novel) and started tearing apart my backpack (a huge Kelty that I carried all over that year abroad). When I physically tried to stop him—worried that I didn’t know the laws and might be thought guilty of assault—the door to our compartment flew open and an impeccable Moroccan gentleman, dressed in an all-white suit, entered, and he and the would-be thief began yelling at each other in Arabic.

After a few bewildering moments of shouting, the white-suited man said to me in flawless English, “You, young man, are in great danger. You have no reason to trust me, but you must. Grab your things and jump off this train. Now.” I have no idea how rational I was at that point, but I followed his advice. The train, as it happened, stopped at that moment in the middle of nothing but sand dunes. I got out, and the train moved on. There, I stood alone in a sandy and windy world, devoid of water, trees, or anything that seemed to be alive. As I couldn’t help but wonder what madness had overcome me, a train moving the right direction emerged over the dunes and stopped. I boarded, and I was able to make my way back to Rabat, then to Gibraltar, and, then, of course, to Spain, France, Switzerland, and Austria.

As it turned out, I had only one compartment companion on the entire route across Europe. He was an elderly man, a former German Nazi who had since converted to Catholicism. Much to my surprise (given my own disposition toward quiet, isolated rides in which I could immerse myself in a book), he told me all about his life, his conversion, and his faith. Far from annoying me, I found the man utterly fascinating and truly wise. Indeed, he reminded me of my maternal grandfather (who had passed away a half-decade earlier), the most dignified man I’ve ever known.

Thirty years to the month later, I still am not sure exactly what happened on that train in Morocco.

BONUS: At The Wall Street Journal, Amanda Foreman concedes that no American barbeque restaurant gets Michelin love, but doesn’t hoot-give. From the piece:

The American barbecue—cooking meat with an indirect flame at low temperature over seasoned wood or charcoal—is a centuries-old tradition. (Using the term for any kind of outdoor grilling came much later.) Like America itself, it is a cultural hybrid. Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean and the Americas would place a whole animal carcass on a wooden platform several feet above a fire and let the smoke do the cooking. The first Spanish arrivals were fascinated by the technique, and translated a native word for the platform as “barbacoa.”

The Europeans began to barbecue pigs and cattle, non-native animals that easily adapted to the New World. Another important culinary contribution—using a ground trench instead of a raised platform—may have been spread by African slaves. The 18th century African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano described seeing the Miskito of Honduras, a mixed community of Indians and Africans, barbecue an alligator: “Their manner of roasting is by digging a hole in the earth, and filling it with wood, which they burn to coal, and then they lay sticks across, on which they set the meat.”

European basting techniques also played a role. The most popular recipes for barbecue sauce reflect historic patterns of immigration to the U.S.: British colonists used a simple concoction of vinegar and spices, French émigrés insisted on butter, and German settlers preferred their native mustard. In the American West, two New World ingredients, tomatoes and molasses, formed the basis of many sauces. The type of meat became another regional difference: pork was more plentiful in the South, beef in the West.

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. On September 7th, Jeremy Beer hosts another AmPhil must-attend “Scotch Talk,” this one focused on grant writing and foundation fundraising. Joining him in the wisdom-sharing on these matters of great importance to nonprofit aficionados will be Iain Bernhoft and Stephanie D’Anselmi, who will discuss how to write polished and compelling grant proposals, woo foundation officers, and plenty more. So get your favorite tumbler, drop in a few ice cubes, pour a sweet liquid—whether the fruit of the barley or that made while the moon shines—and join the conversation. But to do that, you’ll need to register, which can be done right here.

Due. And now allow us to remind you about the forthcoming Center for Civil Society conference—“Rise of the Nones: How Declining Religious Affiliation Is Changing Civil Society.” It takes place on November 7–8 in glorious Scottsdale, AZ. You had best get complete information, which you can find right here, because you are indeed coming, by golly!

Tre. Another reminder, this from Philanthropy Daily, where Jonathan Hannah tells of the 2024 AmPhil Fundraising Fellowship. From the piece:

The AmPhil Fundraising Fellowship is a nine-month leadership program where fellows will learn the history of philanthropy in American civil society, explore contemporary issues related to fundraising, and complete a personal project enabling them to bring value to their nonprofit organization.

Fellows will meet virtually on a monthly basis to discuss readings, workshop ideas, and examine the vocation of fundraising. Fellows will also have special access to AmPhil’s online educational opportunities, including our In the Trenches master classes, and will be invited to our annual Givers, Doers, & Thinkers Conference, which will take place in Southern California in October of 2024.

Interested? If so, you’ll find complete information here.

Quattro. You heard it here first: AmPhil is hosting an “In the Trenches” Master Class on Thursday, October 12th (via Zoom, from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m., Eastern), on “Integrating Direct Mail and Digital Outreach,” and if you have a scintilla to do with nonprofit fundraising and don’t attend, well, you’d better have a pretty darned good excuse, because this session will be a goldmine of wisdom. Get your pick and shovel and sign up—easily done right here.

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: Where do you learn to make a banana split?

A: Sundae school. 

A Dios

A dear old friend, a truly great American, James Lane Buckley, passed away last week. Yours Truly remembered him at National Review, here. So did many others. You will find links to NR’s tribute collection here. Jim was a holy man—but even holy men need our prayers that they rest in God’s peace. Oremus.

May We Be Prepared for the Fateful Hour at Its Coming,

Jack Fowler, who is little prepared for anything but the reception of emails sent to jfowler@amphil.com.

The post The Goons of August appeared first on Philanthropy Daily.

However well-intentioned this approach was, it served neither the school, nor the donor, nor even the school’s constituents well. I use this example to pinpoint a common nonprofit practice: soft-pedaling, if not omitting altogether, any statement of the problem, as well as any institutional challenges or need. A focused, effective ask can only proceed from a well-defined problem and a compelling, equally explicit solution. If you fail to articulate a real, relevant problem, why should a donor care about your solution? And if you don’t articulate any organizational challenges or needs, what incentive is there for a donor to give?

Put another way, your donor communications tell a story. While many stories end with a happily ever after, you won’t find any that also include both a happily ever before and a happily right now. Engaging stories proceed from significant, realistic tensions and conflicts. Your donor communications should, too.

Which brings me naturally, gracefully, seamlessly to this week’s Republican presidential debate. Please note that I do not intend to evaluate the substance of any candidate’s remarks. Instead, I’d like to analyze a moment from the debate in terms of what we can glean about clear, effective donor communication.

Vivek Ramaswamy appeared to be the only candidate to recognize that a debate is less about answering individual questions (the analogue here being an organization’s laundry list of programs and projects) and more about developing a coherent, compelling narrative. Consider:

Overarching Problem: “We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis . . . The problem in our country right now, the reason we have that mental health epidemic is that people are so hungry for purpose and meaning at a time when family, faith, patriotism, hard work have all disappeared.”

Overarching Solution: “What we really need is a tonal reset from the top, saying this is what it means to be an American. Yes, we will stand for the rule of law, yes, we will close the southern border . . . and yes, we will back law enforcement because we remember who we really are, and that is also how we address that mental health epidemic in the next generation that is directly leading to violent crime across this country.”

After listing a few specific, pressing issues facing America, Ramaswamy states the overarching problem in clear, coherent terms. Then, he states the overall solution equally clearly, weaving in proposed solutions to the specific issues he outlined earlier. What really drove the point home, though, was his subsequent exchange with Mike Pence.

Pence: “We don’t have an identity crisis, Vivek. We’re not looking for a new national identity. The American people are most faith-filled, freedom-loving, idealistic hard-working people that world has ever known. We just need government as good as our people.”

Ramaswamy: “Mike, I think the difference is [that] you . . . have, an ‘it’s morning in America’ speech, [but] it is not morning in America. We live in a dark moment and we have to confront the fact that we’re in an internal sort of cold cultural civil war.”

Pence and Ramaswamy are from different generations. During the Cold War, America’s foremost “problem” was obvious: the Soviet Union. Against this backdrop, paeans to the American people like Pence’s could work. Remove the “problem”—or, more precisely, replace it with a less obvious and more multifarious one—and it reads as a solution in search of a problem. (Ramaswamy actually put his finger on this exact point later on, retorting to Pence: “I have a news flash. The USSR does not exist anymore. It fell back in 1990.”)

A willingness to clearly state problems earns your audience’s trust and makes them more receptive to your solutions. Contrast this approach with Pence’s comments, which in the absence of a stated problem read as vacuous pandering. But the benefit of stating the problem extends beyond earning trust for “telling it like it is.” If readers resonate with the problem as you lay it out, they will be disposed to affirm your solutions, just as a conclusion follows from a premise in a logical argument. Moreover, by being explicit and direct, you engage the widest possible audience. In contrast, hedging, soft-pedaling, or getting into the weeds risks losing people along the way.

An effective ask proceeds naturally from here, provided you deploy similar precision when articulating your current needs. The more precisely you define the problem and articulate your solution, the more your organization appears uniquely positioned to address the problem and effect the solution. Let me rephrase that last bit: the more good your donor can do to address the problem and effect the solution by partnering with you.

The post What the Republican debate teaches us about crafting effective appeals appeared first on Philanthropy Daily.

It’s true. You don’t hear about new Ted Bundys or John Wayne Gacys today because that genre of sociopath apparently no longer exists.

There are any number of theories why . . . but here’s one big reason why serial killers used to run amok: police departments didn’t communicate. No universal fingerprinting database. No system of sharing reports or insights. Oftentimes a sheriff in one county would have no clue that similar murders were occurring just 50 miles down the road.

If everyone in a given system operates independently, blithely unaware of their compatriots’ actions, you can get away with murder(s). But when departments collaborate and share information and insights, malfeasance (and dysfunction) is nipped in the bud.

Does the 1970s situation sound like your organization or messaging? Not in terms of body count, of course . . . but it’s an incontrovertible fact that compartmentalization and lack of coordinated communication can cause all sorts of problems.

If you’re part of an organization with even two employees you’ve probably encountered this phenomenon. Variations on it happen all the time in fundraising. Marketing and comms are saying one thing . . . donor relations something completely different . . . and neither knows what the other is up to. Fortunately, lives are not at stake (usually). But mistakes and miscommunication matter: they hurt the credibility, coherency, and cogency of your message.

It’s hard to build or execute when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Or when different messages are coming out of the two sides of your mouth. The potential for miscommunications and inefficiencies abounds.

It’s a daunting problem, and AmPhil has a deceptively simple solution: the new Creative Studio. It brings an organization’s communications needs under one roof—from the print and digital materials needed to woo donors, to landing pages, pitch decks, op-eds, and more. In the Creative Studio, AmPhil’s writing and design teams work closely together (. . . unlike local sheriffs in Ted Bundy’s day . . .) to capture and amplify your voice and style in a single document or across different platforms.

In our screen-saturated, time-scarce world, truly persuasive messaging resides at the intersection of writing and design. Your language must be clear and compelling—but it also needs to look great. If writing and design stay sequestered, if the twain never meet, communications come across as disjointed. The finished product is unlikely to convince donors to align themselves with you.

A dearth of communication between departments is a recipe for mixed messages and miscommunications. As I said, the solution is deceptively simple, but it’s also surprisingly effective: get your right (write?) hand talking to your left, then step back and watch your cohesive, coherent communications win your donors over.

The post Right hand, meet left appeared first on Philanthropy Daily.

Preparing for this conference made me think of a study published by the University of Notre Dame’s Catholic Social and Pastoral Research Initiative. The report compares American Catholics’ self-reported religious giving and philanthropy with those of other religious groups, using a nationally representative survey of about 2,000 Americans conducted in 2010. It is quite intriguing, as the authors find that Catholics are less generous in voluntary financial giving than other Christian groups in the United States.

Why is this? The authors, Brian Starks and Christian Smith, suggest that the most important factor explaining the giving gap is a lack of “spiritual engagement with money” on the part of most American Catholics. They go on to note that, “Rather than seeing their use of money and possessions as a part of their spiritual life—as a part of Christian formation and faithfulness—American Catholics tend to compartmentalize: they tend to separate money from matters of faith and to think that money and material possessions have little to do with spiritual or religious issues.”

The remedy, according to the authors, is for discussions of money in Catholic parishes to center not on meeting basic organizational needs, but rather on spiritual growth and personal and societal transformation. This is prudent advice, as most fundraisers will tell you that inspiring stories that propose to use a donor’s gift to advance the common good are almost always more effective than pleas to write a check to keep the lights on.

Of course, the data used in the report is now thirteen years old. It raises the question of whether churches—not just Catholic parishes—are communicating the importance of giving. It should be noted that the report does not only measure tithing that goes directly to religious offices or parishes but also measures giving to the nonprofits that help society function, through disaster relief, countering food scarcity, and alleviating homelessness. This demands that we ask ourselves another question that will be discussed at the upcoming conference: If religious affiliation declines and America becomes less charitable, what does that mean for society? 

AmPhil’s Center for Civil Society will host our third Givers, Doers, & Thinkers conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, on November 7th and 8th at the W Scottsdale. Join us as we discuss the rise of the “nones” and how declining religious affiliation is impacting American civil society. We will explore what an increase in irreligiosity means for local charity, education, and other aspects of public life—and what philanthropists and nonprofit leaders are doing, and could do, in response.

The post Catholic generosity is failing to measure up appeared first on Philanthropy Daily.

Having assembled the gaggle of links and excerpts, Your Humble Correspondent did a once over and realized the selections were overwhelmingly, well, buzz killers. As you will soon see, several of the selections come from writers who bemoan, condemn, lament, argue, curse, and decry—which gives this edition of Civil Thoughts a tinge of despondency. Maybe not?

Whether not, or so, should you in fact have acquired a taste for despondency prose, do read podcast paisan Victor Davis Hanson’s recent gone-viral essay cataloging what he calls “The Remaking of America.” Who’d a thunk, at the millennium’s outset, that come 2023 we’d be living in an America where justice was thoroughly weaponized, free speech and common law were in the crosshairs, the Supreme Court (and actual Justices) were under attack, debt had gone galactic, the ranks-depleting military cared more about the progressive culture-wish list than preparedness, and . . . well, there’s plenty more where all that came from.

Scratch that itch. But never forget this: Despair is a sin.

Friends, Romans, Countrymen—Lend Us Your Eyes

1. At The American Mind, fan favorite Daniel J. Mahoney makes the case for populism, “rightly understood.” From the piece:

Already in the 1970s and ’80s, independent-minded thinkers such as Irving Kristol and Christopher Lasch saw that in the ’60s we had lived through a radical inversion of “democratic man” (and his relation to the few) described by Plato in Book 9 of the Republic. Ominously, Plato brilliantly described the dialectical connections between democratic and tyrannical souls. Democracy may at first appear as diversity itself, a rich and many-colored coat. But this alluring image disguises moral rot, contempt for legitimate authority, neglect for good habits, and a degrading egalitarianism. With “no order and restraint in his life,” democratic man prepares the way for tyranny. A serious engagement with Plato’s critique of democratic man needs to remain an essential part of an authentic liberal and civic education, to tutor our perceptions and let us know what needs to be resisted. 

In his day, however, Lasch did not think things were completely gone; he tended to set an out-of-touch-with-reality, symbol-manipulating elite against a working populace tutored by reality and educated in its limits. He was not wrong to see in the lower-middle class ethic a rugged common sense and real, if inarticulate, sense of limits. But since Lasch’s death in the early 1990s, this populist respect for limits and common sense has frayed, as elite relativism and the broader culture of repudiation have corrupted the good sense of those previously spared exposure to the quasi-nihilism that has come to dominate education, high and low. Irving Kristol too thought democratic man, still indebted to older civic and religious traditions, was far less corrupt than elites who respected fewer and fewer moral limits and had turned ingratitude and self-loathing into a destructive secular religion. Therefore both Kristol and Lasch recommended populism within limits, or “up to a point” as George F. Will used to say, as a corrective to both democracy run riot and elite tyranny. The people, not the few, had no taste for the “modernity without restraint” that Anglo-American democracy once resisted with a modicum of wisdom and a modicum of moderation. But things have changed.

2. At National Review, Vanessa Brown Calder and Chelsea Follett birth a plan for fertility. From the analysis:

Although fertility initiatives are not likely to revive U.S. fertility meaningfully or permanently, many alternative, low-cost policy reforms could make family life more affordable, easier, and more enjoyable for parents. By removing artificial, government-imposed obstacles to having and raising children, these reforms could even boost the U.S. fertility rate. Several current policies make being a parent harder than it needs to be, which could depress fertility, and are thus ripe for reform. 

For example, various policies increase the price of family essentials. Reforming these policies would reduce the cost of housing, food, and child care while increasing the availability of goods and services that parents need. Reforms that substantially increase housing supply, including overhauls to zoning and land-use regulations and changes to federal lands policy, could meaningfully increase housing affordability. Permanently eliminating national tariffs and excess FDA regulations would improve access to baby formula. Relaxing day-care regulations—including educational requirements for child-care staff and staff-to-child ratios—would increase child-care availability and affordability.

Flexible and remote-work policies allow parents to combine personal and professional obligations more seamlessly, and the private sector has made major strides in providing remote-work opportunities post-pandemic. However, policy-makers should reform labor policies that get in the way of flexible and remote options, from overly restrictive regulations on home-based businesses and independent work, to licensing rules that punish part-time workers (many of whom are parents) and discourage telework. Women who were most likely to work from home during the pandemic experienced higher fertility, perhaps because combining pregnancy and early parenting with work obligations is easier within a remote-work context.

3. At The American Conservative, Declan Leary bemoans the forces that remove one from ancestral community and home sweet home. From the end of the piece:

It is often said that America is the only place in the world where an immigrant can come and be considered one of the people. You can spend your whole life in France without becoming French if you are not born so. Whether the same goes for being an American is a question of its own, but what is certain is that the more concrete a community becomes, the less abstractions like that hold.

 I suspect my grandparents, and many of my friends’ grandparents, would have considered themselves Bostonians before Americans. They were tied together in time and place. But they were chased out of their city by a hostile regime, and the idea of return is unfathomable now.

I could go further out, to a little town or farmhouse on land no generation before me ever touched. The thought of peace—to say nothing of the savings—is alluring. But how much further can we run before there is nothing to leave for the next generation?

I was born and raised in the place where my forefathers’ forefathers disembarked four centuries ago. The particular house is its own concern, but there are graver things at stake here. There is no true solution, for conservatives or for Americans more broadly, that demands that this kind of inheritance be squandered.

4. More Localism: At UnHerd, Fred Skulthorp condemns Britain’s soulless housing. From the reflection:

In a local competition organised by the developers, schoolchildren presented contending utopias: green arches adorned with solar panels; a tram to ferry residents between parks and leisure centres. It got the adults talking, too. The town, it was proposed, would have its own community-based energy company. This would be an “innovation market town”, capable of sustaining local employment in an eco-idyll of tree-lined cycle lanes and allotments, a sustainable suburbia for 21st-century England.

Nearly 15 years on, the dream is dead. Visit Northstowe today and you are greeted by a Portakabin community centre that, as one local suggests, looks like a “pop-up STI clinic”. Bored children on bikes circle aimlessly, and a steady stream of cars forms an exodus from the leaden townscape of roofs and sky. There is, as one terminally bored 14-year-old tells me, “absolutely nothing to do”. No shops. No leisure centre. No green arches or trams. And certainly nothing that would give this place a collective hearth: a high street, town hall or a pub.

At the entrance to the town, I meet Richard of nearby Cambourne, who takes daily walks through Britain’s newest town to “try and work out what it all means”. Surveying the sprawl of identikit new-builds that stretch into the distance, he pronounces: “I have come to realise that this a soulless place built for a new generation of soulless people.”

5. More TAC: Christopher Brunet laments Canada’s carbon-tax policies, with the death of farms north of the border the price being paid. From the piece:

One has to wonder, is the focus on carbon taxation purely about reducing carbon emissions? Or is there a deeper, more sinister agenda at play? Richard Lindzen, who served as the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT for 30 years until his retirement in 2013, said, “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.” 

The maddening part is that even if Trudeau imposes a hundred new carbon taxes, it will all be for naught. Climate change is indifferent to borders, and Canada’s modest population of 40 million does nothing to sway the global balance. If Canada were a Chinese province, it would rank sixteenth in population behind Guangdong (127 million), Shandong (102 million), Henan (99 million), and thirteen others. Coal is the main source of energy in China.

“Canada’s own emissions are not large enough to materially impact climate change,” admits Trudeau’s own Parliamentary Budget Office, due to increased emissions from the developing world.

How can a Canadian farmer dream of competing with an American farmer? Consider North Dakota, which shares a border with the province of Saskatchewan. What incentive is there for an agribusiness to invest in Saskatchewan, when it could drive 30 minutes south and bypass the massive carbon tax? This is reflected in investment outcomes. Canadian business investment per worker was $14,687 in 2021, compared with $26,751 in the United States.

6. At The European Conservative, editor-in-chief Alvino-Mario Fantini considers a Frank Capra classic, and finds in it “John Doe conservatism.” From the commentary:

This journal routinely resists such narrowness of thought on the Right. We hold that there are important discussions to be had (perhaps about controversial topics) from which all of us—even the most cynical—can learn. Being intellectually promiscuous, perhaps even rebellious, is a sure way to fend off total servility to a dominant group.

The establishment powers behind today’s mainstream parties—including conservative ones that have the most to lose from new, dissident, right-wing parties—actively take steps to block newcomers. This is short-sighted, for whether they are ‘populist’ or ‘nationalist,’ the new parties resonate deeply with the ‘regular guy’: John Doe. People like him are unashamedly patriotic, protective of their families and communities, and willing to disrupt the ineffective and outdated ‘Conservatism, Inc.’

This is why some of the newer, more exciting right-wing parties—those who dare to shake things up—are regularly decried in the foulest ways by mainstream conservatives. They are subjected to bullying, censorship, and even emotional blackmail from fellow conservatives—many of whom have one eye on their own careers. Yet, it is often the newcomers who best speak for the people.

7. At Law & Liberty, Alexander William Salter gives a refresher on the conservative cause of “fusionism.” From the essay:

Any discussion of fusionism must begin with the Meyer-Bozell debate. Frank S. Meyer was a reformed Communist who became the primary intellectual architect of fusionism. Brent Bozell, his National Review colleague, was a traditionalist Catholic and the chief skeptic of a freedom-virtue synthesis.

Meyer championed “the common source in the ethos of Western civilization from which flow both the traditionalist and libertarian currents.” Man’s highest goal is the pursuit of the good, achieved through virtue: the ethical habits that predispose us to right action. Political liberty, which makes men “free from the constraint of the physical coercion of the unlimited state,” is necessary because it allows the “free choice of good over evil.” Government cannot make men good because compelled virtue is a contradiction in terms. Hence government power is necessarily limited by the “sacred sphere of the individual person.” Society exists to make men good, but the state, as society’s coercive apparatus, exists to make men free.

Bozell dissented. He was skeptical that “the choice necessary to virtue can be affected by external circumstances,” such as political coercion. Was not St. Paul supremely virtuous when persecuted by the Jewish religious authorities and the Roman state? “The freedom that is necessary to virtue is presumably the freedom no man will ever be without,” Bozell contended. The will is free to choose the best it can, political liberty or no.

8. At City Journal, Ed Ring argues that California can make a dent in its profound homelessness crisis by merely reversing some of its most destructive policies. From the analysis:

Anyone who expects California’s state and local governments to do anything sensible, however, is ignoring history and the corruption that grips the state. Amendment 2, passed by the state legislature and now scheduled to go before California voters in March 2024, will take away the right of local governments to reject the placement of public-housing projects in their neighborhoods. Piling on, the state legislature is also offering California’s spring primary voters Amendment 10, championed by Governor Gavin Newsom, which will declare an inalienable “right to housing” for all Californians. Imagine the implementation of this beast.

What about deregulating the most over-regulated housing market in America—the real reason housing is unaffordable in California? Not a chance. Better to tamper with the state constitution so that the government and its cronies can handle California’s housing shortage and homelessness surplus. They’ve done everything so well so far.

Not to be outdone by Sacramento’s follies, Los Angeles has come up with a “Responsible Hotel Ordinance,” a measure that would “require hotel operators to report to the city, every day, the number of vacant rooms at their establishments so the city can send homeless people over to the hotels to stay in the rooms that night.” Taxpayers will foot the bill, of course. The impact on tourists and conventioneers? Likely severe.

9. At The Wall Street Journal, William McGurn decries the religion test that Catholics who seek to become foster-care parents are failing in Massachusetts. From the column:

The author of their license study took care to note that the Burkes are “lovely people.” But with regard to LGBT issues, she also said “their faith is not supportive and neither are they.” Ultimately the license review team concluded the Burkes “would not be affirming to a child who identified as LGBTQIA” and the Burkes were rejected.

The Burkes have filed a lawsuit in federal court, claiming that their First Amendment rights to free exercise of religion have been violated. William P. Mumma is chairman of Becket Law, which defends religious liberty and is representing the Burkes. Like Justice Alito, he understands that the new orthodoxy on sex and marriage has its own dogmas, high priests and enforcers. Thus do ordinary Americans find themselves likened to terrorists by everyone from their local school boards to the FBI, which recently targeted Catholics who attend traditional Latin Mass. 

“When government takes over a space formerly held by intermediating institutions or citizens acting through the democratic process, they promise dispassionate expertise, neutrality and justice,” Mr. Mumma says. “But what they deliver is a replacement ideology and a big stick to enforce adherence.”

10. Axe and You Shall Receive: At First Things, Alec Torres sharpens his blade and explains the pleasure of chopping wood. From the piece:

So why do I do it? And why do my friends want to chop wood too?

There are a few possible reasons. Maybe the crack of a dry round and a growing pile of red oak logs overcomes the alienation of modern office work that separates labor from production. Maybe, as Ronald Dworkin posited in the April issue, happiness requires resistance—the pleasure of triumphing over something. Maybe men have an innate desire to learn physical, practical skills. Maybe breaking things is fun. Or maybe, like a workout at the gym, guys just want to do something that makes them stronger.

All of these reasons can be true. But for me, there’s another reason, at once facile and profound.

I chop wood because I choose to do it. By deciding not to call in the woodchipper, I manufactured an obligation, and it had to be met. It’s as simple as that.

11. At Comment Magazine, Cornelia Powers wields the abracadabra and finds the wonder-awakening that comes from fairy stories. From the essay:

As humans, we are born with all the necessary ingredients of awe, including an inquisitive mind, a lack of inhibition, and a fascination for all that surrounds us. This appetite for awe is something that children’s books both harness and encourage. Derived from the German Wundermärchen, these “wonder” or “fairy tales” present worlds marked by prophecies, spells, and enchanted forests, where fairies, wizards, centaurs, and elves are as real as you and me. Generally, children have an easier time inhabiting such worlds. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien conceded as much, writing that all those who enter “the Kingdom of Faërie should have the heart of a little child.” Yet even Tolkien believed that fairy tales had been mistakenly associated with children, having been “relegated to the ‘nursery’” after being declared “unfashionable” in literary circles. Using “adult” as imprimatur, the critics of Tolkien’s day accused fairy tales of giving children an impractical—and thus unhealthy—impression of the world they lived in. The sooner young readers abandoned fantasy as a genre, they argued, the better their lives would be.

Most of us can remember a time when we were told to “put aside childish things,” exchanging the magical for the real. Yet this trade comes at a high price. As “we move from the childhood world of play and daydreams,” wrote Madeleine L’Engle in A Stone for a Pillow, we “stifle our sense of joy and wonder,” finding security in cynicism and distrust. Regrettably, this shift is happening earlier and earlier. Across the country, art and music classes are being slashed from school budgets as curricula are being swallowed by assessment, generating precipitous declines in the number of young readers who reportedly read for fun. With every minute scheduled and every interaction digitized, children are being given fewer opportunities to cultivate their natural penchant for wonder, particularly as our world descends into patterns of further warming and extinction.

12. At the Driftless Journal in Decorah, IA, Samantha Ludeking is on the scene where flowers, dancers, and Nordic aspirations meld to raise some funds. From the beginning of the article:

A popular new activity at Nordic Fest this year was making live floral crowns, a fundraiser for the Decorah Nordic Dancers. As the Junior Dancers transition to Senior Dancers, they were excited to carry out some of the fundraising efforts they had been planning for some time. 

With a selection of live flowers and materials, supplied by Ladybug Landscapes and Decorah Floral, Festgoers were able to sit down and create their own colorful crowns. The ever-popular dainty silk floral options were still available for purchase as well this year.

“We really want to go to Norway,” Anita Weis exclaimed as she detailed fundraising efforts for this group’s trip. Current Junior Nordic Dance directors Anita and Al Weis, Amanda Huinker, Ann Grimstad and Marcie Dodd will stay on as the junior dancers become senior dancers.

Lucky 13. At Front Porch Republic, Vermonter John Klar curses the country-relocated City Mouse. From the piece:

This intergenerational sapping of rural culture is evident in Vermont, where agriculture, especially cow dairying, has generally declined for a century. The “local” culture of Vermont was built on self-reliance and independence, which in turn was entwined with agriculture. But the poverty and deprivations that accompanied the death of dairy persist across the Green Mountain landscape even as more farms disappear. . . .

The Coventry Landfill in Coventry, Vermont has ballooned into a Bog of Eternal Stench. Locals call it “Mount Casella” after its operator and mountainous dimensions. This incongruous stain is striking because it is so disproportionately massive compared to the declining nearby city of Newport. The heights of the rising mountain of refuse overlook thousands of acres of pristine wetlands and the Black River, as well as the international Lake Memphremagog. Mount Casella is partly constructed of out-of-state waste, including “construction materials, sludge from sewage treatment plants, asbestos, ash, contaminated soil, medical waste and more.”

Gradually, over decades, Vermont’s remnant of poor ex-farmers and their families and homes have been displaced by mansions and estates, as the colonization and gentrification of this rural hold-out region has worn down the “locals” much as the harsh winters have withered their leaking barns and drooping farmhouses. In their Exodus back to the country, the City Mice have decided they too prefer Aesop’s “crust with peace and quietness.” But they are not bringing an agrarian culture back from the cities to Vermont. They are more likely to suburbanize its towns and seek modernity and convenience. Much like that ringworm analogy.

BONUS: At Plough Quarterly, Brett Bradshaw finds that water’s blessings include rain-soaked, dancing daughters. From the beginning of the piece:

Rain began to fall after dinner one evening. I watched from the front porch with my two oldest daughters. The younger one, who was three years old at the time, inched toward the roof dripline. “Can we go in the rain?” she asked, grinning. I gave permission. She leapt into the yard, quickly followed by her five-year-old sister. “Come on, Daddy!” they pleaded. I chased after them. The soil squished like a wet sponge beneath our bare feet. Big raindrops mottled my white undershirt. I stopped, and the younger girl looked up at me. Her face was wet and very pretty, water glistening on blushed cheeks, dimples tucked in, lips curved upward, blue eyes squinting. She was washed in a kind of grace, delighted and free. As Marilyn Robinson writes in Gilead, “It is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing.”

I am reminded of my childhood in Nacogdoches, Texas, in the nineties. I was more familiar with Walmart aisles than garden rows, but people still talked about rain as a serious and pleasurable thing. About once a month, my father would take me downtown to Milford’s Barbershop off Main Street. We would walk into the shop—the Barbasol scent, the red-dirt-stained linoleum floor peppered with hair clippings, the buzz of clippers—and take a seat on a vinyl-covered bench lining the length of the room. Our reflections looked back at us in a wide mirror on the wall behind a row of barber chairs. Old-timers and young men, farmers and ranchers, skilled laborers and businessmen, friends and strangers sat waiting their turn. Talking about the weather, especially rain: the lack of it, who got some and who didn’t, when it was coming in, and when there was too much of it was a way of keeping company, a shared concern, a form of neighborliness. I have not visited Milford’s in years, but I imagine if I were to stop by most of the men would have their heads hung in a smartphone-induced stupor. I wonder what we lose when we stop talking about rain as a matter of shared hope, lament, and delight.

For the Good of the Cause

Uno. At Philanthropy Daily, Jonathan Hannah announces the 2024 AmPhil Fundraising Fellowship. From the piece:

The AmPhil Fundraising Fellowship is a nine-month leadership program where fellows will learn the history of philanthropy in American civil society, explore contemporary issues related to fundraising, and complete a personal project enabling them to bring value to their nonprofit organization.

Fellows will meet virtually on a monthly basis to discuss readings, workshop ideas, and examine the vocation of fundraising. Fellows will also have special access to AmPhil’s online educational opportunities, including our In the Trenches master classes, and will be invited to our annual Givers, Doers, & Thinkers Conference, which will take place in Southern California in October of 2024.

Interested? If so, you’ll find complete information here.

Due. Here and now is the ideal place and time to remind you about the forthcoming Center for Civil Society conference—“Rise of the Nones: How Declining Religious Affiliation Is Changing Civil Society.” It takes place on November 7–8 in glorious Scottsdale, AZ. You had best get complete information, which you can find right here, because you are indeed coming, by golly!

Tre. Lend an Ear: On September 7th, the great Jeremy Beer will host another AmPhil “Scotch Talk,” this one focused on grant writing and foundation fundraising. It’s a talk, as advertised—not a soliloquy—so joining Jeremy to share their immense wisdom on these matters of great importance to nonprofit worker bees (and even queen bees) will be Iain Bernhoft and Stephanie D’Anselmi, who will discuss how to write polished and compelling grant proposals, woo foundation officers, and plenty more. So get your favorite tumbler, drop in a few ice cubes, pour a sweet liquid—whether the fruit of the barley or that made while the moon shines—and join the conversation. But to do that, you’ll need to register, which can be done right here.

Department of Bad Jokes

Q: What do you call a sad cup of coffee?

A: Depresso.

A Dios

Hana is a tough lady fighting that nasty disease, which has established beachheads and battlefronts throughout her besieged body. It would make one weep to know. Bloodied but unbowed, she fights back. You go girl! It might lessen her load if you keep her in your prayers. Oremus.

May We Go Aware that We Do So but for God’s Grace,

Jack Fowler, who happily hears from even the unhappy at jfowler@amphil.com.

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