Now that Giving Tuesday is over, let me share why I regret Giving Tuesday.
Yesterday I received at least 43 emails from 27 different nonprofit organizations asking for my support on #GivingTuesday. This doesn’t count all the texts, social media posts and so forth.
Mind you, I don’t fault the nonprofits. They’re taking advantage of this one day — fabricated with good intentions, I’m sure, in 2012 — to inspire us to think beyond ourselves during the holiday hustle and donate to these organizations that bind us together when so many other institutions have failed.
But the unintended consequence of Giving Tuesday is a further relegation of nonprofits to subservient status. By hyping this one day for charitable giving, we suggest that the countless causes with which nonprofits grapple aren’t important the other 364 days.
In our for-profit world, nonprofits are already consigned to the lesser ranks inhabited by Oliver Twist nearly 200 years ago: “Please, sir, I want some … more?”
This scarcity mindset calls to mind the tiresome adage I’ve too often heard in nonprofit board meetings: “Nonprofits should operate more like a business.”
Are there some best business practices that all organizations should incorporate? Sure. But let’s do without the condescension when we talk about nonprofits as if they’re puppies scrambling for scraps at the dinner table.
The motivation of business is to make money … and there’s no money to be made in housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, spaying stray cats and dogs, teaching literacy to immigrants and native-born Americans, showing children how to dance and sing, preserving African-American history, awarding scholarships for kids to afford college, creating art in low-income neighborhoods or helping the frightened single mom care for her baby — just some of the nonprofit missions we’ve highlighted and helped on our TV show BUZZ.
As I share in the opening of every episode: “their profit comes not in the thing they sell, but the good they do.”
This goodness deserves celebration year round, not just 1/365th of the year.
If we as a society say that these missions are important, then let’s resolve in 2025 to celebrate Giving Tuesday each week, not just the first one of December.
That nonprofit we professed such care about yesterday will be working just as tirelessly, just as heartfully, those Tuesdays as well.
Always buzzing,
Michael Hemphill
BUZZ creator
