Compare this to what some companies can make in a day: Apple sells $465 million worth of iStuff every single day. The $100 million-in-two-months Ice Bucket Challenge is our highest-profile success in years.
The humanitarian sector has been taught to settle for scraps. health and human services charitable sector. Apple’s revenues are close to $50 billion every quarter – equal to the entire annual budget of the entire U.S. Imagine if Tim Cook had to get people to dump ice on their heads in order to bring revenue into Apple – and had to figure out a new idea like that every six months – with an R&D budget for hatching it of precisely zero, to boot. Without a systemic way to raise money and also build market awareness of its causes, charities have to pray that a fluke like the Ice Bucket Challenge – a zero-cost, once-in-a-lifetime, spontaneously combusting viral idea – will come their way. We condemn them for using donated resources on building market awareness or on fundraising, even though without those things, they can never reach the scale we need to fully address these massive social problems. What keeps us from increasing charitable giving? We are inherently averse to seeing humanitarian organizations spend money on anything other than “the cause,” as we define it, and we define it very narrowly.
In forty years, the nonprofit sector has not taken any market share away from the for-profit sector. ever since we started measuring it in the 1970s. It’s not enough to end poverty, homelessness, bullying, and all of the other problems charities address.Ĭharitable giving has remained stuck at 2% of GDP in the U.S. $50 billion isn’t near enough to cure cancer, ALS, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, and other threatening diseases. was $ 335 billion in 2013, but only about 15% of that, or $50 billion, went to health and human services causes – 85% went to religion, higher education and hospitals. And for that to happen we need to give charities far more freedom to invest in that result.Ĭharitable giving in the U.S. We must aspire to a statistically significant increase in charitable giving as a percentage of GDP. But for the sake of the ALS Association and everyone afflicted with ALS, we must dedicate ourselves to something far greater – yes, far greater than $100 million. I love the Ice Bucket Challenge as a thing unto itself. So when the enthusiasm fades, there will be nothing there to replace it, because investment in the replacement was forbidden. The ALS Association is already being scrutinized to make sure it doesn’t spend a penny of the Ice Bucket money on anything but research. So, are we looking at the future of charity? We are glimpsing the potential of momentary collective engagement, but at the same time, we are seeing the confining rules by which nonprofits must play, collectively imprisoned in an ancient way of thinking. And, as of last week, it raised more than $100 million for the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association, up from donations of $2.8 million for the same period last year. It has generated public tears in an age with far too few of them. It’s a collective expression of love in a world with far too little of it.
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