By Cailynn Klingbeil
Dan Pallotta is changing the way people think about charity.
It happened when he founded Pallotta Teamworks, a company that invented fundraisers such as the AIDSRide and Breast Cancer 3-Day events and raised $305 million in nine years for unrestricted use by charities.
It grew when Pallotta wrote Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, a book published in 2008.
And it continues today, with Pallotta’s recent founding of the Charity Defense Council and work on a new book set to come out in the spring of 2012. “It just sort of happened,” says Pallotta of his job as spokesperson for changing the way people think about charity.
In his first book, Pallotta powerfully argues that we need to stop treating charities like charities, distinct from every other kind of organization. Begin paying people according to their value, begin marketing to build demand, and begin raising the capital to finance it by offering a return, writes Pallotta – basically, charities should be able to behave like businesses.
“The problem is the denial to charity of certain rights that are enjoyed without restraint by the rest of the economic world,” Pallotta writes. “… The answer to this problem is simply to stop denying charity these rights. The solutions already exist in the tools of the free market.”
Pallotta ends Uncharitable with a case study of his own business, Pallotta Teamworks. Despite the massive amount of money raised for charities, Teamworks collapsed following heavy criticism for the exact things that made the company so successful. By building brand awareness, working for profit, paying people according to their value and spending money on advertising, Pallotta was accused of “greed and unabashed profiteering.”
It’s that experience that inspired Pallotta to write the book in the first place. “Sometimes you say to yourself, if you could still have the company but not the book, still have the company but not have the public conversation go on, would you take it? The answer is no. I wouldn’t change a thing,” Pallotta says.
His book is much more than just his experiences, though. It “deserves to become the nonprofit sector’s new manifesto” wrote Renée Irvin in a review published in Stanford Social Innovation Review. “Dan Pallotta has written Uncharitable as a response to every media report about a charity spending $400,000 to raise $1 million, ever donor who wants at least 90 per cent of her donation to go toward the cause, and every nonprofit executive director who eschews marketing for fear that donors will consider it extravagant,” Irvin wrote.
Since publishing Uncharitable, Pallotta has shared his message of equal economic rights for charity in nearly 100 talks in cities around the world. “The book gathered more momentum as time went on, and continues to,” Pallotta says. “The book exists in parallel with lots of other books and blogs and things that people are writing that represent a new conversation.”
Such open discussion is “liberating” to those in the nonprofit sector and brings a sense of excitement back to their work, says Pallotta, adding that work remains in order for that conversation to occur among the general public.
That’s Pallotta’s next step, one he hopes to accomplish through the Charity Defense Council and his new book. “My next book will basically be a blueprint for building a national leadership movement and that movement has to be about changing the way the public thinks of these things,” he says.
The Charity Defense Council, of which he is president, will provide paid advertising for the sector, develop a rights act for charity and social enterprise and help to organize the sector, among other roles. “The nonprofit sector has never had a public campaign that engages people in the issues that are critical to the sector,” Pallotta says.
Pallotta, who also blogs for Harvard Business Review and is founder and chief humanity officer for Advertising for Humanity, recognizes that there’s lots of work ahead of him. But considering the conversation he’s already started, he sounds hopeful that the general public will pick up on his message, too.
And if they do – if we free charities and the people who work for them from the set of rules “designed for another age and another purpose” – Pallotta thinks we could achieve good on a scale not previously imagined.
Category: Work
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