Living Between the Tides

Each day the certainty of the changing tides is the one constant. I suppose it's more obvious when you live in a coastal city and less apparent if you're landlocked. Low tide gives way to high tide and back again. Get caught out at low tide and you might end up stuck. Get too comfortable at high tide and you might lose sight of the dangers below. We live our lives between the tides.

And just like the tides, change in our lives is never instantaneous. It takes place over a period of time. Although the rate of change may vary, just like tidal ranges and patterns differ depending on your location, the basic concept remains the same. This isn't a tale by Washington Irving and there's no fast-forward button or TiVo to skip past what happens in-between. When you wake up tomorrow, there won't be a robot butler waiting with your food tablets and flying car ready to go. It never works that way.

Technological change is no different. It is a constantly evolving hive of chaotic balance that ebbs and flows. Some changes happen quickly and others seem to take an eternity. But how do you live between the tides? How do you balance the old way of doing things with the new way of doing things? How do you transition the ways you fund your mission without cracking the foundation? How long do you hold on to what has always worked before you risk getting caught high and dry? One day at a time. One tide change at a time.

"The old systems get broken long before new ones become stable." – Clay Shirky

The horse and buggy was broken long before the automobile was perfected, and even after 120 years we're still trying to get the car on the good side of Mother Nature. The typewriter was broken the moment the personal computer debuted, but no one would say it doesn't still need improving. The record album business was broken by the cassette tape, which was then undone by the CD, then digital music files changed everything, and something else is sure to come along. The frozen TV dinner was broken the minute the first microwave came out, but popcorn still gets burnt 50% of the time in one. The newspaper classified ads were broken forever by the Internet, thanks to a one-two punch from the likes of Monster and Craigslist. The direct mail world was broken the instant the first email was sent, but 80% of all email sent is spam.

And the nonprofit fundraising world is being broken a little bit at a time too. Kiva breaks it. Room to Read breaks it. GlobalGiving breaks it. GOOD magazine breaks it. Causes on Facebook breaks it. People to people fundraising breaks it. Care2 breaks it. And this list of new-but-not-yet-perfected things will go on and on. You can choose to ignore it all, but that won't stop the changing tides. You can dismiss some of these things as fads or just a flash in the pan. You can cover your eyes right up until the moment you find yourself stranded on the exposed rocks. That's your choice.

Change is messy. Who will win? Who will lose? No one has a crystal ball and you can't call Miss Cleo either. The technology landscape of the past 30 years is littered with big hits and even bigger misses. Remember Betamax or Laserdisc or ColecoVision or Iridium satellite phones or PointCast or WebTV. And yes, even Apple once bombed with the Newton. Thomas Edison tried 6,000 different filaments before he got the light bulb right. Success is usually the end result of a series of failures. And sometimes the things that looked like failures the first time around often reappear down the road. Anything look familiar about Blu-ray or Xbox or the iPhone?

The industries change and the professionals do too. When is the last time you called on a cobbler, cooper, lamplighter, wheelwright, tinsmith, farrier, or a telegraphist. What's next on the career extinction list? There might not be some for a while, but every career path is now on the transformation list. The profession of a major gift officer, volunteer coordinator, international programs director, alumni relations manager, event planner, annual fund manager, donor services manager, fundraising system analyst, marketing communications specialist, overseas missionary, online content developer, and just about every other career path in the nonprofit world is changing with the tides. Are you changing with it? More importantly, are you seeking out people with a healthy appetite for change? Or do they get sea sick?

The technology providers are not immune to the tides of change either. What got you here won't necessarily keep you there in the future. And what makes you novel today can quickly make you a nobody tomorrow. The price of more novelty is always less understanding. What you deliver has always been more important than how you deliver it, but even that changes with the technology tides. Back in the day, Blackbaud used to hand-deliver the hardware and software to our clients. Now we let you choose who hosts the bits and bytes, and those bits and bytes are changing too. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The rate of change in the nonprofit world has been steadily increasing over the past decade. This is in part because the easier you can communicate, the faster change happens. But it has also been driven by major events like 9/11, the Asian Tsunami, and Hurricane Katrina. And the 2008 U.S. presidential election are giving us a whole new glimpse of the multi-channel communication and fundraising industrial complex in action. This isn't the world of tomorrow. This is the world of today. The tide has changed.

Nonprofits used to have the luxury of letting other organizations take the plunge first. But those days are quickly coming to and end. Depending on the mission and constituents that you serve, then you might already be past the tipping point. Many of you are already seeing the tide going out on some of your fundraising efforts and are working to adapt to the changes. There will be organizations that get lost in the depths and others that thrive at the edges. Everyone likes change, but no one likes changing. This is never easy, but it is necessary.

All of this change is spurring the growth of more nonprofit organizations than ever before. In a world where businesses keep consolidating to survive the nonprofit world is actually expanding more and more. These new organizations may not be as large as the old growth nonprofits, but they aren't carrying the same baggage and bias about change either. If you started your organization over from scratch today, then what tidal patterns would you pay attention to first? Now just take out the "if" and get started.

Amongst the chaos and the uncertainty is where the innovation happens. This panics some people and drives the passions of others. These are the exciting times to live in. This is where nonprofits finally overcome the roadblocks of the past, and get on to fulfilling their missions in dynamic new ways. It starts with experimenting with new strategies and technologies (not the other way around). Try one new thing, measure where you started and measure where you finished, and then adjust. Fail fast. We live our lives between the tides. It can be a great place to live if you are willing to give it a try.