Nonprofits love their car shows. And let’s be honest. It’s a terrible way to raise money. At least, that was my opinion until last weekend.
The paint is what you notice first. Candy apple red. Burnt orange. Black so deep and polished you could see the whole crowd bent across the hood. These were cars restored down to the last bolt, and the people around them leaned in close, pointing, talking.
Twenty-four hours later, I found myself sitting in the VIP tent at a local air show. Planes from a bygone era sat on the ground like museum pieces, then took off and filled the sky with noise you could feel in your chest. The crowd tipped their heads back and watched while a thousand cameras captured the planes in flight.
Two days, two crowds, thousands of people. I started to wonder why we come.
We do not come to give anyone anything. We come because the car is the one our mother and father drove, or the one the child we used to be wanted and never got. We come to hear an engine we have not heard since we were young. We come to stand close to something we remember.
Standing there, I understood something I had been slow to learn.
Money, it turns out, was never what the day was really making.
Look again at who was standing in that crowd. Hundreds of people who had never met. They came from different towns and different lives. And every one of them loved the same thing. The old Fords sorted them out of the whole county and set them down in one field on one morning. Birds of a feather. The day did not do much for anyone's pocketbook. What it did was show a few hundred people that they are a flock.
That is the thing a letter cannot do. A letter reaches a person alone in a kitchen. An event puts them shoulder to shoulder with everyone else who cares. That feeling is where community starts.
Which tells me where our work really is.
Our work is not really the show. The show mostly runs on its own, on love people brought with them. Our work is to notice the flock the day gathered, learn their names, and tend what they already have in common long after the cars go home. The gathering is the gift. The event just made it visible for a day.
So I have stopped asking whether the car show made money.
Who did it bring together?
And what are we doing to keep them together?
About this Field Note
Field Notes from Show Me the Receipts record what we see in the field, written by a practitioner for other practitioners. This one is close to a parable, and it rests on a practice you can check. Two things in it are verifiable. Events of this kind commonly gather large, self-selected crowds who share a specific affinity, hundreds of people who all, on their own, love the same thing. And as a way to raise money, such events are inefficient: published analyses put the cost of raising a dollar through a special event near fifty cents, against roughly a nickel for a major gift, far below passive and relationship-based methods. The note does not cite that number in the body on purpose, because its point is not the ledger. It is the gathering. That gathering does real fundraising work, and on this point the evidence is firmer than a reading. Kessler and Milkman, in two field experiments with the American Red Cross reported in “Identity in Charitable Giving” (Management Science, 2018), found that an appeal priming a donor’s identity as a member of their local community raised the donation rate to 5.5 percent, against 3.8 to 4.1 percent for drives that did not, and that the effect was strongest in smaller communities, where belonging carries more of a person’s sense of who they are. A global donor survey of more than eighteen hundred people across one hundred seventeen countries (Chapman, Masser, and Louis, “Identity Motives in Charitable Giving,” Psychology & Marketing, 2020) found the same pull: people give more readily to the groups they belong to, community and neighbors among them. What those studies measured is the general link, that shared community identity moves giving. That a car show or an air show is one of the places such community gets made is the reading this note lays on top, offered as a reading and not a finding, along with the claim that the day's real yield is the flock it reveals rather than the money it clears, and that the fundraiser's work is to tend that community rather than repeat the event. That is how this framework sees the work. The tending this note points to, keeping a community together and giving its promises an owner and a written record before they break in silence, is what Show Me the Receipts is about. Glen E. Quiring, CFRE, is the developer of the Show Me the Receipts framework. ShowMeReceipts.org.