Today, I’m thankful for operating & equipment fund donors like Ryan & Caleb. They helped me acquire a much needed piece of software I need as part of this project.
However, after corresponding with the CEO of the company behind this software, spending money to support this company was the last thing I wanted to do.
After reaching out to his company inquiring if they discounted or donated software to worthy causes, I got a thanks but no thanks response.
On the advice of one of my friends on Twitter, I wrote a personal appeal to the CEO. Turns out, the person who responded originally was in fact the CEO.
Here was his follow-up:
Hi Shawn,
I have already responded to you, but apparently my message wasn’t clear so let me spell it out. I have given a lot of money to various causes over the years and have concluded it was a complete waste. The reason why is that it was passive and reactive, with no real attention being paid to the impact it might have. My response to this is not to pull back, but rather to redouble my efforts, take the time to devise a donation strategy, pick my battles and be very conscious of whether I am being effective. This takes a lot of time, but I like how it is working out.
Part of the strategy is to allocate my time carefully. There are only so many hours in the day that I can spend on philanthropic efforts. Every minute that I take to write letters like this one is a minute I can’t spend finding the most effective way to stop the trafficking of women in Vietnam or free a political prisoner in Burma. We get a lot of requests for donations to all kinds of things. We can either say yes to all of them or no to all of them, but there is no way we are going to take the time to investigate them to see which ones we feel we should support. Instead, we will use our time to identify the efforts that make the most sense to us and we will put a lot of support behind those, without having to be approached about it. In other words, don’t call us, we’ll call you.
So, no, I don’t know your organization and I am not going find out about it. [...]
I’m definitely hurt and insulted by this CEO’s response. But I didn’t post this to give his company a bad reputation. Instead, I wanted to talk about the idea of “don’t call us, we’ll call you” as a standard for corporate social responsibility.
Simply put: that approach doesn’t work. This is especially true if your company creates a niche product (as is the case for this particular piece of software).
There is no way that, of all the causes and charities out there, that the one the CEO decides to “call” will happen to be the one that could be best served by a complementary copy of his software.
It’s times like this that I’m ever grateful for all the companies that have taken time to learn about me – even though they may have never heard of me before. Companies that have taken the time to see the value in my work, take a risk, and support it.
And, I’m especially thankful for operating and equipment fund donors who help me solve problems when I can’t find a sponsor or a CEO kind enough to even offer a coupon for their products.
And, without mentioning the company or product name, no – there is unfortunately no competitor or alternative to this particular program. It’s very niche and solves a very specific problem for those using dual system sound recording.
Perhaps that’s why this CEO could afford to be so gruff: he knew I’d have to be a customer of his either way.
[UPDATE: Wow - this post inspired some changes. Since writing this post, a copy of this software was donated to me by the CEO. We also had several good email exchanges afterwards where he shared some tips on what he feels would catch the attention of other CEOs that I approach in the future. Basically, his suggestion was that I should emphasize the work I do on the ground and not focus on how much support there is for this on YouTube.]
