You can just see the fundraising team around a conference table trying to create an appeal that doesn’t draw any complaints, doesn’t raise even one hackle, doesn’t offend in any way, real or imagined.

And the result is this:

For many of our community members, living without shelter can be traumatic and dangerous.

That’s the first line of the email. Talk about stating the obvious. “Living without shelter can be traumatic”? The only possible response to that generalization would be “no kidding.”

It continues:

And in the summertime, extreme temperatures make the experience even more perilous.

Another obvious point, made even less impactful by the cautious, corporate-memo-style phrasing. But there’s more going on here. So, being homeless is an “experience” now? And in the summer, it’s “perilous”? That’s an understatement. In the southern part of the country where this nonprofit operates, the temperatures are in triple digits, have been for weeks, and will continue to be. For someone who’s out on the street, that must feel like living on the surface of the sun. You would bake out there. And even if you could find some piece of shade, it’s so hot that it would feel like the life is being drained right out of you. “Perilous” doesn’t begin to cover it.

It continues:

Neighbors will face the risk of dehydration, heat exposure, and worse… 

Actually, they’ll die. Their hearts will stop beating, and they’ll die from the heat. As many homeless people do. Just as, in the winter months, homeless people freeze to death.

It continues.

That’s why I am writing to you today. This is a critical time of need in our community. Our community members without permanent shelter are looking for friends to stand up and help make summer not only bearable, but hopeful too.  

A couple things going on here and in previous paragraphs. Referring to someone who’s homeless as a “community member” or as “living without shelter” or as “community members without permanent shelter” or as “neighbors” just wouldn’t ring true for donors, either when it comes to what they might know about homelessness or what they might presume about it. These are obvious, hollow euphemisms.

Imagine you’re a donor, and you see a homeless man picking in a trash can for a half-eaten hamburger, do you think “Oh, there’s a community member without permanent shelter” or do you think “that man is homeless, he’s hurting, he deserves help”?

Of course there are real concerns about ‘otherizing’ the beneficiaries of a nonprofit in fundraising, and they’re valid. But when those concerns result in bland, cautious, and sterile fundraising, it’s a problem.

It’s a problem because it fails to convey the actual lived reality of the very people that the nonprofit hopes the donor will help. And in the end, that’s a disservice to the purpose of fundraising and to the people who need help. And it’s a disservice to donors, who want to accept the reality of a social ill like homelessness, confront it, and make a difference for the people caught up in it.