Uncharitable

“Uncharitable is the most courageous and necessary of all of the recent books that have been written about philanthropy and the nonprofit sector.

Dan Pallotta understands that being faithful to those that charities are designed to serve requires more than generosity and good management. It requires taking risks, confronting antiquated notions of politically correct charity, and most of all remembering that nonprofit efficiency should be a means to an end not an end in itself. Uncharitable charts a new path that if followed, could finally create the incentives needed to unleash the enormous potential of nonprofits to change the world.”

Bill Shore
Founder & Executive Director,
Share Our Strength

“Challenging hallowed premises is difficult; challenging the foundational premises underlying our understanding of charity is even more so. Dan Pallotta has done exactly that and, in doing so, requires us all to rethink the very nature of what it means to be charitable and how charity actually functions. He liberates charity from its Puritan constraints and cogently attaches it to entrepreneurship in a way that should make us all take two steps back and imagine a new philosophy and theory of charity itself. This is nothing less than a revolutionary work.”

Gary Hart
Former United States Senator
Scholar in Residence, University of Colorado

“Dan Pallotta has written the clearest and most articulate critique I have read of the system of values that our charities and other nonprofit organizations are supposed to follow. He explains in graphic detail how these values undercut what charities are trying to do and prevent them from accomplishing all that they might. Not everyone may agree with his position, but the nonprofit world will surely benefit from a vigorous discussion of his arguments.”

Derek Bok
Former President of Harvard University

“What scales would our nonprofit organizations have to achieve to eradicate the great social problems that confront us, and how do our traditions and beliefs about charity stand in their way? Dan Pallotta has elevated the questions we need to be asking. His book provocatively challenges traditional views of how charities should operate and provides a thought-provoking alternative. ”

Dr. David Ho
Time Magazine Man of the Year, 1996
Director, Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center

“Uncharitable poses a bold challenge to orthodoxy that drives American non-profit business practice.
In an era when civilization is challenged with unprecedented threats from disease, climate change and globalization, unleashing imaginative leadership in the creation of social good is of paramount urgency. If we are indeed going to succeed in innovating our way to a sustainable future in the 21st century, we will need to unlock the moral and creative potential of the non-profit sector, enable it to interact more comfortably and flexibly with the market, create the right incentives for the recruitment of America’s most talented social innovators, and rethink our approaches to capitalizing
our best ideas and institutions. If this is heresy, we need more of it. ”

Raymond C. Offenheiser
President, Oxfam America

“For the first time someone has codified all of the irrational ways we have forced charities to operate. The picture that emerges tells us we have everything backwards. Dan's battle cry to set charities free to experiment, to take risks, to advertise like Apple, and to use the same economic incentives as G.E. are long overdue. The message to philanthropists is even more important - start leveraging your generosity to create new, long-term revenue streams and action, instead of merely supporting short-term program survival.
Dan has put the pieces together in a way no one has before him, and proposes a breathtaking path to change that has never before been articulated.”

Peter Diamandis, M.D.
Chairman and Founder, X PRIZE Foundation

“Dan Pallotta voices what nonprofits don't dare mention, for fear of
losing their donor support:

• Why fundraising expenditures are not only good, they are essential for nonprofit survival;
• How investment in "overhead" can catapult an organization into a
  more efficient and productive sphere of operation;
• How donor distaste for spending on marketing puts our greatest causes at a severe disadvantage to the giant consumer brands;
• How low salaries prevent nonprofits from attracting top talent to
  the world's most important jobs.

Pallotta's testy and spirited review of the public's weird misconceptions
about how nonprofits ought to run should be required reading for all
nonprofits, board members, donors and foundations.”

Renee Irvin, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Director,
Graduate Certificate in
Nonprofit Management Program,
University of Oregon

“For those of us who have labored in the trenches of the non-profit world, this book comes like a rainstorm to a parched land.
For too long society has demanded that the nonprofit sector put traditional operating procedure ahead of innovation... Dan and his team have raised unprecedented sums to help treat devastating human disease. Our lab received $100,000 for research from one of his company's events. The findings from that research allowed us to secure over $20 million more in federal grants. Those who would take issue with doing things in
a new way will have to reconcile their reservations with those results.”

Peter Anton, M.D.
Professor of Medicine
Director, Center for HIV Prevention Research
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

“Charitable non-profits exist to leverage our country’s prosperity for the benefit of those in need, and yet too often non-profits reject the tools and the techniques that have made that prosperity possible, shortchanging their noble causes in the process. With passion and logic, and drawing on his own deep well of experience, Dan Pallotta shows how the power of capitalism can be marshaled the cause of compassion.”

Yuval Levin
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Former Associate Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council
Coordinator of National AIDS Policy

“As the chairman of a nonprofit policy institute, Dan Pallotta has clarified for me the explicit and many implicit constraints under which we operate. My thanks.”

William A. Niskanen
Chairman, the Cato Institute

“I urge every nonprofit executive who values their sanity and their mission to buy each of their board members and major donors a copy of this book.
Here in one inspired package is the intellectual artillery to intelligently debate another way forward. It was Dr. King who once said that while he valued the Good Samaritan and the world needs them, he did not particularly want to be one. He did not want to be the Good Samaritan picking up victims beside the Jericho Road. He wanted to fix the Jericho Road. I believe that this is what Dan is trying to do here. This is a powerful wake-up call that reminds us we are here to change the world, not to conform to an antiquated orthodoxy that makes real change virtually impossible.”

John Hope Bryant
Founder and Chairman, Operation HOPE, Inc.

“Dan Pallotta’s book is a brilliant take on the absurdities that constrain the potential of our fastest growing sector — the nonprofit world in America. He raises questions that every executive director asks him or herself every week, but finds no public discourse on. He calls it like it is. In order for charities, large and small, to truly grow to their potential, don’t they need to be more entrepreneurial? Don’t they need to think long-term? Don’t they need to take seriously new marketing strategies and invest in diversified funding streams? In fact, isn’t it necessary for the old-fashioned “Puritan mindset” (as Pallotta would call it) to be eradicated as the dominant paradigm for the great promise of the nonprofit sector to be realized? From his own extraordinary experience putting together the most successful fundraising events in history, Dan has put together a timely manifesto that outlines the only direction that makes sense — embracing true entrepreneurial initiative and challenging the paradoxical split in America that sets business free but straitjackets charities.”

Torie Osborn
Senior Advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa
Former Executive Director, Liberty Hill Foundation,
National Gay & Lesbian Task Force,
Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center

“Dan is a pioneering individual of tremendous vision. A decade ago, he reinvented the concept of charitable fundraising – and his ideas now promise to reengineer the entire non-profit industry. The lines between the private sector and civil society already are blurring, but the momentum of Dan’s ideas will accelerate this fusion.
Uncharitable is a must read for people seeking
careers in social enterprise or attempting to
drive meaning into their work.”

Jonathan Greenblatt
Co-Founder, Ethos Water
CEO, Good Magazine

“Do the norms and values that have defined the way charity has been undertaken for centuries continue to make sense in the current age of globalization, mass marketing and technology? Dan Pallotta makes a convincing case that the time has come to rigorously measure strategic impact rather than overhead ratios; be more competitive in regard to mass communications and marketing; and more adequately invest in administrative systems and program support...
Uncharitable is an important contribution to making philanthropy more impactful in the 21st Century.”

Charles MacCormack
President and CEO, Save the Children

“America needs the smartest and most creative people operating its multi-billion dollar nonprofit sector. To attract them, we must be competitive in compensations, business management and fundraising ideas. Nonprofits who see themselves “poor as a church mouse” do their mission and supporters a disservice.”

Morris Dees
Founder and Chief Trial Counsel, Southern Poverty Law Center

“Dan Pallotta writes commanding and compelling vision of what charities and non-profit organizations are capable of becoming if freed to fully embrace free enterprise thinking and action. He would have us break permanently from the notion that spending money in the service of raising money for deserving social causes is a sin.
Anyone who cares about vexing social and health problems facing society should pay close attention to the brilliant ideas percolating in this groundbreaking book.”

Everette J. Freeman
President, Albany State University

“I have long considered Dan Pallotta a wise and visionary man with much to contribute to our world. This book proves it. His insights into charities and non-profits are
as brilliant as they are unexpected and unorthodox. It has always seemed to me that the impulse in our culture to give to worthy causes is a manifestation of what is best about us as people and as a society. This book explains how we limit the effectiveness of our organizations and undermine the realization of our purest dreams and our highest hopes. It is essential reading for anyone who cares about non-profit organizations or the money they give to them. I truly believe that following the wisdom in this book would lead us to impacting on the problems of our world in a genuinely amazing way.”

Judith Light
Two-Time Best Actress
Emmy-Award Winner
AIDS Activist

“We cannot help but wonder 'What might have been?' Where, for example, might we now be in long struggle to develop a safe, cheap, effective vaccine against HIV if Pallotta TeamWorks had not been put out of business by an informal coalition of well-intentioned AIDS activists, who thought they were serving the community by assailing Dan Pallotta’s unorthodox—but hugely successful—approach to fund-raising. The millions that PTW raised for vaccine research at UCLA and two other major AIDS research centers across the country helped to jump-start work on a number of promising ideas, many of which we were subsequently obliged to put on hold for lack of continued funding. At the moment, our best guess is that it will take another 15 to 20 years to develop an effective vaccine against HIV. With Dan’s continued help, we might have been able to cut that development time in half. But it isn’t just vaccine development that has suffered since the demise of PTW. It is almost impossible to tally the number of promising ideas—and young careers—that have languished as a result. And it is hard to avoid asking ourselves 'What might have been?'”

Dr. Irvin S.Y. Chen
Director, UCLA AIDS Institute