There are two kinds of people in the humanitarian sector. Those obsessed with giving donors what they say they want and those committed to giving donors something more magnificent than anything they ever dreamed they wanted. The latter are in short supply.

To respond, Boy Scout-like, to what donors say they want, and to dedicate the whole of your organization to telling them what they want to hear, is at best professionally lazy and at worst a wholesale dereliction of duty. Donors lead busy lives. They cannot and should not be expected to have the same level of sophistication about giving questions as those of us who have made philanthropy our careers.

Most donors don’t know what they really want because they haven’t had time to think about it. Those of us who lead philanthropy and humanitarian organizations have a duty to share our expertise with them and to do it in a way that engages them. We have a duty to lead, not to follow. Imagine if your dentist let your teeth rot because she didn’t want to tell you that you needed a root canal because she knew it wasn’t what you wanted to hear.

In a 2009 television interview, the head of Charity Navigator, said that executives in the nonprofit sector should not be making more than $150,000 annually. Why? In part because of what Charity Navigator’s users want, and don’t want, to hear. He said, “The public is offended by [high salaries]. More than any other comment, [our users] will say ‘Now that I see what the CEO is making, I will never give money to that charity ever again.'”

But what if, instead of nodding our heads in agreement, we told the donor that by hiring a leader who commands a $300,000 salary in the market, instead of one who commands only a $150,000 salary, a charity might well be able to double the amount of money going to the cause, and double the impact of the donor’s dollar? The donor might want to know that, don’t you think?

Most of the public’s favorite charities are quick to put watchdog seals of approval on the home pages of their websites as a signal to donors that they’re listening. We need a seal of approval to show that charities are leading.

In 2001 the Better Business Bureau Wise Giving Alliance was considering imposing more onerous overhead restrictions on the humanitarian sector. To aid in their decision making, the Alliance hired a research firm to ask donors what they thought the overhead guidelines should be. What on earth expertise does the public have about what overhead ratios should or should not be? That would be like asking people how long they think heart surgery should take and then using the answer as a standard for heart surgeons.

In that same survey, the Better Business Bureau got a remarkable result. When asked what information they most wanted to have before giving to charity, 79% of respondents said they wanted to know what percentage of their money went to the cause. Only 6% said they wanted to know if their donation made a difference. Six percent. Now, why would that be? It’s not because the donating public is stupid. It’s because we’ve managed to teach them that the two things are the same.

It’s because the sector has been filling their heads with nonsense.

We’ve been telling the donating public that good charities have low overhead, and bad charities have high overhead. Well, I don’t know about you, but when I hear “good,” I think, “makes a difference.” So, if you tell me the good charities have low overhead, then I don’t need to know whether the money I give makes a difference. If they have low overhead, I can assume that they do! The Nonprofit Overhead Cost Project at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy came to the opposite conclusion . Their report, entitled, “GETTING WHAT WE PAY FOR: LOW OVERHEAD LIMITS NONPROFIT EFFECTIVENESS,” indicates that the charities that spend less on capacity tend to have inferior programs. The donating public might want to know that, don’t you think?

We have, as a result of our timidity, managed to confuse a well-intentioned public into basing their giving decisions on the wrong data. That’s not what they want. And if they knew that’s what we’ve been up to they’d be pissed.

The list of erroneous teaching is long. For example, charities don’t spend a lot on advertising because the public’s default thinking is that it’s wasteful. We signal our agreement by making sure the public knows that any advertising we do is donated. But donors might want to know that there are proven, positive correlations between ad spending and donation revenue — that a dollar donated to purchase an ad will likely produce more than a dollar of donation, multiplying the donors’ impact.

If we want to honor the donating public’s sacred faith in us, then we have to stop trying to score quick holier-than-thou points, and start showing some respect for their intelligence and their intentions. Telling busy people who don’t know any better what they think they want to hear ain’t it.

It’s courage time for the humanitarian sector. We shrink before donors, as if we’re six years old looking for approval from our parents. It has to stop. They have kids of their own. What they expect from us is the maturity to tell them the truth.