To Have and to Give

A growing number of couples are incorporating philanthropy into their weddings

Lisa Cleff Kurtz and Michael Kurtz say they lead charmed lives. So when it came time for the couple to register for gifts for their wedding, they decided to give rather than to receive.

The Kurtzes, who live in San Francisco, say they felt uncomfortable asking friends and relatives for gifts they didn’t need or want. Instead they asked the 130 people who attended their mid-May wedding to donate to the couple’s favorite causes, using an online charitable gift registry.

“It made the wedding more of a celebration to know that these organizations were going to be benefiting,” says Mr. Kurtz.

“We’ve got all the pots and pans,” adds Ms. Cleff Kurtz. “We thought there were a lot of people out there who needed help more than us.”

Like the Kurtzes, whose guests have so far donated about $4,500 to the four charities the newlyweds selected, other couples are incorporating philanthropy into their weddings — either by asking guests to give to charities on their behalf or by donating money themselves to celebrate their big day.

The I Do Foundation, a Washington charity that encourages couples to promote philanthropy as part of their celebrations, estimates that about 10 percent of people now planning weddings are working charity fund raising into their events.

Several charities are starting to become more aggressive in seeking wedding-related donations, by offering online registries to accept donations, and making reception favors and other items available to brides and grooms.

2.3 Million Weddings

More than 2.3 million Americans will get married this year, according to the Conde Nast Bridal Group, which publishes three bridal magazines, and they will be accompanied by 23 million bridesmaids and groomsmen and nearly 380 million wedding guests. With numbers like those, wedding philanthropy could be a good way for charities to reach new donors, fund raisers say.

But weddings that raise money for charity are still not commonplace, and many engaged couples are unaware that their nuptials could be used to help others.

“More people might do it if they had heard of it,” says Mr. Kurtz. He says that once the idea occurred to the couple, they started looking for resources and stumbled onto the online wedding registry maintained by the I Do Foundation Web site. The registry allows guests to donate money to charities chosen by the bride and groom.

“It was a little tough to find,” adds his wife. Charities “need to get the word out there.”

When Sarah Kirk and her husband, Bill, got married last October, they asked guests to donate to six organizations. Ms. Kirk created a flyer herself, featuring a brief description and the logo of each charity, and asked her bridesmaids and relatives to give copies of it to inquiring wedding guests.

Many of those guests, however, called and asked, “What do you really want for your wedding?,” Ms. Kirk recalls. None of the charities on her flyer received much money, with Ms. Kirk’s alma mater, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, in Lynchburg, Va., getting the most: $435.

Ms. Kirk says she would have used a charitable wedding registry — if she had ever heard of one.

“I wish I had known about that,” she says. “I think more guests would have done it because they would have known we were serious.”

Charities Say ‘I Do’

Even though many people do not know about formal efforts to encourage wedding philanthropy, Bethany Robertson, executive director of the I Do Foundation, says she believes the trend is gaining momentum.

The organization has raised $1.5-million for charities since its inception in 2002, $1.1-million of which was donated last year alone, primarily through the wedding registry on its Web site (http://www.ido foundation.org).

Couples sign up for the registry online and create a personalized Web page highlighting nonprofit groups they have chosen. Guests are directed to the Web page where they can make contributions online. The foundation adds a 3-percent processing fee to each donation to help pay its costs, including ensuring that all of the 3,000 charities that couples can select for their pages are tax-exempt organizations. Donations are then sent to organizations selected by the couple’s guests.

The I Do Foundation’s Web site also includes information about how weddings can help charitable causes in other ways, from donating leftover food to local homeless shelters to using recycled paper for the invitations. Since the organization started the site on Valentine’s Day in 2002, the number of visitors has increased from a couple of hundred people in the first year to about 200,000 in 2005.

Ms. Robertson says that much of the increased interest in her organization comes from people who participated in weddings where charity was involved.

“Whenever one couple does this, they have 175 people who hear about it, so it’s grown quite virally,” she says.

No Need for Presents

Another big reason wedding philanthropy has become an attractive option, fund raisers say, is that people are marrying later in life or for a second or third time and do not need traditional gifts like china and silverware.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median age of first-time brides in 1970 was 20.8; by 2000, their median age had advanced to 25.1. Conde Nast’s data, based on a survey of 1,619 brides, suggests that the trend toward marrying later is continuing — this year, altar-bound women are 27 years old, on average, and their grooms are 29.

“By that time, you’re combining two sets of household items,” says Kendall Webb, president of Justgive.org, an online giving site that maintains a wedding registry. “There’s just less that they need.”

The electronic wedding registries of both Justgive.org and Whatgoesaround.org, another online giving site, are similar to the I Do Foundation’s registry, but they allow couples to choose from among more charities. Both sites are linked to GuideStar, an online database of information on the nearly one million charities that have tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, and donors can give to any of those organizations through the online wedding registries.

Justgive.org deducts a 3-percent processing fee from a guest’s gift and also charges donors a flat $5 fee per transaction. Whatgoes around.org gives donors the option of adding its 3-percent processing fee to their donation; otherwise it deducts the amount from the gift.

Since Whatgoesaround.org was founded two years ago, donors have used the site to create about 6,000 registries, called “Givelists,” which have produced about $200,000 for charities. Officials from Whatgoesaround.org estimate that about 2,000 of those registries have been created for weddings.

Justgive.org, which started offering online wedding registries in 2002, has raised nearly $500,000 from the friends and families of about 1,600 couples who created wedding registries to benefit nonprofit groups.

Ms. Webb says that couples often find Justgive.org through the search engine Google. Many, she says, see their wedding as the beginning of their joint household contributions.

“Couples look at this as the start of their philanthropy,” says Ms. Webb. “It’s something that guests can come together and help couples start.”

Seeking Gifts

Rather than relying on other organizations’ Web sites to tap into the largess of marrying couples and their guests, some charities have created their own wedding registries and found other ways to encourage brides and grooms to give.

Last year, Heifer International, a hunger-relief group in Little Rock, Ark., started an online wedding registry, adding to a feature on its Web site that allows people to set up their own Web page and promote gifts that pay for goats, heifers, bees, and other agricultural animals, which the charity purchases for needy families in developing countries.

Heifer received about $200,000 last year through Web pages created by donors for all occasions, including anniversaries and birthdays as well as weddings.

Mike Matchett, director of marketing, says that although the wedding registries are new and have raised relatively small amounts, he believes they have great potential. With the convenience of an online registry, he says, more people will turn to philanthropy to add more meaning to their nuptials.

“People want to make a statement with their wedding,” he says. “Donors are looking for ways to talk about a cause that they believe in.”

Wedding Favors

Other charities seek donations directly from brides and grooms.

In recent years, the National Arbor Day Foundation, Unicef, American Cancer Society, Special Olympics, and other groups have started offering couples favors or cards that can be given to guests or displayed at their wedding reception in exchange for a minimum donation. Several of the organizations say they started making such offers at the request of couples and their families who wanted some way to announce a gift they were making in honor of a wedding.

In exchange for a gift of $3 or more per guest from a couple or a family, for example, the National Arbor Day Foundation offers “gift trees,” tiny saplings in plastic tubes that are distributed to wedding guests who are urged to plant them.

Brides and grooms can include their names and a customized message on the tubes.

The American Diabetes Association, in Alexandria, Va., started distributing wedding favors about five years ago by printing cards on the office laser printer recognizing a couple’s donation, says Joanne DelGiorno, managing director of direct-response marketing.

She says that the cards, one for each place setting at a wedding reception, have helped the charity connect with donors in their 20s and 30s, a younger crowd than the group’s average donor, who is 55 to 65 years old.

In February, the diabetes association unveiled an online feature that allows couples to help design the announcements. They can change the color, font, and border design on the cards to match the style of their nuptials and also create a specialized message for wedding guests.

The association does not know how much has been raised since the feature became available, but they say they are averaging a little more than one order per day, with a minimum donation of $200 per order.

Ms. DelGiorno hopes the effort will expand as more and more people, including future brides and grooms, see the cards at the weddings they attend.

“We’ve really done no outside promotion of it other than on our Web site,” she says. “In the wedding business, word of mouth is golden. If a couple has a good florist, everyone knows about it.”

Unicef, the international children’s charity in New York, last year began offering wedding favors, and has so far netted about $11,000 from 20 to 25 couples who have made a gift of $3 or more per guest, says Karla Coello, who oversees the effort.

Like Ms. DelGiorno, she says that many of the donors who order wedding favors are young and have not previously given to her organization.

Ms. Coello says that Unicef officials are so pleased with the results from offering wedding favors that they are looking into expanding choices for donors, by offering a greater array of acknowledgment cards or creating an online wedding registry.

“Just look at all the wedding magazines out there,” says Ms. Coello, pointing to how lucrative the wedding industry is. Some $58.5-billion will be spent on weddings this year, according to the Wedding Report, an industry research group. And among the people spending that money, Ms. Coello adds, “there’s a lot of interest in donating to charities. There’s a lot more potential.”