Beyond Recognition

Charities devise creative ways to acknowledge donors by name — and motivate them to give more

When Rebecca Hoffberger, director of Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum,

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wanted to thank a donor who had made a $2.1-million gift, she decided that putting the person’s name on a building wasn’t enough.

Instead, she commissioned a steel sculpture of the donor’s face and had it mounted on the building. She did the same thing for another million-dollar donor, a woman whose visage now adorns a second building.

“I wanted to put a face on the gifts — and remind our visitors that it’s always a human being that makes the critical difference,” says Ms. Hoffberger, the founder of the museum, which features work by people with no formal artistic training. “A name alone is just too impersonal.”

Like Ms. Hoffberger, more and more fund raisers are realizing that traditional ways of acknowledging gifts — such as plaques and walls etched with names of big contributors — do not do what they are supposed to do. Not only do they fail to reinforce a donor’s loyalty to the institution and to encourage more gifts, they often do little to inspire others to give generously.

The focus on how best to acknowledge a big charitable gift comes at a time when many charities are looking for ways to stand out. As organizations ask for bigger and bigger donations, donors are getting pickier about the groups they support. To appeal to them, charities are looking for new ways to gratify and motivate donors — and to differentiate themselves from the crowd of solicitors.

“Given the amount of competition out there, you have to look at unique ways you can recognize the important partnerships you are forming in the community,” says Karla Schell, a fund raiser at the Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, in Edmonton, Canada. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense anymore to just put a person’s name on the wall.”

Ms. Schell did much more than that when she honored donors who helped pay for renovations of the hospital’s pediatric unit. She and her colleagues asked a professional designer to come up with a playful thank-you piece that would appeal to both children and adults in the unit.

The designer came up with a wall mounting that works like a pinball machine. A small lever releases a ball that travels over a lighted board, which is illustrated with painted animals and objects labeled with donors’ names.

Such innovative designs do not appeal to all fund raisers, however. Many worry that spending too much time or money on donor recognition sends the wrong message — that they are more devoted to getting gifts than to good works.

Other fund raisers, even when they are not afraid to spend money to honor donors, have not figured out how to make their recognition tools stand out.

“There’s not enough creativity going into donor recognition,” says Dyan Sublett, senior vice-president for institutional advancement at the Art Center College of Design, in Pasadena, Cal. “I see a lot of organizations buying nice pieces from Tiffany’s and just handing them out to donors,” Ms. Sublett says. “The name of the organization is on it, but the object itself does nothing to remind the donor of that institution.”

To avoid that trap, the College of Design decided to honor people or companies who give $25,000 or more by putting their names on foot-long aluminum pencils — a reminder of the tool that plays a prominent part in all design work. The pencils are displayed in vertical rows inside several dramatically lit display windows.

To insure that the donors remember the institution, the college also gives each one a replica of the pencil in a teakwood case.

The display pencils have removable tips in different colors; each color represents a range of gift sizes. When donors make repeat gifts, the tip of the pencil is replaced with the appropriate color and the pencil is moved to a new spot in the display.

That feature, Ms. Sublett says, has helped draw many new gifts, particularly from companies that recruit graduating students to design their products. When corporate executives visit the college and see that a competitor has given more, they often press their own companies to do the same.

The pencil project cost $150,000 to create, plus an additional $110 for every boxed pencil given to a new donor. To avoid spending money on professional designers, the college turned the project into a contest for students, one of whom came up with the winning idea.

That helped get students thinking about philanthropy at an early age, Ms. Sublett says, which could have long-term benefits. In the short run, she says the pencils have helped generate more than 200 gifts totaling over $53-million.

Even charities without easy access to free talent can benefit from the creativity of local artists who are sometimes willing to take on a project pro bono.

When Project Open Hand, a San Francisco charity that delivers hot meals to housebound people, wanted to acknowledge donors who helped refurbish its new headquarters, the group approached Mark Evans and Charley Brown, two donors who own a local decorating business. They designed a floor-to-ceiling mural of brilliantly colored dinner plates that appear to be three-dimensional. The names of some 300 donors are painted on the rims of the plates.

“Although we support Project Open Hand, we could not afford to give the grandiose donations we’ve always wanted to, so giving a work of art seemed appropriate,” says Mr. Evans.

Fund raisers can appeal to artists by offering them more than just the chance to support a favorite charity, however. Mr. Evans sand Mr. Brown say they agreed to help Project Open Hand because, in addition to providing them with free publicity in the local press, the project offered more artistic freedom than they normally have with their paying clients.

“We could do anything as long as it related to their basic service of providing meals,” says Mr. Evans of the charity job. “When you donate something like this,” he adds, “you often have a tremendous amount of freedom and great flexibility. You do a better piece.”

Some charities cannot find artists to donate their work but still manage to find low-cost, creative ways to thank donors.

Quigley House, a shelter for battered women in Green Cove Springs, Fla., spent $12,000 to honor donors who gave a total of $2-million to its capital campaign.

The shelter commissioned a quilt made of metal squares connected by ribbon; each metal square bears the names of several donors. The quilt now hangs in the shelter’s waiting room.

“We have a saying here about quilts,” says Samantha Hanson, the charity’s director. “They are tattered pieces of cloth joined together to make a strong piece. They create something strong from what was tattered and discarded. It’s a good metaphor for what we try to do for our clients.”

The San Francisco Food Bank also found a relatively inexpensive way to thank donors. Working with its architect, the charity created a “recognition wall” out of tin cans to thank about 200 donors who gave $1,000 or more each in a $8.6-million drive to raise money for a new warehouse.

The cans are attached to the wall in the lobby area of the new building with their bottoms facing outward; a donor’s name is painted on the round surface of each one.

“We really wanted to do something different, but the challenge was to keep within a very tight budget,” recalls Gretta Wark, the food bank’s director of development. The architects, she says, “liked the can idea because it was cheap.” The total cost — which included a steel sign atop the structure and sandblasting the cans so that the painted names would be more visible — was $14,000.

That sum was only a fraction of the money raised in the campaign, but the final result made a big difference to donors, says Ms. Wark, largely because the can motif depicts the food bank’s work.

“We all carry the memory of what a can feels like in your hand,” she says. “Our design is physical and interactive in the sense that it draws you back into why you support the food bank: providing food to someone who would otherwise go without a meal.”

Innovative approaches to thank-yous can do more than make donors feel appreciated. They can also help a charity establish long-lasting relationships with contributors and their families.

At the Settlement Music School, in Philadelphia, donors who give $7,500 or more to endow a scholarship are honored by having their names put on musical notes made out of brass. The roughly 200 notes, mounted on a 24-foot-long bas relief on the wall, are placed so that they make up the musical score of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

“People are very taken with it,” says Katharine Sokoloff, director of development at the Settlement Music School, in Philadelphia. “Very often we have donors come in and polish their own notes. One woman came in recently and polished her father’s note.”

That kind of pride among donors is the reaction that the National Science Center/Fort Discovery, in Augusta, Ga., was seeking when it acknowledged about 200 people who gave $1,000 or more each in a $6.7-million capital campaign.

The museum spent $35,000 to create a wall-sized replica of the solar system and asked the architects who renovated the facility to design it. The planets on a wall of deep blue-green brushed aluminum are lit from behind with lights of varying colors. Each planet, along with its path of orbit, represents a different range of gift amounts, with areas closest to the sun reserved for the largest contributions. Donors’ names are printed in white and placed like stars in the orbit sphere of the appropriate planet. Names can be easily moved as people give more, and there is space for new ones to be added.

“I wanted people to be proud that their name was on the wall, that they’d contributed,” says Phyllis Hendry, director of the center. Many visitors to the center, she says, think the donor wall is a science exhibit due to its high quality.

“When we unveiled it for donors the first time, there was a gasp. They thought it was beautiful,” says Ms. Hendry. “You’re beginning an ongoing relationship, so it is critical that you recognize donors in a wonderful way,” she says. “It is not about a plaque on the wall.”