Courting Gay Donors

Charities try new efforts to persuade homosexuals to give

When Greg Baldwin and his male partner showed up to have their picture taken for the United Way of Miami-Dade’s donor-recognition book five years ago, the couple caught the charity by surprise. “I was sitting there with my partner in a lobby, and the photographer came out and told me, ‘I’ll take your picture as soon as your wife arrives,’” Mr. Baldwin says. “There was a moment of awkwardness.”

Once the misunderstanding was resolved, however, the United Way went on to publish the couple’s photo alongside other donors, and Mr. Baldwin, a lawyer, has continued to give about $10,000 annually to the charity. He says he supports the United Way because of its efforts to promote communication between the diverse groups of people who live in Miami.

While the local United Way says it did not feature the gay couple’s photo as a way to raise money, Mr. Baldwin suspects it has helped encourage more gay and lesbian people to give to the group. “The basic feedback I got back on the photo was very favorable. It was, ‘Jeez, I didn’t know these guys were that open,’” he says. He adds: “There’s more than one same-sex couple in the book now.”

The United Way of Miami-Dade’s experience is just one example of how a broad range of nonprofit groups — from operas to environmental groups — are appealing to gay donors. While charities have solicited and received money for years from gay supporters, some are now taking steps to specifically show that they are attuned to gay-rights issues and supportive of gay relationships. Strategies include changing administrative policies, making appearances at gay-pride events, and highlighting gay donors in publications. A few groups even have adopted a bolder tactic of tailoring their fund-raising messages to gay donors.

Special Attention

The Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, for example, raised $100,000 from lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people — known collectively as LGBT — this year after hiring a fund raiser to specifically court such donors, says Alvin H. Baum, a member of the charity’s Board of Directors.

“The gays and lesbians are in a category with the Russian émigrés or the Israelis,” says Mr. Baum. “These are groups that have a separate identity, a separate set of interests, and they tend to fall between the cracks” of the usual fund-raising practices.

But while solicitations aimed at gay donors have the potential to bring in more dollars from such donors, specific appeals could run the risk of alienating social conservatives who believe homosexuality is immoral. After Unity House, a nonprofit group that serves youths in Troy, N.Y., began promoting its Safety Zone counseling program for gay and lesbian teenagers, “we received a letter from a long-term donor saying that the program was against the Bible’s teachings and he would never support Unity House again,” says Tom Cairns, director of development.

What’s more, without a subtle, nuanced message, fund raisers say a charity could end up patronizing gay people and turning them off to a group’s cause. “It can be very touchy,” says Christopher P. Surridge, a fund raiser at Florida Grand Opera, in Miami. “The LGBT community doesn’t like to feel like they’re a target.”

Other charity leaders worry that segmenting donors by sexual preference or ethnicity can run counter to a mission of broad inclusion.

“We don’t have a Cuban initiative, we don’t have a Jewish initiative. Why all of sudden would we have a gay initiative?” says Harve A. Mogul, president of the United Way of Miami-Dade. “If you’re an organization like the United Way that’s trying to make a tent large enough for everyone to be in, it’s very dangerous all of sudden to start saying you have a straight-persons initiative, a gay-persons initiative, without starting to send signals that are totally unintended.”

Even so, some nonprofit leaders are starting to identify steps large and small that could help make their organizations and causes more appealing to gay donors.

While fund raisers play down the stereotype of gay people being wealthier on average than straight people, they acknowledge that gay donors as a group have the potential to give significant money.

Wealth Estimates

A study released this year by the marketing-research companies Witeck-Combs Communications and MarketResearch.com estimated that the “disposable personal income” — the after-tax money a person has available for purchases, savings, or charitable contributions — for the country’s 15 million gay and bisexual people totals $485-billion. That translates to about $32,000 per person for gay individuals, a higher average than for black people, Asian-Americans, or Latinos. The average disposable income for the nation’s black population, for example, is roughly $19,000, though this population certainly includes a portion of gay people as well.

While groups whose sole mission is to serve gay people tend to receive strong support from gay donors, about half of donations made by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people go to “nongay organizations,” according to the most recent study by the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies, in Amherst, Mass. The study, done in 1997, looked at the giving and volunteering patterns of 2,244 gay donors in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. “We found that the amounts of giving didn’t vary a lot between gay groups and nongay groups, though for lesbians, they actually gave more to nongay groups,” says M.V. Lee Badgett, research director for the group.

The institute’s study showed that, compared with the findings of another study that included both gay and straight people, gay and lesbian donors gave more than the average donor. The institute found that the average gay donor contributed $1,194 a year, while an Independent Sector study the same year, which most likely included a percentage of gay and lesbian people, found that the average donor in the United States gave $1,017.

But charities whose missions are not tied to gay causes may have a hard time making their cases to gay donors, says Gregg White, a fund raiser at OutFront Minnesota, a gay social-services and advocacy group in Minneapolis. “The gay community is extremely suspicious of outsiders coming and asking for money,” he says. He points to the figure from Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues, in New York, an organization that advocates for increased giving by grant makers to gay causes, that only 0.3 percent of money donated by charitable foundations goes to support gay groups. Some gay people might say, “‘We know we’re not getting money back from the mainstream to us so therefore, screw you, why give to mainstream organizations?’” according to Mr. White.

Employment Policies

A first step charities can take in appealing to gay and lesbian donors, say fund raisers, is to make administrative changes at their own organizations. Groups should include gay, bisexual, and transgender people in their nondiscrimination clauses, says Mr. White. “If they don’t have that,” he says, “they’re just shooting blanks.”

Other administrative changes for nonprofit groups to consider, according to charity officials, include recruiting a gay trustee and adding a “married/partnered” line on forms that ask for personal information from supporters, as well as on reply cards for invitations to fund-raising events.

While some of these changes sound small, many gay people identify them as extremely important. A 1998 survey of lesbian women by the Women’s Funding Network, a San Francisco association of foundations that support women’s causes, found that 70 percent of respondents wanted to know whether a charity was “lesbian/gay friendly” before deciding to support it. Respondents identified “reputation/track record” as the only factor more important than a charity’s treatment of lesbian and gay people.

Donna Red Wing, a former official at the Gill Foundation — a Denver organization that supports gay and straight causes and was founded by Tim Gill, the gay entrepreneur who started the software company Quark — agrees that such steps are crucial. Ms. Red Wing, who now works as a fund raiser for the Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, says Mr. Dean’s support of gay civil unions has helped him raise substantial sums from gay donors. “The days of gays giving to homophobic charities are long gone,” she says.

Often charities point out that raising money from gay donors relies on the same principle that all fund raising does: building personal relationships. Human Rights Watch, for example, recently has tried to introduce its work to gay and lesbian people by holding a series of screenings of a documentary about gay life in poor countries. The screenings were not aggressive attempts to raise money, says Randy Chamberlain, a fund raiser at the New York organization, but to give people an opportunity to learn about the group’s effort to protect gay rights and “to have them get to know us and see that we’re doing this work.”

Other strategies for appealing to gay donors include:

• Advertising in gay publications. The San Francisco Opera bought ads for its new “Rainbow Series” — a package of discounted tickets to three productions marketed to gay patrons — in the Bay Area Reporter, a gay newspaper. The ads helped recruit 104 Rainbow subscribers, says Vanessa Bartsch, a spokeswoman for the opera. The creation of the Rainbow series also helped the opera attract donated products from two companies — Rainbow Ridge Wines and Origins, a division of the Estée Lauder cosmetic company — that want to promote their products to a gay audience. Ms. Bartsch says she hopes the relationship with these companies will lead to general-support donations in the future.
• Attending gay-rights events. Mr. White, of OutFront Minnesota, encourages charities to sponsor booths at local gay-pride marches and rallies. At such events, charities are “not going to make any money, but it’s going to show that they’re there,” he says.
• Forming partnerships with gay business leaders. Unity House holds fund-raising events at local gay bars. The events have helped to bring about 100 to 150 gay donors to the organization.

The Florida Grand Opera and Miami’s Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce held a meeting for gay business leaders last spring to promote the opera to potential gay donors and patrons. “People like to support people who like to support them,” says Mr. Surridge, a fund raiser for the opera.

Several colleges and at least two groups — the Chicago Foundation for Women and the Sierra Club Foundation — have created funds to attract gay donors. Carleton College, in Northfield, Minn., for example, started its Human Sexuality Endowment Fund in 1993 and has raised about $200,000 from mostly gay alumni to supports gay and lesbian activities on campus.

The Sierra Club’s Walt Whitman Gay and Lesbian Fund allows gay donors to support two causes at once, according to Paul L. Hokemeyer, a former Sierra Club fund raiser who set up the fund.

“If I can invest in environmental issues and my civil-rights issues at the same time, then that’s how I want to spend my dollar,” he says. The Walt Whitman fund provides general support to the environmental group.

But both the Lavender Fund and the Sierra Club’s fund have received less money than the nonprofit groups had hoped.

The women’s fund, created in 1999, has raised about $50,000, says Mary F. Morten, who co-founded the fund. “We did think we would raise more money by this time,” says Ms. Morten. In part, she blames the lack of interest on homophobia because lesbian donors are afraid to support a gay-identified fund, even anonymously, out of fear of reprisal for being open about their sexuality.

The Sierra Club has raised about $19,000 since the late 1990s with its fund. “We haven’t had a lot of activity,” says John DeCock, executive director of the Sierra Club Foundation. He notes that the charity’s primary method for raising funds from gay donors occurs at the local level, where chapters hold events specifically for gay people, such as wilderness hikes.

While not every effort to raise money from gay people succeeds, Mr. Baldwin, the Miami United Way donor, who gives about $25,000 a year to charity, says he hopes more groups will make a point to reach out to gay donors. “I’ve always thought targeting the gay and lesbian community would be a very sensible thing to do,” he says. “The problem mainstream nonprofits have is that they forget there is a gay community.”