Fund Raisers Say Donations Good in 2001

More than two-thirds of charity officials surveyed by the Association of Fundraising Professionals said their organizations raised the same or more in 2001 as they did in 2000, despite the economic downturn and last fall’s terrorist attacks, according to results the association released at its annual meeting here.

The figures represent a turnaround from an earlier association survey, released in February, which reported that 44 percent of charities were raising less money after the September 11 attacks compared with amounts raised during the same period the previous year.

The most recent survey found that just 30 percent took in less money than in 2000, while 59.6 percent of survey respondents raised more in 2001 and 10.5 percent raised about the same as in 2000.

Some groups saw substantial increases in 2001: A little more than 15 percent of respondents reported increases of 30 percent or higher compared with the previous year.

To conduct the survey, the association e-mailed 1,800 of its members and asked them to answer questions using a form on the association’s Web site.

Joyce O’Brien, a spokeswoman for the group, said the 455 respondents were a representative sample of the group’s 25,000 members.

In response to a question asking participants to list the single biggest fund-raising challenge their organizations faced in 2001, about a third cited the economy and the sluggish stock market.

Of the rest, 15 percent said turnover in leadership and fund-raising positions or a shortage of fund raisers posed the greatest difficulty, while 14 percent pointed to problems related to their mission, boards, or volunteers, and 8 percent cited general difficulties with finding and retaining donors.

Only 8 percent of respondents named the terrorist attacks as a major challenge to their ability to attract donations. Another 3 percent cited problems with postal mailings related to the anthrax scares, and 1 percent said they had lost revenue from events scheduled for September and October.

Paulette V. Maehara, the association’s president, said that while the survey’s “overall news is good,” it is important to remember that about 30 percent of those surveyed reported declines.

She said charities in the New York area that were not involved in disaster-relief efforts saw the biggest drop in giving, but that the effect of the attacks on fund raising lessened “the further you go from New York.”

Association representatives said they hope to use the survey as part of an annual study of the state of fund raising in the United States.

A summary of the survey results is available on the association’s Web site, http://www.afpnet.org, and the full report will be posted soon.

For more information, contact the Association of Fundraising Professionals at 1101 King Street, Suite 700, Alexandria, Va. 22314; (800) 666-3863; paffairs@afpnet.org.

By taking the time to craft individual pitches, a campaign to raise money from a nonprofit group’s own employees can be a surprisingly rich source of donations, said Barbara L. Walker, director of development at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston.

Ms. Walker’s organization was one of two winners this year of Awards for Excellence in Fundraising, sponsored by Donald A. Campbell and Company, a consulting company in Chicago that specializes in nonprofit clients.

Ms. Walker, whose charity won the award for large organizations, talked to conference attendees about how she and one administrative assistant conducted a creative employee fund-raising campaign at Baylor beginning in 1996 that saw donations from the medical school’s workers rise from $444,762 during the previous four-year campaign to more than $31-million.

The number of donors increased, and donors gave more on average than donors in previous staff campaigns: The average donation amount rose from $1,727 in the previous staff campaign to $8,434 in the new one. Major gifts, such as $16-million from Michael E. DeBakey, the noted heart surgeon who is Baylor’s chancellor emeritus, helped the staff campaign succeed.

Too often, Ms. Walker said, organizations hurry their staff campaigns, viewing them as a chance to “get in, get a lot of balloons, get a lot of participation, and then get out and go raise some real money.”

Originally given only 90 days to solicit donations from staff members, she instead requested that the campaign take three years, during which time she approached not only current Baylor faculty members but also emeritus and retired faculty members.

Many had never been asked to donate, and those who had been, she discovered, were approached with low expectations of the amount they would give.

Her organization tailored its solicitations to individual prospects and allowed them to designate their gifts for specific projects, which previous campaigns had not offered.

The winner of the award for small organizations, White Memorial Medical Center Charitable Foundation, in Los Angeles, successfully expanded its pool of donors by reaching out to residents of its surrounding neighborhood and city, says Mary Anne Chern, president.

White Memorial, located in overwhelmingly poor and Hispanic East Los Angeles, saw its foundation double its number of donors and increase its donations from $550,000 to $8-million a year over the course of four years. It also went from receiving no grants to receiving 15 grants over the same time period.

Ms. Chern said courting affluent former residents of East Los Angeles helped raise the foundation’s revenue, but other factors played roles as well. Chief among these was asking some of the foundation’s 20 trustees, many of whom were White Memorial physicians and their spouses, to resign to make room for new trustees, including local Hispanic leaders and more representatives of greater Los Angeles and other individuals from outside the hospital.

White Memorial also joined forces with local charities to develop services intended to appeal to neighborhood residents, with efforts focusing on such areas as indigent care, diabetes awareness, and nurse recruitment.

While most fund raisers use e-mail these days, not everyone uses it effectively or efficiently, said Sandra A. Adams, senior vice president of the National Parks Conservation Association, at a conference session.

Ms. Adams said most essential was to put all the important information first, using the journalistic technique of listing “who, what, when, where, why, and how” as quickly as possible. E-mail messages should be kept to about 25 lines, or about the length of a single computer screen, she said.

In addition, she said e-mail messages should make clear to the recipient whether they are expected to respond or take another action, giving them choices that are clear and easy to understand.

Charities should steer clear of abbreviations that not all recipients might understand, such as using “BTW” to mean “by the way.” She also recommended sending out a test e-mail asking recipients whether they can download graphics or attached files easily.

Her golden rule is “know your audience.” Ms. Adams said that when composing e-mail, fund raisers need to keep in mind whether the recipient is a more “traditional” donor — the kind who would be likely to have a secretary print out the message, and would then write a response for the secretary to type up and send — or “new” donors who are more technologically savvy.

“Some donors would like to hear from you by e-mail very regularly,” she observed, while others might prefer less frequent contact, and still others “would never look at it if their lives depended on it.” Her advice: “Find out what they want, and when you do, act on it.”

She offered as an example the experience of one of her board members, a busy executive who loves e-mail and prefers it to the phone or in-person meetings when soliciting his friends for gifts.

For one special event, he sent a message saying, “Great dinner, you’ll have fun — buy a table, $10,000? Let me know.” His brevity generated results: three recipients of the e-mail message donated $10,000 each for a table at the event.

Although about a quarter of Canadians surveyed recently said they want to leave money to charities in their wills, only 10 percent of those people said they had made any formal arrangements yet to do so, according to a new study of Canadian giving.

The authors of the study, two fund raisers at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, said charity officials should make a special point to try to tap into interest in planned giving.

The study’s authors, E.H. Guy Mallabone and J.A. Myers, conducted a telephone survey of 1,240 randomly selected Canadians in March last year and asked them about their giving habits.

The authors had expected to find different motivations for giving between entrepreneurs and the general public, but the results showed few distinctions.

To request a copy of the study’s findings, send an e-mail message to guy.mallabone@sait.ab.ca.

Speaking at the America’s Center convention center here, the Olympic track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee told fund raisers that she had dreamed of doing something to help others since she was 9 years old.

At that time, she thought she would be “a schoolteacher, counselor, or physical therapist” when she grew up, or perhaps follow in the footsteps of her mother, who was a nurse’s aide.

After earning five Olympic medals — three golds, a silver, and a bronze — Ms. Joyner-Kersee returned to her hometown of East St. Louis, where she has worked with husband, Bob Kersee, to create the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center, which offers tutoring, athletic, computer training, and other programs for youngsters ages 7 to 18 (The Chronicle, September 6, 2001).

Over the past decade she has raised $12.5-million for the center, exceeding her original goal by $500,000. “And that point-five makes a difference,” she said, to appreciative laughter from the fund raisers in the audience.

Raising that sum of money was not easy, she said. At first some people were skeptical of her motives, thinking that she was doing it just for good publicity. “People questioned why I wanted to give back,” she said.

Meanwhile, others tried to take advantage of her, she said. She turned down donors who offered money for the project only in exchange for favors, such as getting office space in the charity’s building.

She compared raising money to athletic competitions, explaining that participating in her first Olympic Games only fueled her desire to compete again. Similarly, she said, meeting her initial goal for the center inspires her to keep raising money.