New Hampshire Donors Covet Their Independence – and Wealth

After a donor made a $10,000 pledge to the United Way in Manchester, N.H., last fall, Gail M. Garceau, the

organization’s president, wanted to parade the benefactor before the public. “Showing these people off is a great way to link them to your charity, and possibly to other donors,” says Ms. Garceau.

But the donor balked — hardly a novelty in southern New Hampshire, where a desire for anonymity often walks hand in hand with generosity.

The leader of the United Way in Portsmouth, one county east, has seen the same thing. “We’re the ‘Live free or die’ state — people are very independent here,” says Susan Donahue Suter, executive director at the United Way of the Greater Seacoast. “Even though some people may be philanthropic heroes, they won’t allow us to use their names. Because of it, they don’t inspire others to give.”

Such is the landscape faced by many fund raisers in southern New Hampshire, where momentum can sometimes be hard to come by, as evidenced by the relatively low charitable-giving rates of people in two counties in the state’s south, Hillsborough and Rockingham. According to a Chronicle study of federal tax data, the two counties are among the three least generous in the country among 380 counties in which at least 10,000 people itemized on their tax returns. Rockingham County, which includes

Portsmouth, finished last, while Hillsborough, which includes Manchester, was No. 378. Among such counties nationwide, 15 of the 20 counties with the lowest rates of giving to charity are in New England.

Low Giving Rates in State

New Hampshire ranks from 45th to 50th in the country among states, according to studies by The Chronicle and other organizations to examine the percentage of income that state residents give to charity. The state also consistently ranks among the top 10 in terms of the percentage of residents who are affluent. Those rankings haven’t been lost on those who monitor philanthropy in the state and who have spent the past few years trying to match needy causes with dollars.

“We have enormous untapped potential here,” says Deborah Schachter, executive director of Giving New Hampshire, in Concord, a group formed in 1999 to find ways to increase charitable donations in the state.

The program is supported by the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the statewide community foundation, in Concord, and New Ventures in Philanthropy, in Washington, a national program designed to encourage new donors to create endowments. A Giving New Hampshire study found that those who itemized on their tax returns in New Hampshire in 2000 gave $500-million to charity, Ms. Schachter says, a 21-percent increase over 1999 giving levels. If giving in the state had been at the national median, they would have given $170-million more, she adds.

Besides many donors’ preference for anonymity, Ms. Schachter and others offer numerous reasons why New Hampshire, and particularly counties in the southern part of the state, lag behind the rest of the country in making charitable donations:

• Religious giving. Those who monitor the rate of donations say that people in the state give few dollars to churches, compared with people in the rest of the country. The phenomenon is not limited to New Hampshire, or even New England. According to The Chronicle study, donors to charity nationwide who itemize their deductions give a median rate of 5 percent of their disposable income to religious causes. In the eastern part of the country, made up of New England states, plus New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, the rate is nearly half of that. The lack of churches from denominations that encourage tithing may be responsible for the low rate of giving to religious causes, say some church and charity leaders.
• No income tax. New Hampshire has no income tax, providing a draw for the well-heeled in states with high taxes. “The thinking is that many people who typically aren’t generous move here to take advantage of the lack of state taxes,” says Ms. Suter. New Hampshire residents also itemize their deductions at a lower rate, says Ms. Schachter, which makes the charitable-giving rate harder to accurately assess. Only 70 percent of those in New Hampshire who annually make $50,000 or more itemized in 2000, compared with 91 percent nationally.
• Part-time residents and commuters. Those who live only part of the time in New Hampshire cities and towns may have more tenuous ties to them, including charities and the needy, than do full-time residents, say some charity leaders. Nearly half the residents in Rockingham County commute out of the area to work, mostly to Boston and other cities in northern Massachusetts. Meanwhile, charities have been looking for newcomers to the area, in hopes they can make up for donations that other residents aren’t making. “We’re trying to find the newly retired people who are moving into Rockingham County,” says Ms. Suter.
• Lack of corporate headquarters. New Hampshire is well below the national median for corporate giving, perhaps because few large companies are based there. “We have a disproportionate amount of small businesses in Hillsborough County,” says Ms. Garceau. “That’s great for the economy, but it presents a challenge for groups like ours to reach them all.”
• A dearth of fund raisers. Small organizations complain they don’t have the staff to garner the amount of donations that may be available. Charities need not only to reach potential donors more, but also to better explain the need for the services they provide.

Organizations that have expanded their reach say they have seen substantial gains in bequests and large individual donations. United Way organizations in Hillsborough and Rockingham Counties reported double-digit increases during the 1990s. And observers such as Ms. Schachter say that studies showing a relatively high rate of voluntarism in the state may eventually bode well for charities and their fund raising. Nationwide studies have shown that volunteers give more to organizations than those who don’t donate their time.

Four years ago, the United Way of the Greater Seacoast helped start a volunteer action center, in Portsmouth, in hopes of attracting retirees and commuters who may one day give more money to charities, as well as time. The center brings in 2,100 volunteers per year, Ms. Suter says.

Many long-established charities in southern New Hampshire, such as the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Manchester, which was founded in 1907, say that raising funds can still be difficult at times. Although he characterizes Manchester residents as generous, Brian M. Tremblay, the local organization’s director of development, says the group recently moved away from one-time fund-raising events because they were bringing less and less in. This has led the group to court individuals more to encourage them to make big gifts. “We’ve had some success with that approach,” says Mr. Tremblay.

For newer organizations, getting started with fund raising has proved challenging.

The Manchester Community Health Center, a 10-year-old organization that serves 5,600 people on an outpatient basis each year, has tried to garner more money from private sources, which provide only 1 percent of its $3.2-million annual budget, with the rest coming from governments. A fund-raising campaign in 2001 brought in only $2,000 — about one-third of the health center’s goal.

“We may try another campaign next year, but in the meantime, I think we have to make more people aware of the health center and what it does,” says Tony S. Pickard, the center’s director of marketing.

Increasing Visibility

The health center and its fund-raising difficulties point up a recurring problem for New Hampshire charities: a lack of visibility. Ms. Schachter says that helping charities achieve a higher profile and improve their fund raisers’ abilities are two ways Giving New Hampshire attempts to turn things around.

The group works with public-radio stations in the state to spotlight charities. Giving New Hampshire also contacts financial planners and advisers to inform them of the advantages that philanthropy can provide their clients in the form of tax breaks.

Giving New Hampshire helped form the Squamscott Coalition, a collection of charities in six Rockingham County towns. “Our goal there is to raise people’s awareness of charities and let the communities know what they can do,” says Ms. Schachter.

So far, the coalition has formed a “giving circle” of 16 residents, most of whom are not otherwise connected to the coalition, who will make collective decisions about where their charitable donations will go.

One member of the circle, Helen Crowe, says she joined six months ago so she could learn about the needs of people in Exeter, where she lives.

Circle members regularly meet with groups that provide services to the area’s poor, she says. The experience of being in the circle has led Ms. Crowe, a psychologist who moved to town 18 months ago from Virginia, to do more than give the minimum $1 per day to the group. She has started a clothing drive for needy people and hopes that the circle can be expanded so it eventually has money in reserve during times of extreme need. “This has been an education for me,” says Ms. Crowe. “I walk away from our meetings feeling energized.”

Squamscott Coalition-led research has shown that the region has enough wealth and volunteers to increase its giving, and that the area’s 200 charities need to do more to reach donors and state the need for the charities’ services. “We found that only a few groups were doing face-to-face solicitations with donors,” says Carol Walker Aten, project manager at the Squamscott Coalition. “Only one in three of them had any kind of fund-raising plan.”

A lack of understanding about the financial benefits that donors can derive from making gifts and the often-tiny fund-raising staffs of many nonprofit groups are other obstacles the coalition is trying to help charities overcome.

But the group has run into obstacles of its own. Ms. Aten says the organization has suffered frequent rejections from private foundations, corporate foundations, and individuals. “We’ve had to pare back because of it,” she says, adding that the irony of leading an organization designed to increase giving that suffers from a lack of funds is not lost on her. “When we started, the economy was robust and the state’s tech companies were thriving,” she says. “Now that we’re trying to increase giving, people are losing their jobs and our funding has been cut. We try to remember that life has its ups and downs.”

Meanwhile, southern New Hampshire’s low numbers regarding charitable giving haven’t troubled others, who say they view them as they do those shy donors — as a challenge.

“I’ve always seen them as a sign that there’s a wonderful opportunity for growth here,” says Ms. Suter.