August 27, 1998 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Measuring the climate for charitable giving has never been easy, but the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy thinks it has found a way.
The center has developed a biannual survey called the “Philanthropic Giving Index” that asks fund raisers to assess current and future giving and to rate the effectiveness of techniques such as direct mail and telephone solicitation.
Eugene R. Tempel, the center’s executive director, said the index is aimed at providing an alternative to purely anecdotal information about the climate of philanthropy and the behavior of donors. “We said we ought to have a more systematic way of looking at this,” he said.
The center’s first index, released this month, is based on information gathered in February from 251 fund-raising executives at groups that varied in revenue size, geographic region, and mission.
The index totaled 88.8 out of a possible 100 points, indicating a generally optimistic attitude about the climate for fund raising in the United States.
Among other findings from the surveys: Executives from groups with revenue between $250,000 and $1- million were generally less optimistic than their peers about the fund-raising climate. They were especially pessimistic about the success of raising money through planned gifts and major gifts.
The most successful ways to raise money are through major gifts, direct mail, and planned gifts. Executives rated telephone solicitation and the pursuit of corporate gifts as least successful.
One-third of the executives said their organization was actively involved in a capital campaign. One-fifth said their group planned to begin a campaign within six months.
Raising money through special events is not a particularly successful strategy for organizations with revenue of more than $100-million. But executives at groups in the $5-million to $10-million revenue range said special events were especially successful in raising money.
Guiding the index project is an advisory board of 10 people, including Mr. Tempel and seven others from the Center on Philanthropy or some other part of Indiana University. Also on the board are Wes Lindahl, director of development at Northwestern University, and Paul Schervish, director of the Social Welfare Institute at Boston College.
Mr. Tempel estimated the cost of producing the index at $15,000 per year.
The Center on Philanthropy hopes, over time, to correlate the index with other economic measures, such as the Conference Board’s index of consumer confidence, to see if there is a similarity between consumer and giving trends, Mr. Tempel said.
Part of the impetus to create the index, he said, was a desire to know more about how people respond to fund-raising solicitations. He acknowledged, however, that the index is a “secondhand way” of accomplishing that because it measures the attitudes of fund raisers rather than of donors.
“We thought about trying to create a large donor panel,” he said, but that “would have been very difficult to do.”
Mr. Tempel also acknowledged that the philanthropy climate can change between the time respondents fill out a survey and when the results are published — a gap of six months for the first index.
“Our goal is to shorten that,” Mr. Tempel said. Researchers intend to gather information for the second index in October and publish the results by early December, he said.
Despite the project’s challenges, Mr. Tempel said he believes that the index can be a valuable tool for charities looking to compare their fund-raising performance to that of other non-profit organizations.
If survey respondents “think the climate for fund raising is pretty good, and you’re not doing very well,” said Mr. Tempel, “then you might ask yourself: ‘Are we doing something wrong?’ ”
For more information on the “Philanthropic Giving Index,” call Angelynne Amores, Communications Manager, Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, at (317) 236-4912.
