New Report Offers 32 Ideas to Increase Giving to Charitable Causes

The Giving Pledge—the effort by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett to persuade the nation’s wealthiest people to give most of their fortunes to charity—missed a key opportunity, fund raisers say.

Instead of simply urging other billionaires to give, the Giving Pledge should have asked them to match the charitable donations of people with a lot less money.

That’s one suggestion offered in a new report by Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang, two scholars who study and teach fund raising at Indiana University.

Their report is based on ideas from influential nonprofit leaders and other executives on ways to increase charitable giving.

Besides suggesting that billionaires offer matching gifts, the report includes 31 other ideas for improving giving. Among them:

• Encourage charities to develop productive ways to handle complaints from donors, which would reduce negative word of mouth, build trust, and provide ideas to improve fund-raising operations. Nonprofit organizations could take a lesson from the business world, the authors write, where “complaining customers are the firm’s biggest asset.”
• Educate potential donors about the true costs of fund raising. “Many Americans still believe the sector is populated largely by volunteers, that managers are paid poorly (if at all), and that income can be generated at zero (or close to zero) cost,” the authors write.
  When individuals bump up against reality, their trust and confidence can therefore be damaged.” Nonprofit leaders must, they add, “dispel key myths that act as a barrier to giving.”
• Encourage gifts of non-cash assets. Only 7 percent of the average American’s holdings are in the form of cash, the authors write, making it essential for financial advisers and fund raisers to promote gifts of stock, real estate, business interests, and other valuable property.
• Persuade fund raisers to stop talking to donors about annual funds, capital campaigns, endowment drives, and other such fund-raising terms and instead urge them to focus on what their money will accomplish.

As an example, the report noted that Harvesters, a food bank in Kansas City, Mo., stopped asking for annual gifts or capital donations. Instead, it now conducts appeals that ask people to help feed children, families, and the elderly and promote healthy eating habits.

“The new approach is immensely more powerful. No one supports a single nonprofit because they happen to have an annual fund or an endowment,” write Mr. Sargeant and Ms. Shang. “It is not the vehicle that matters to donors; it’s the difference they can make in society.”

The report, “Growing Philanthropy in the United States,” is available free on the Web site of Blackbaud, the fund-raising software company, which co-sponsored the report, at http://www.blackbaud.com.