Nonprofit Organizations Advised to Look for International Donors

Boston

Globalization, the changing balance of economic power among nations, and increased levels of giving in emerging markets are all reasons why universities and other large nonprofit organizations should consider looking for potential donors overseas, experts told participants gathered here for APRA’s annual conference.

APRA is a membership organization for fund raisers who focus on researching prospective donors and managing information about contributors.

The number of people capable of making a substantial gift is growing in many parts of the world, said Deborah Miller, an assistant vice president at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, N.C.

She told the audience that the World Wealth Report 2009 predicted that by 2013 the number of millionaires in Asia and the total value of their wealth will exceed that of millionaires in the United States.

Reaching out to people in other countries who have a connection to an organization’s cause also serves to diversify the group’s donor portfolio, said Ms. Miller. In the current economic downturn, she said, some countries have been hit much harder than others.

“The industries or economies that create most of the wealth in this country are not the same that are creating wealth in other countries,” said Ms. Miller. “By looking at donors in other parts of the world, we may be able to find people who are feeling a lot richer than in the United States.”

A new type of “transnational” major donor is emerging who has well-established connections to multiple countries, Maria Estrada, international prospecting manager at the Nature Conservancy, in Arlington, Va., told the audience.

As an example, she pointed to DK Matai. A wealthy businessman, Mr. Matai was born in India, grew up in Iran, holds dual Indian and British citizenship, and now splits his time between the United Kingdom and Switzerland.

Ms. Estrada said that his philanthropy focuses on problems that transcend borders: global warming, sustainability, poverty, and terrorism.

“He’s explained that he thinks of his philanthropic ventures as outside the nation box,” she said.

But that’s not to say that a globally focused donor’s personal experience isn’t important, Ms. Estrada said.

Often, she said, the donor’s country of origin plays an important role in his or her international gifts.

Last year, Cornell University received $50-million from the Tata Education and Development Trust, a philanthropic arm of India’s Tata Group. Ratan Tata, the corporation’s chairman, is a graduate of Cornell.

Half of the gift established a center that focuses on agricultural and nutritional research to benefit India’s poor, and the other half went to a scholarship fund to bring more students from India to Cornell.

“When you reach out to these transnational individuals, many times their local histories are a very, very strong pull in terms of the decisions that they make on where to give,” said Ms. Estrada. “But the influence of their gifts is very much global.”

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At the end of the session, conference participants shared some of their strategies for gathering information about potential international donors.

A fund raiser at a performing-arts organization said that one of her colleagues, visiting a museum overseas on her honeymoon, took a picture of the institution’s donor wall and e-mailed it to her with her cellphone.

“It started out as a joke,” the woman said, but now taking pictures of donor walls at cultural organizations is standard practice when staff members travel abroad.

While the Internet offers a wealth of information, don’t overlook books, another conference participant urged. She said that a book about wealthy merchant families in Saudi Arabia helped her piece together a potential donor’s ties to that country’s royal family.

A researcher at a university said that he always checks domestic real-estate records to see if an international prospect owns property in the United States.

“The number of wealthy Latin Americans who might have something in Miami or the number of wealthy Europeans who might have something in New York is pretty staggering,” he said.