Raising Money by Association

Alliances with trade groups yield new money for many charities

Rawhide Boys Ranch, a New London, Wis., charity that helps youngsters who have been in trouble with the law, is thriving today thanks to an unusual alliance that saved the charity when it was on the brink of shutting down.

Rawhide was sinking $25,000 deeper into debt each year — until it owed the bank nearly $1-million.

The charity’s founders, John and Jan Gillespie, decided to make up for the shortfall by urging people to donate their used cars so Rawhide could sell them and keep the profits. To help them collect the cars, the couple enlisted the help of the Wisconsin Automobile & Truck Dealers Association.

The Gillespies figured that they needed to sell about 50 donated cars each year, but in their first year they did better than that. Two hundred cars were donated, raising $40,000, and donations have increased steadily in the 15 years that the charity has worked with the automobile association. Some 7,000 cars donated last year netted more than $1-million for Rawhide.

Like the boys’ home, many other charities are benefiting from fund-raising and other kinds of alliances with professional and trade associations. In addition to the money they raise, associations offer a way for non-profit groups to meet business owners and other professionals who may become donors as well as board members or volunteers.

No one knows for sure how many associations undertake charitable projects or how much money they donate or help raise. But a survey released by the American Society of Association Executives this year found that nearly half of the 8,662 associations it represents raise money, donate supplies, or perform pro bono services for charities.

Fund-raising partnerships between charities and associations can have potent benefits for all participants. The arrangement between Rawhide Boys Ranch and the automobile dealers’ group, for example, has enabled the charity to quadruple the number of boys it serves. And with an additional $300,000 in cash donated by association members, the charity has built a new facility to replace its original one.

The association is just as happy with the arrangement. The member dealers have received favorable publicity for running the program, and customers are happy to get a tax write-off for donating a used vehicle.

Working with associations comes with a price, however. Profitable alliances with associations can be difficult to find and maintain, and raising money from association members often eats up vast amounts of charity staff members’ time. To avoid fund-raising and administrative problems, non-profit and association executives offer the following tips:

Consider working with all types of associations. Successful alliances between charities and associations often arise when the association has a natural affinity to the charity, such as the National Association of Home Builders’ program, which provides funds and encourages employees to donate their time to build houses for Habitat for Humanity International.

But successful relationships also exist between groups that have little in common. Loggers who are members of the American Pulpwood Association, in Roanoke, Va., for example, raised $2.4-million last year for Children’s Miracle Network, which supports children’s hospitals in the United States and Canada. The association and charity teamed up when a hospital volunteer proposed the idea to friends who were loggers.

Association members raise money for hospitals through a program called Log-a-Load. They make donations of $200 to $500 — the value of a truckload of logs — and hold fund-raising events such as auctions and fishing tournaments. Log-a-Load has raised $8.1-million for children’s hospitals since 1988.

Look for donors with association ties. Fund raisers who have built strong ties with associations say that the best alliances often result when they are started by a loyal donor, volunteer, or staff member who is also an association member. Working from inside the association, that person can recruit fellow members and get them excited about supporting a charity.

When real-estate agent Renee Kaplan, a member of the Greater Tulsa Association of Realtors, survived breast cancer, she approached her association colleagues to ask if they would help raise seed money for a local chapter of the Y-ME National Breast Cancer Organization she was starting in Tulsa.

The association agreed, and members sponsored events such as silent auctions and golf tournaments to raise money. All told, the efforts brought in $12,500. That supplied half of the charity’s budget for its first year of operations.

The lack of an advocate who is an association member can doom charities’ efforts to work with professional groups. An association of chiropractors that collected canned goods for the Food Bank of Greater Los Angeles had no strong ties to the charity and ended the project after two years, says Doris Bloch, executive director of the food bank. The chiropractors gave a discount to any patient who brought canned food to drop in a barrel in their waiting rooms. The program produced “modest but effective” gifts to the charity, Ms. Bloch says, but association officials had trouble drumming up support among the members and finally dropped the effort.

“They just couldn’t energize their members,” says Ms. Bloch. “If some member of the association is on the board of the charity, that makes a difference.”

Seek associations with adequate resources. The Video Software Dealers Association, in Encino, Cal., raised $2-million last year for Fast Forward to End Hunger, a local charity, by putting 5,000 collection cannisters in its member video-rental stores to solicit gifts from customers.

But even such seemingly simple fund-raising efforts can require a lot of time by an association’s members and employees, says Lana Westermeier, national coordinator of Fast Forward to End Hunger. The video-store effort, she notes, involved months of research and planning.

Associations that have small staffs and that lack other forms of support for such projects often have to abandon their good works for charity.

The Arizona Society of Association Executives, in Phoenix, quit buying Christmas gifts for needy children and organizing home-cooked dinners for families at the local Ronald McDonald House four years ago. Those projects were interfering with the regular duties of staff members, some of whom had complained that they were already absorbed in volunteer work for other groups, says Luz Rubio, the association’s executive director. “It was getting more difficult to pick up the phone and ask our members to help out.”

Divide duties fairly. While charities usually have to help plan and run fund-raising events and other activities with associations, they should avoid dominating or taking over the event, says Roy Zeidman, director of marketing and development at the Virginia Special Olympics.

“We never want to take complete control of their fund raising because when they lose ownership, they lose interest,” he says. “You have to walk that fine line of providing support and being around to keep them excited but not stepping over the line.”

When the Professional Insurance Agents Association of Virginia and the District of Columbia holds a golf tournament that raises about $10,000 for the local chapter of Special Olympics, the charity and the association share the workload. The association picks up the tab for prizes and pays fees for the use of golf resorts, while the charity takes care of the logistics, arranging the foursomes and putting up signs.

Monitor association publications. Most associations use their own newsletters and other publications to tell members about their alliances with a good cause — which means charities may not have the chance to communicate directly with those donors.

Charities should review the association’s newsletters, magazines, fliers, and other materials to make sure the charities are described accurately, says Dave Smith, executive director of Special Love, a Winchester, Va., group that provides recreational activities for children with cancer.

“The association speaks for the charity,” he says. “Quite often you’re dealing with people who have no other contact with you. They may have read a blurb in their association newsletter, and you need to make sure that blurb was good because it may be the only thing they ever see.”

Stay in touch with association members. In addition to placing information in association publications, charities should look for other ways to communicate directly with the association’s members, says Mr. Smith.

When the Credit Union National Association, in Madison, Wis., agreed to raise money for Mr. Smith’s charity, it sent members a postcard asking them to bring a toy for a child or give money when they came to the association’s annual meeting. The cards also told members that they could make their gift directly to Special Love.

The request yielded $850 from 29 of the association’s members who sent checks directly to Special Love. All of those people received a thank-you letter from the charity.

“Follow-up, which is always important, is even more so when you’re dealing with people who hear about you from a third party,” says Mr. Smith. “It’s very easy with that loose link to lose track of the individuals and only have contact with the association.”

When the Recreation and Welfare Association, in Bethesda, Md., held a barbecue that raised $1,500 for Special Love, the money came from admission fees, and donors might easily have remained anonymous, Mr. Smith says. But, in hopes of following up with members, Special Love provided forms for people attending the barbecue to fill out with contact information, as well as small brochures about the charity that people could tuck in a purse or pocket.

Ask associations for introductions. Individual members are not the only source of new donors provided by associations, which interact regularly with corporations and other organizations that can be valuable contacts. Often the association can provide an introduction to such groups.

The National Association of Home Builders has introduced Habitat for Humanity International to many valuable contacts simply by giving the charity free booth space at its annual trade show, which attracts 70,000 members and non-members.

“They have provided entree to a lot of our other partners who come from their membership and from different builders’ associations,” says William M. Mecke, director of marketing at Habitat. One such partner is Dow Chemical. Corporate officials were introduced to Habitat at the trade show; now the company donates all of the rigid foam insulation used in Habitat houses throughout North America, valued at $350,000 annually, and makes a $250,000 cash donation each year.

Don’t take association support for granted. While most associations prefer to work with the same charity year after year on special events and other programs, the arrangements can backfire, says Mr. Zeidman of Special Olympics. Once a fund-raising effort becomes a popular annual event, the association could pull out — or even decide to use the event to benefit another group, he says. Such outcomes are more likely to occur when the association experiences turnover among its top leaders.

“It’s not unlike what happens with companies,” Mr. Zeidman says. “If Company XYZ has a huge changeover in management and the new people decided they didn’t like Special Olympics, we could find ourselves looking in from the outside. That can happen with an association. You can help them build up an event that their members get used to seeing and all of a sudden, instead of being for Special Olympics, it’s for some other charity.”

The Professional Insurance Agents Association of Virginia had been holding golf tournaments, bowl-a-thons, and other events for Virginia Special Olympics for several years when annual donations dropped from about $16,000 to $4,000, says Mr. Zeidman. So he and some of his staff met with association officials to show their appreciation for all the group had done in the past.

“We probably had become lackadaisical,” he says. “We had to tell them we were as interested in their association as they were in our athletes.”

That was all it took, he says. Gifts from the association to the charity have picked up again to about $12,000.

Seek in-kind gifts. Donated supplies and services from an association can be just as valuable as getting hard cash from the organization. Since 1994, members of the Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons have worked with the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, providing plastic surgery for more than 700 women who have been disfigured by domestic abuse.

“This was an enormous gift to battered women,” says Rita Smith, executive director of the coalition. “Plastic surgery is considered cosmetic to the rest of the world, but it’s a real gift to women who want to have scars removed.” Michael Roemer, for The Chronicle John Gillespie, founder, with his wife, of the Rawhide Boys Ranch, in New London, Wis.: The Gillespies turned to the Wisconsin Automobile & Truck Dealers Association for assistance in collecting donated cars after Rawhide fell almost $1-million in debt. Ernie Leyba, for The Chronicle Rita Smith of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence: Working with an association of plastic surgeons, her group has been able to provide surgery to more than 700 battered women.