Raising Money With Sense and Sensibility

Mississippi conference examines strategies for courting and keeping minority donors

Nonprofit groups seeking to tap the growing economic power of blacks, Hispanics, and Asian-Americans should tailor their fund-raising appeals to the prospective donors’ customs and sensibilities, Emmett D. Carson, president of the Minneapolis Foundation, told a conference here of development officials.

Many charities use personal meetings with those interested in giving, plus other traditional fund-raising techniques that put minority groups on guard, said Mr. Carson, who is black. Some minority members see these meetings as interviews that may threaten their privacy. “African-Americans come from a history in which the people who had interviewed them didn’t use that information in their best interest,” he said.

Speaking at a conference titled “Minorities and Philanthropy in Higher Education in the South,” Mr. Carson told the 65 attendees, most of them college and university fund raisers, that charities often stumble in their efforts to raise money among blacks and other minority groups. Many charities simply fail to recognize that minorities are strong supporters of nonprofit causes, he said. Others recognize the giving potential of minority donors, but fail to hire fund raisers whose ethnic and racial backgrounds are similar to those whom the charities are trying to help.

“We don’t go after donors of color responsibly,” Mr. Carson said. “We make assumptions about the giver. There’s this notion that blacks don’t give, but that’s not true. People of color have always given when asked. If you’re not getting a gift, it’s a problem with you, not them.”

Because of travel trouble resulting from the September 11 terrorist attacks, Mr. Carson gave his talk via satellite hookup. His image appeared on a large screen between an American flag and the Mississippi state banner, which incorporates some elements of the flag of the Confederacy.

Such contradictions aren’t unknown to Mississippi, the state with the highest proportion of blacks — 36 percent — in the country, or the conference’s site, the University of Mississippi. The state’s oldest public university, it opened in 1848, but the first black student wasn’t admitted there until 1962.

Even now, Mississippi’s historically black colleges and universities are involved in a 26-year-old federal lawsuit that argues that efforts to integrate the state’s colleges were ineffective and that predominantly white colleges and universities in Mississippi received a far greater proportion of state money than black institutions did.

The conference’s main theme centered on raising private money for colleges. Strategies for more effectively reaching out to alumni who have become disenchanted with their alma maters were discussed, as were ways to tap the giving power of ethnic groups and Native Americans.

Mr. Carson and others advocated the development of an academic center exclusively for the study of the philanthropy of ethnic groups.

Of the 32 university programs nationwide devoted to studying nonprofit groups, none has minority philanthropy as its sole focus, several speakers said.

In addition to calling for a more ethnically sensitive approach to donors, Mr. Carson made a plea for unity among black organizations and philanthropists. Black charities should ensure that a split from their religion-based, community-centered traditions does not occur, he added.

“Black philanthropy is at a crossroads,” Mr. Carson said. An increase in the number of wealthy blacks could concentrate the power of black philanthropy in fewer hands, he said. “Individual wealth and success have lessened the need for collective decision making.”

He added that increasing numbers of blacks may feel more like they live in the mainstream of American life than ever before, but that they may feel a split in their loyalties when it comes to giving. “African-Americans are struggling as to whether they’re African-Americans or Americanized Africans,” Mr. Carson said. “We’re torn between mainstream organizations that have our interests at heart and black organizations that have our interests at heart.”

Mr. Carson urged black donors to maintain their traditional emphasis on black social concerns. “Despite all the gains we have made, there is more we have to do,” Mr. Carson said, citing problems such as a high incarceration rate for black males, police brutality, and poorly performing public schools in primarily black neighborhoods. “We have to have some kind of shared responsibility.”

Making assumptions about donors’ backgrounds is widespread, and charities should work harder to overcome preconceived notions of ethnicity when dealing with minority donors, Janice Gow Pettey, executive director of the Sacramento Regional Foundation, told the conference.

She encouraged nonprofit organizations to realize the growing power of minority groups, which are expected to compose a majority of the U.S. population by the year 2050, according to Census 2000 data.

Ms. Gow Pettey, whose grandparents are from China, said she has seen stereotyping in the nonprofit world firsthand. In the 1970s, the Peace Corps sent her alone to a South Korean fishing village while other new members of the Corps were sent to their locations in pairs.

“They saw an Asian-American woman and figured I could fend for myself,” even though she is a third-generation American with little knowledge of Korean customs or language, Ms. Gow Pettey said.

Organizations must be mindful of the cultural differences of those they approach for gifts, she said. For example, she couldn’t talk to a wealthy Chinese businessman about a gift because she wouldn’t be considered his equal, she said.

Groups should work to understand a culture and its history before embarking on fund-raising campaigns, Ms. Gow Pettey recommended. She also urged charities to use the language of prospective donors and identify culturally appropriate fund raising. Ethnic groups will give freely to causes that aid relatives and friends in their native lands, she said, citing Hispanic-Americans’ propensity for donating to relief charities during hurricanes and earthquakes in Central and South America.

Differences in giving show up among ethnic groups, she said. Asian-Americans tend to give to family- and health-centered charities, while Hispanic donors, accustomed to government and church help on social issues, give more often to religious institutions and mutual-assistance groups that provide aid to impoverished community members, Ms. Gow Pettey said.

Philanthropy among Hispanic people, who make up 11 percent of the U.S. population, is growing, with funds started by and for Latino immigrants and others opening in Los Angeles, New York City, St. Paul, and Kansas City, Mo., among other locales in recent years, Ms. Gow Pettey added. Such groups report combined assets of $6-million, she said.

Like Mr. Carson, Ms. Gow Pettey said mainstream organizations shouldn’t overlook minorities as potential bankrollers of nonprofit programs.

“When we say people don’t give, all I have to say is, ‘Think about how Hispanics give,’” she said. “Billions of dollars are sent by individuals who live and work in the United States to other countries.” Many of these gifts go beyond the needs of those immigrants’ families back home, Ms. Gow Pettey added. “Some end up going to hospitals, community centers, and the like.”

Ms. Gow Pettey urged organizations not to underestimate a person’s giving power because of his or her ethnicity, adding that a more empathetic approach to donors might have other benefits.

“We now have an opportunity to teach groups about the history and the role of philanthropy in the United States,” Ms. Gow Pettey said.

In a session on giving to colleges and universities, speakers outlined new methods for coaxing donations out of alumni.

Some recommended making pitches to donors more personalized and less orthodox than the ones usually made to them.

Isaac Byrd, a trustee at Tougaloo College, in Mississippi, said that those courting potential donors should be less stuffy than fund raisers who insist on pricey dinners or receptions when wooing them.

Mr. Byrd said he entertains one of the college’s donors by taking him to area blues clubs. “We party all night,” said Mr. Byrd, who is also the lawyer leading the case seeking equal funds for Mississippi’s black institutions of higher learning. “A lot of people don’t want things to be formal.”

In a separate session, Billie Sue Schulze, a longtime fund raiser for colleges, outlined the Kresge Foundation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities Initiative, which is designed to increase giving at historically black institutions.

Ms. Schulze, who previously served as vice president of advancement at Spelman College, a historically black women’s institution in Atlanta, serves as the program’s director.

The foundation’s five-year, $18-million plan, unveiled in December 1999, will help five traditionally black colleges in the South add fund raisers and improve technology systems in development offices.

The staff-development aspect of the program may be its most important one, Ms. Schulze said. “There are so few African-Americans in the advancement field currently,” she said. “We’ll have an annual training program at each of our five schools.”

Ms. Schulze added that a long-term approach to each donor is paramount in fund raising.

Others maintained that going after young alumni is the key to success. “You have to cultivate people at an early age,” said Mr. Byrd. “They’ll give $10 now, but they might become millionaires later.”