‘Smart Money’: Donors’ High Expectations

Elaine Vasquez, a community-newspaper publisher in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who donated $100,000 last year to local charities, says she wants an opportunity to manage the use of her money. For example, before she agreed to give money for a new geriatric-education database to Nova Southeastern University, she told the institution it had to use more student workers to trim its budget.

Such donors are becoming more plentiful, notes Smart Money (January).

While wealthy donors have long “been able to tell nonprofits how high to jump, charities say that even middle-class donors are making them work hard for the money these days,” the magazine reports.

To find out how such donors were faring, the magazine followed a few of them and said each of them was facing a tougher time than they had expected, both in finding charities to support and making sure their money was well spent. Among the donors the magazine includes:

• Steve Gaber, a retired mutual-fund manager in Santa Fe, N.M., says his reviews of the books of many nonprofit groups have revealed a “horror story.” He refuses to donate money to groups for which his foundation would be the main source of support, a restriction that leads to many rejections, he says. He also will not give repeat donations to groups that do not tell him the results his money achieved — and he says that more than one of his requests for such information has been greeted with total silence.
• Holly Kerr, a business professor in Highland Park, Ill., got no takers for 10 years when she tried to carry out a request her husband made when he learned he had terminal cancer — to set up a foundation to cultivate leadership among Hispanic people in and around their hometown. Now she is supporting a few efforts that are less directly related to that goal, in part because her foundation, which has a $1.5-million endowment, is set to close in 2020 so she must get money out the door.
• Floyd Keene, a former corporate lawyer, put $1-million into a foundation he called Triple EEE, to reflect its mission of “building self-esteem through education and exercise.” He says he believes that if people were more self-confident, society would be more productive. But he says he never received a grant proposal that seemed worth supporting. He came up with several other experimental programs to foster educational video games and increase college-counseling opportunities for teenagers, but he again failed to generate enough interest, he says. Instead, he has found more luck supporting ideas that nonprofit groups bring to him.

The article is available online.