December 31, 1999 | Read Time: 6 minutes
More and more donors are getting together to pool their money and decide how to give it away. However, such “team giving” groups can be hard to organize and maintain.
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Even those that have started with the help of an established group, like a community foundation or other charity, sometimes run into problems.
“You cannot just start one of these groups and expect the money to come rolling in,” says Leslie Kase, a development officer at the Chicago Community Trust, who helped organize a group of young professionals who each give $500 or more annually.
Veterans of team-giving efforts offer these suggestions to help beginning groups avoid problems:
Let donors start and run the group. For team giving to work, organizers say, the donors must have a high degree of interest in the effort or they will not attend meetings, visit charities, debate with other donors over which organizations to support, and participate in other activities required by the group.
The only way to get that level of commitment from donors is to let them create and manage the undertaking themselves, organizers say. But that can be very time-consuming.
For example, it took about two years to get the Chicago Community Trust donors’ group off the ground, largely because the founding members — more than a dozen people with differing ideas and motivations, as well as busy schedules — first had to figure out how to structure their group, says Ms. Kase.
Organizers must be patient, she says. “You can’t tell people what to do when they are committing this much time and money,” she explains. “We gave them ideas, but they had to come up with the basic structure.”
Get donors to recruit others. The founding members in a donors’ group should be encouraged to recruit friends and colleagues who share their interest in a hands-on style of philanthropy, organizers say.
“The collective experience with like-minded people is the thing that keeps these groups going,” says Nancy Radner, director of community development at the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs in Chicago. “Members have to organize other members,” she says.
Ms. Radner organizes visits to charities and performs other administrative tasks for a group of wealthy donors who invest at least $25,000 a year each in programs to create new jobs and low-cost housing in Chicago. The founders of the group were two commercial developers, both of whom had served on the board of the Jewish council; gradually, they have recruited five other donors who share their interests.
Ellen Ferguson, a long-time member of A Territory Resource, a Seattle-based donors’ group, has recruited members by holding small parties for a dozen or so friends and colleagues in her home.
“It’s very informal,” she says. “I talk about why I’m involved and say, ‘We’d love to have you join,’ but there’s no pressure.” The parties, she says, usually recruit up to three new members.
Work out ground rules. People who plan to pool their money for joint gifts should decide how to structure the group’s giving before anyone contributes a single dollar, organizers say.
“One thing we have learned is to set the ground rules from the beginning,” says Ruth Reiss, a Boston Foundation official who helped to create a team-giving group for young professionals.
Ms. Reiss, who is also a member of the group, says the lack of a clear structure was disturbing to some early donors, who had preconceived notions about how the group was going to be organized, only to find that other donors had different ideas.
Among the decisions that members of team-giving groups should make: whether to require members to give a minimum amount or percentage of their income; whether giving decisions will be made by vote, consensus, or some other method; whether to confine giving to a particular cause, such as education or race relations; and how to expand or change the causes the group supports.
Other decisions include how often the group will meet and what responsibility each member will have for finding worthy charities, evaluating proposals, visiting prospective grant recipients, and other tasks.
A how-to manual outlining such key decisions and many other aspects of starting a shared-giving group is available from the Shefa Fund, a Philadelphia group that works to encourage Jewish philanthropy.
The manual, while specifically aimed at Jewish groups, contains information relevant to any team-giving effort.
To order “Building Community, Creating Justice,” send $10 to the Shefa Fund, 805 East Willow Grove Avenue, Wyndmoor, Pa. 19038; (215) 247-9704; info@shefafund.org.
Provide opportunities to learn. Donors often say that the chance to learn something new is the reason they join team-giving groups. That is why organizers of shared-giving programs put a lot of emphasis on guest speakers, visits to charities, and other activities to help donors become more informed about the causes and organizations to which they give.
“The key is high-quality substance,” says Sandra Wood of the Hartford Foundation, who helped organize a group of donors who give $500 or more each year. She is also director of development and communication at the foundation.
“Donors are not coming for social cachet,” she adds. “They are coming because they really care about the issues.”
Ms. Wood is putting together a panel of experts who will discuss race relations, the issue that the donors have decided to focus on this year. The panel will include a former welfare commissioner, a state official who worked on school desegregation, and a professor who edited a book on blacks in Hartford.
Get adequate administrative support. Someone has to be responsible for a team-giving group’s collection of money, distribution of grants, record keeping, correspondence, and other administrative tasks, organizers say. While those jobs generally fall to individual members in smaller, more-informal groups, some team-giving programs have paid staff members to handle such duties.
But “you really have to control the process in terms of what staff can provide,” says Ms. Wood. “Members would love more written material, but that could take up all our time.”
Run meetings efficiently. To keep members motivated and to make team giving enjoyable, meetings should start and end promptly and stick to an agenda, says Sue Hoffman, associate director of the Shefa Fund. The fund’s how-to manual on starting such groups contains an entire chapter on meetings.
To insure that gatherings go smoothly, some team-giving groups give individual members rotating roles. For example, some groups appoint someone to lead the discussion and make sure that the group does not stray too far from its declared agenda.
Marta Drury, a donor in a shared-giving group created by the Global Fund For Women in Menlo Park, Cal., says that having a facilitator would have been helpful to her group.
“We had many heated discussions and sometimes got bogged down, like spending three hours on a detail when we could have moved on,” she says. “When you have a lot of people with different ideas, you need a facilitator who’s neutral.”
