Winning Big Gifts in India and North America: Cultural Differences

Efforts to attract big gifts work differently in India than they do in North America said Tony Myers, a Canadian fund-raising consultant, one of the speakers at the 29th annual International Fundraising Congress in Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands.

In an interview, Mr. Myers spoke about some initial findings in his research to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Calgary; his dissertation will compare efforts to seek major gifts by universities in India and Canada that specialize in technology training.

In India, Mr. Myers says, the largest donations in higher education come from alumni who have accumulated wealth in India and from “diaspora” donors who have left the country in pursuit of business opportunities.

Large gifts to Indian institutions typically come from alumni who themselves decide to make a collective donation along with others who graduated in the same year—not in response to the institution’s outreach, Mr. Myers said. He said that he found little or no formal effort, as there is in North America, to conduct research on wealthy individual donors to determine how large a gift they are capable of making.

While that could change as charitable fund-raising practices continue to spread throughout the world, the differences he found in Indian and Canadian institutions are cultural, said Mr. Myers. “North American culture is individually based, and Asian giving is collective, based on family and social group,” he said.

But wealthy alumni of Indian universities have been influenced by some American fund-raising practices, Mr. Myers said.

For such donors, an increasingly critical issue is “the reliability of organizations,” he said, particularly in the eyes of those who, from their exposure to foreign societies, have come to expect a level of accountability that Indian institutions are not accustomed to providing. Such accountability, he said, includes a high level of communication about the progress of charitable projects, assurance that the are completed on time and on budget, and a celebration or some other activity to mark their successful completion.