Equal Sights

Women’s funds try unconventional fund-raising methods in bid to join philanthropy’s big leagues

Women’s funds — which raise money to benefit charities that help women and girls — are starting to use new and, in some cases, unconventional fund-raising methods in an attempt to sharply increase their assets.

The Women’s Funding Network, an umbrella group of 77 women’s funds nationwide, has announced a sweeping new plan to increase the assets of its members from an estimated $70-million today to $450-million in 10 years.

That’s an ambitious goal. While the number of women’s funds has nearly quadrupled in the last 20 years, their asset base has remained low. Only three of the funds have assets above $5-million. Most give away less than $1-million annually, and few make individual grants bigger than $10,000.

To fatten their coffers, several of the funds have started their own campaigns to raise millions by recruiting 2,000 new donors to give $2,000 each by the year 2000.

While experts say charities often lose out when everyone is asked to give the same amount — because wealthy people will give less than they can afford — leaders of the women’s funds defend the approach. Not only are the campaigns raising hard cash, but they also are bringing in new donors and convincing increasing numbers of lower- and middle-class women that they, too, can become philanthropists.

To further expand their pool of donors, the women’s funds are also making concerted efforts to reach out to women under age 34 and to minority females, many of whom have never given to those organizations. The Boston Women’s Fund has gone so far as to start a special institute to train female fund raisers who are members of minority groups. The Women’s Funding Network is considering creating a similar program to operate nationally.

New research findings released by the Women’s Funding Network show the poor track record that women’s funds have in reaching minority donors: 67 per cent of the black women surveyed — most of whom were on the mailing lists of women’s funds — said they had never been asked to give.

That was not the only dismal news in the findings: A majority of the more than 1,200 women of all backgrounds in the study had little understanding of women’s funds. They could not say how the funds differ from other charities, such as the YWCA or Girls Incorporated, that provide direct services to women and girls.

“One thing we haven’t done is communicate well what we do,” says Carol Mollner, executive director of the Women’s Funding Network, in St. Paul. “We have been so involved in starting these funds up that we have not invested much in communication. But we cannot serve the community unless we bring in more women.”

Conducted by Ordinary Magic, a Denver marketing and communications company, the new research was supplemented by focus groups in four cities and interviews with 46 women. Some of the participants gave to women’s funds, while many of the others contributed to other causes. In the study, a majority of women said that:

* By donating to a women’s fund, they would have less control over how the money was spent than if they gave it directly to a women’s program or proj ect.

* They feared that they would not be able to see the results of their donation as easily as they would by giving directly to a women’s program.

* They thought that the amount spent on administration by women’s funds was too high and that not enough of their gift would go toward helping women and girls. At the Maine Women’s Fund in Portland, for instance, administrative costs eat up 30 per cent of the money raised.

In carrying out their expansion plans, the women’s funds hope to follow the lead of community foundations — groups that raise and distribute money in one region. Since 1988, community foundations’ assets have more than quadrupled, swelling to $17.1-billion in 1996, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Several private foundations have made grants to help community funds expand. Leaders of the women’s funds hope to persuade such foundations to provide as much as $20-million in technical-assistance grants, mainly to help them hire fund raisers, run endowment drives, and take other steps to increase their assets.

“Let’s face it, our bottom line is to raise money,” says Christine Grumm, executive director of the Chicago Foundation for Women. “If community foundations can do it, we can do it. Raising five times as much as we have now may be scary, but it puts us in the adult category around money.”

Many woman’s funds need significant help if they are to mimic the growth of community foundations.

“Some women’s funds have so little equipment that they cannot identify who on their mailing list actually gave, as opposed to [who is] just getting a mailing,” Ms. Mollner says.

Nevertheless, some women’s funds are getting more sophisticated in their approaches to fund raising.

The Milwaukee Women’s Fund is revamping its annual fund-raising luncheon, which draws about 800 people each year. In the past the fund has invited well-known speakers to lure participants; now it will feature leaders of the organizations it has supported, and they will talk about the benefits of working with the women’s fund.

To illustrate how the fund allows individual donors to make more of a difference collectively, the Milwaukee fund put a new twist on the standard fund-raising raffle.

At its most recent lunch, participants were urged to spend $5 each to buy a raffle ticket. The proceeds were used to make an on-the-spot grant of $1,000 to one of the fund’s grantees.

After making available a list of the grantee organizations, officials told raffle participants to write the name of one of the organizations on their tickets. The charity named on the winning ticket got the money.

More than 500 people bought raffle tickets, and when the winning organization — the Silver Spring Neighborhood Center — was announced, a female executive from GE Medical Systems stood up and promised to double the grant.

Says Tracy Wayson, the Milwaukee fund’s executive director: “This helps donors and ticket buyers really see how their dollars get leveraged by our fund. We’ve never asked for money at an event before, but this has been a tremendous success.”

Many leaders of women’s funds say that they have been held back not only by ineffective communications but also by the lack of ethnic, racial, and class diversity in their organizations.

“Right now, you have a lot of white women asking women of color,” when women give to people like themselves, says Bourge Hathaway, the senior researcher in the Ordinary Magic study. “It’s just not that effective.”

Whites dominate fund-raising positions. Membership surveys by the National Society of Fund Raising Executives have found that, while female development officers now hold some 60 per cent of all fund-raising jobs, the vast majority are Caucasian.

To increase the number of minority fund raisers, the Boston Women’s Fund has created a new Women of Color Fundraising Institute for minority women in its grantee organizations. All of the organizations have annual budgets under $100,000 and work on causes like preventing AIDS among women, providing services to incarcerated women and girls, and protecting the rights of female immigrants.

Eighteen minority women, two from each charity, are currently enrolled in the year-long program, which is now in its third month. The women, who spend one weekend together each month, are learning about economics, financial management, computerized systems to keep track of donations, grant-proposal writing, and other fund-raising skills.

“The usual fund-raising training programs do not take into account where women of color come from, their communities,” says June Lee, director of grants administration at the Boston fund. “They are not coming from the position where they have access to wealth and wealthy donors. Fund-raising programs tend to ignore these women’s communities.”

She adds: “Foundations expect everybody to speak in their culture and their language. The institute is to help women learn how to truly present their own priorities, how not to whitewash themselves, and how to strike a match without completely conforming.”

The Boston Women’s Fund is not just training minority fund raisers; it is also doing more to bolster the solicitation skills of its trustees. After 10 trustees received intensive training last year, the fund encouraged them to make fund-raising visits to at least two people who had previously supported the fund. They were asked to solicit gifts of $1,000 or more from donors they had never met. In most cases, the trustees had never made a solicitation before and were asking for more money than they themselves had given.

Many fund-raising experts frown on such practices. Requests for big gifts, they say, should be made by a volunteer who the donor knows and respects, someone who has given at a similar level. But breaking the rules seems to be working for the Boston fund, officials say. The first-time fund raisers brought in more than $73,000 last year.

As the Boston fund and others struggle to improve fund raising, many are calling on the Women’s Funding Network to spearhead a national public-relations campaign. Such an effort is needed to counteract views held by women donors, leaders of big foundations, and the general public, they say.

Many grant makers, for instance, do not believe that specially tailored philanthropic efforts are needed to help women overcome lingering discrimination and other social problems that disproportionately affect females.

“Public opinion needs to be moved so that a lot more people get it — that’s the only way to get beyond playing catch-up” in fund raising, says Mary Ellen Capek, a researcher at the University of New Mexico’s Anderson Schools of Management, in Albuquerque. “We need to take on the media.”

Ms. Capek recently completed a series of monographs on women and philanthropy that was paid for by a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

Based on a review of existing research on grant making — and interviews with more than 80 male and female leaders of foundations, women’s groups, and other charities — Ms. Capek documents a decline since 1992 in grants for women and girls, despite years of efforts to increase them. She also concludes that too many grant makers regard programs for women and girls as “special interest” or discriminatory because they favor females over men and boys.

Some women’s funds, however, are convincing new donors that their programs are not special-interest causes. The Chicago Foundation for Women started a grant-making program this year to fight violence against women. So far it has raised $300,000, including a pledge of $100,000 annually for four years from Dominick’s, a local grocery chain.

“The C.E.O. is seeing this as a community program,” says Ms. Grumm, the foundation’s executive director. “These are not women’s issues but issues that affect the whole community. We have to make people understand we are mainstream.”

But as they make the case for expanded support, women’s funds may find themselves competing with other women’s groups — and even their own grantees.

Carey Tradewell, president of the Milwaukee Women’s Center, which has received grants from the local women’s fund in the past, says her center currently raises $500,000 annually and soon hopes to be raising $750,000 per year.

If the local women’s fund embarks on a massive new fund-raising effort as the center also revs up its own fund raising, she says, donors may be forced to choose between the two groups.

While some women’s groups fear competition, the funds have been careful to stress their role in increasing the philanthropic pot for women’s causes, not diminishing it. Many say they encourage women to give to both their organization and to individual women’s groups.

“We liken ourselves to a mutual fund,” says Ms. Grumm of the Chicago fund. “It’s fine to have individual stocks, but mutual funds are a good investment too.”

Some women’s funds say the best investment they can make now is to concentrate on donors under 35. In the Ordinary Magic study, a strong commitment was found among women aged 34 and younger to feminist causes such as equal pay for women, ending domestic violence and sexual assault, and reproductive health. Seventy per cent said they planned to increase their giving to such causes in coming years.

That finding was reassuring to leaders of women’s organizations. Many have feared that younger women in their 20s and 30s won’t see the need to support women’s causes, because they now enjoy the fruits of a decades-long battle to promote greater equality between the sexes.

The Michigan Women’s Fund this year held a reception for women, aged 22 to 32, and expected to draw about 15 attendees. After 40 women in that age group signed up, the fund was forced to turn people away.

The fund also has a program to get high-school girls involved in grant making. Twenty girls are selected each year to solicit proposals, make site visits, and award $20,000 to local girls’ organizations. The Michigan fund hopes to expand the program to eight new locales in the next five years.

Girls in the program, says Margaret Talburtt, executive director of the Michigan fund, “quickly see the difference between being a volunteer and a philanthropist.”

Volunteers, she explains, do important work, like serving meals in soup kitchens to help alleviate hunger. But philanthropists, she says, “have more power” because they use their financial clout to try to eradicate social problems.

“We want young girls,”she adds, “to see themselves as philanthropists.”

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A free summary of the Women’s Funding Network study, the “Donor Research and Marketing Project,” can be obtained by contacting the organization at 332 Minnesota Street, Suite E-840, St. Paul 55101-1320; (612) 227-2213 fax; e-mail: wfn@wfnet.org. Free copies of the monograph series by Mary Ellen Capek, “Women and Philanthropy: Old Stereotypes, New Challenges,” are also available from the network.

Marilyn Dickey contributed to this article.