Women Take an Activist Path to Philanthropy

Kathleen Loehr should have been an easy prospect for Cornell University’s fundraisers. One of eight siblings who all graduated from the university, she had also once led its President’s Council of Cornell Women.

But as her 35th class reunion approached, she found herself turned off by the barrage of impersonal e-mails and phone calls from the institution’s development office.

“They were just asking me to give and not remembering everything I’d done for Cornell,” says Ms. Loehr, a managing director at the Orr Associates fundraising consulting firm who has also worked at the American Red Cross and other charities.

Finally, one fundraiser took the time to do some research and acknowledged Ms. Loehr’s long history of aiding the university before asking how she might want to contribute in her reunion year.

“That’s the person I responded to,” she says, adding that she had planned to give $350, but because the fundraiser made an effort to learn more, she contributed $1,000.

Personal Approach

Ms. Loehr’s experience is not unique.

Women donors are increasingly demanding a more personal approach from nonprofits, yet they say fundraisers have been slow to deliver.

Too many charity appeals are “transactional, male-driven, goal-driven, reunion-timed, match-your-peers challenge grants,” says Ms. Loehr.

In failing to meet the needs of female donors, say giving experts, charities are turning their backs on some of their most generous supporters, according to studies that show that women of all income levels outpace men in their giving.

While women often do require personalized approaches, they shouldn’t be ignored, says Donna Hall, leader of the Women Donors Network.

“You really need to look at a woman philanthropist as a complicated, involved person who is an activist in one way or another, who has a depth of knowledge, or who wants to attain a depth of knowledge before donating.”

Economic Fears

Alison Harmon leads the Delta Research and Educational Foundation, the fundraising arm of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, which supports charities that work to improve the lives of African-American women and their children.

In her 13 years working there, she says, she has seen its female supporters make ever-larger gifts.

When she arrived, the organization mostly received $50 to $100 gifts. Now average gifts are $100 to $500.

That’s a sign of the donors’ commitment to the cause but also of women’s overall growing economic clout: “Their work is netting for them more and more dollars,” she says, “and they’re making choices about what they want to do with the resources they have for giving, and their commitment to giving is increasing.”

And yet fundraisers often struggle to make their case to female donors, even wealthy ones.

When all other income factors are equal, it is generally harder to raise money from women than it is from men, says Lorri Jean, who seeks gifts of $6,000 and up as chief executive of the Los Angeles Gay & Lesbian Center.

“Usually it’s because they have some income insecurity that I almost never hear from the men, and it ranges from they’ve got kids in college to they are concerned about their retirement to they don’t have the same level of confidence that they are going to be making the same amount of money in the future as they’re making today,” says Ms. Jean.

Debra Mesch, a scholar at Indiana University-Purdue University who conducts studies of women donors, says that caution is born out of the reality of most women’s lives: They are much more risk-averse investors than men; they worry more about their retirement savings because they live longer; and they tend to drop in and out of the labor force more often to care for family members and thus accumulate less money during their careers.

Yet despite all that, says Ms. Mesch, the data still show that women are more generous.

“Men may have a bigger pie,” she says, “but the women are giving a bigger slice of their pie to charity.”

Similar Views

But that generosity doesn’t mean women donors are pushovers for a nonprofit’s sob story.

Take, for example, Suzanne Sheuerman, a 57-year-old financial adviser, who lives in the Bay Area. She and her partner, Barb, give about $35,000 a year to charity, supporting mostly groups that help women in developing countries, along with climate-change organizations and public radio.

The couple carves out time every year to make giving decisions methodically. Ms. Sheuerman makes a list of all the groups the couple supported in the previous year and those that are asking for a donation for the first time.

Her partner, a lawyer, then digs deeper, says Ms. Sheuerman: “She goes and researches every nonprofit and looks at how watchdog groups rate them. I think we probably screen out groups more than look for new ones.”

Ms. Sheuerman says she prefers it when charities send her updates about their work rather than asking directly for money.

She does not appreciate fundraisers who won’t take no for an answer when she declines to give more. When that happens, she calls the charity and explains that as a loyal donor she doesn’t want to be inundated with appeals once she has made clear she has given for the year. It usually works.

“Sometimes you have to escalate the issue to the executive director, but people who work at nonprofits are pretty cool people to begin with, so it’s kind of hard to get mad at them,” she says.

Mahsa Pelosky, a 39-year-old donor in New York, hates it when charities rely on what she considers emotionally manipulative marketing.

She calls such methods “humanitarian porn,” such as when a charity uses the most gut-wrenching case studies to goad donors into giving.

“That stuff just really grosses me out,” she says.

Ms. Pelosky, a former corporate marketing executive and political fundraiser who has for the last decade devoted her time to her family’s philanthropy, gives between $70,000 to $100,000 a year to charity with her husband, a private investor. She primarily supports women’s advocacy and antipoverty groups and think tanks.

Today’s wealthy women, she says, are searching for charities whose view of the world matches their own and that are working toward solving social problems that matter most to them, rather than reflexively doling out money to help the needy, as previous generations of affluent women have done.

In deciding where to give, Ms. Pelosky focuses on a nonprofit’s leadership and structure; she and her husband usually give only to groups on whose boards they serve and whose internal operations they know exceptionally well.

“I prefer the executives that take the road less traveled and are a bit forward-looking in their approach to solving a systematic issue, not necessarily putting a Band-Aid on something,” says Ms. Pelosky.

The Next Generation

Many charities have been focusing their efforts on women who broke barriers in the 1960s and beyond: The first significant wave of lawyers, doctors, chief executives, and others who followed in their path are now in their prime earning and giving years.

Figuring out how to appeal to them has been a challenge for some charities; solutions that work for older generations don’t always work with younger ones. While such women want to be decision makers about their giving, they don’t feel they need to operate separately from the men in their lives to do so. They view such separation as just another cumbersome gender bias.

“These women have grown up with men in the conversation,” says Ms. Loehr, the philanthropy adviser. Compared with previous generations, she says, “the men are more enlightened, the men understand the importance of bringing the woman’s voice into the conversation.”

Ms. Hall, of the Women Donors Network, says she is also hearing this from her younger donors. It’s causing a rift with some of her group’s older members, many of whom have encountered bias in their careers and from fundraisers.

“We go into strategic planning next year and it’s going to be an interesting and stressful conversation because you have women in their 50s and 60s who value the women’s space for all sorts of reasons that younger women haven’t experienced,” she says. “Yet younger women say they want to be an empowered woman leader, but they don’t want to do it without men in the room.”

The solution, say fundraisers, is to show that a charity understands that some women want to drive their own giving and others want to share decisions equally with men.

The challenge is to figure out what type of approach the donor prefers. That, says Ms. Loehr, gets back to the need for fundraisers to make the effort to cultivate women donors of all ages.

“If we begin to organize ourselves differently for women, we’re going to be able to organize ourselves differently for the millennials,” says Ms. Loehr. And, she notes, “when we take the time, we almost always get more dollars and more engagement.”