Posts Tagged ‘generosity’

The 5 Ws of Individual-Gifts Fundraising

November 1, 2010

As all budding journalists know, every story can be told through judicious use of the 5 Ws: Who? What? When? Where? Why?  Here the Nonprofiteer employs this efficient system to tell the story of how reluctant volunteers can become enthusiastic and successful individual-gifts fundraisers.

For most small- and medium-sized organizations, everything about this story is a blank.  So here’s a primer on how to fill in that blank.

WHO to ask?: Only two types of people should be asked individually for gifts: people who’ve given to your group before, and friends of your Board members.  With anyone else, it’s sheer impertinence: “Hi, nice to meet you, open your wallet.”  Ask friends (of the agency and the Board), and ye shall receive.

What to do when your Board members say, “I don’t want to ask my friends for money”?  Reply: “You don’t have to ask your friends.  Just ask each other’s friends!”  So Angela asks John’s friend, and John asks Angela’s.  All they ask of their own friends is to come to a meeting, and all they have to do at that meeting is wax enthusiastic about the group and listen while the other one solicits the gift.

WHAT to ask for?: If they’ve given to the agency before, you’re asking for more.  You have to make the leap of imagination (from $250 last year to $1000 this year) before the prospective donor can think about making it.

Don’t worry about being too ambitious in your monetary goal.  Very few prospective donors are offended by being mistaken for rich people.  (Women, though, are more likely to be taken aback than men, so ask for slightly less from women.  They’re more likely to say ‘yes,’ so it all evens out.)

If you’re asking a Board member’s friend, ask for slightly less than the Board member gives him/herself, because the first thing the prospect will do is turn to his Board friend and say, “What do you give?”  If the Board member doesn’t think the agency’s worth $500, the friend is unlikely to think it’s worth anything.

What if your Board member’s friend is a gazillionaire?  (We should all have this problem.)  Then prime the Board member to say, “I give $200, because that’s what I can afford.  We’re hoping you’ll likewise consider a gift based on your capacity.”  Again, few people mind being suspected of success, so if your Board member is prepared to say, “Listen, I know you made a killing last year when you sold your Google stock . . .”  his friend is unlikely to want to correct him!

WHEN to ask: The Nonprofiteer is a prompt—some might say premature—fundraiser.  As a cautionary tale, she offers the story of how her alma mater took her out for coffee repeatedly to soften her up for an ask, despite her saying, “Guys, I’m a fundraiser.  I know what we’re doing here.  Just ask me for the money!”  By the time they were ready to ask her, she’d been reminded that the school’s investment philosophy would have permitted owning shares in slave-ships, and did permit investing in companies propping up genocidal regimes; and therefore she declined to give, though she wouldn’t have reneged on a preexisting pledge.  So don’t delay; get the yes!

“What about cultivation?” you ask.  The Nonprofiteer believes that lots of what passes for “cultivation” in individual-gifts fundraising is nothing more than stalling.  Don’t hold “cultivation” events and plan to ask for money later; if you hold an event, either get contributions through the ticket price or ask forcefully that night.

All you need to do to “cultivate”  people is to demonstrate that you’re thinking about them on a regular basis, and you can do that by forwarding something you think they’d like to read.  Better yet, send them invitations to your activities, whether performances or client graduations or river cleanups.  People give where they feel they belong, so be on the lookout for “belonging” opportunities.  For this purpose, the less special the event, the better.    If you do something special for a donor, make it an ask.

One word of caution about WHEN: don’t ask too soon after the last gift.  May and June may be two separate fiscal years to you, but your donors probably think (and give) on a calendar-year basis.  So they’ll think you bizarre and ungrateful if you respond to their May gift with a June ask.

WHERE?: Over breakfast, lunch or dinner (or possibly bedtime snack).  The Nonprofiteer is a firm believer in the power of food to facilitate fundraising.  In any case, the advantage of a meal is that it requires the prospective donor to sit still for about an hour, during which time you can a) learn about her; b) educate her; and c) ask her.

WHY?: Why bother with individual gifts?  Why not just write some more grants?  (asks your Board.)  Three reasons:

  • Because grants come and go.  Institutional funders have the attention span of fruit-flies: this year they’re interested in AIDS but next year it will be architecture.  If you’re not the fad, you’re out of luck.
  • Because even if they continue to embrace your work, very few foundations or corporate giving offices will give money to support your operations.  They want to support programs, the newer the better, often leading agencies to elaborate their programming beyond what their infrastructure can sustain.  If you need to pay your light bill—or your employees—you need individual gifts.
  • And finally, even if they love you to pieces, most institutional funders want to sustain you while you find broader support.  They’re not interested in being your permanent sugar daddy.

By contrast, most individuals give because they’re asked, and what they’re asked for is support for a cause or an agency (not a single program), and once they’ve agreed they keep giving out of habit.  So you have to actively offend them before they stop.

So that’s the story of successful individual giving.  And if who-what-when-where-why merely piques your interest, you can learn how right here.

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Posted in corporate giving, Finances, Foundation Hall of Shame/Stupid Foundation Tricks, Fundraising, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General, Private Philanthropy, Relations with funders, Volunteers/Volunteerism, Women's Issues | Leave a Comment »

Whether women are more generous than men, and whether it matters

October 26, 2010

The Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy has just released a study showing that at all income levels women give more than men—both more frequently and more generously when controlled for income.

This study’s headline is that across nearly all income levels women 1) are more likely to give and 2) on average give more than men.

Specifically, women who make $23,509 or less (Q1) are 28% more likely to give than men; women who make $23,509 – $43,500 (Q2) are 32% more likely to give; women who make $43,5000 – $67,532 (Q3) are 49% more likely to give than men; women who make $67,532 – $103,000 (Q4) are 43% more likely to give than men; and women who make +$103,000 (Q5) are 26% more likely to give than men.

In every income group except for Q2, women give more than men. In Q1, women give 92% more (or almost twice as much) than men; in Q3, women give 95% more (or almost twice as much) than men; in Q4, women give almost 45% more (or almost one and a half times more) than men; and in Q5, women give 94% more (or almost twice as much) than men.

The study’s authors resist the temptation to make bold claims about why this is the case, though they note that generosity tends to increase with education and that women now earn more than half of all bachelor’s degrees.  Generosity also increases with income, and more women are employed now, and therefore earning their own income, than ever before.  But even controlling for income, education and wealth, in what principal investigator Debra Mesch calls “pure terms,” women are the more generous half of the population.

[Digression: Women now make 80 cents for each male dollar.  This represents an increase from 62 cents in 1979, at which rate we'll achieve wage parity in 2043.  Only the most ridiculously strident feminists regard this as a problem.]

What’s the source of women’s greater generosity?  When prompted, Mesch is willing to indulge in a bit of speculation:

Women are socialized to take care of their families and their communities, and because of that socialization process we see the motives of empathy and caring.  We’ve done another study that looks at difference in motives for giving, and women score much higher on empathy and principle of care.

Her new study’s results comport with the trend to focus international aid on women because they’re more likely than men to spend surplus income on their families instead of themselves.  Mesch is unsurprised: “I think that’s an international phenomenon, that women are the caregivers and nurturers; they have more of those prosocial behaviors.”

So what difference does any of this make, except the sheer giggle value of demonstrating female superiority to the male of the species?  Mesch is the Queen of Tact on the subject:

I think what we need to understand is that one is not better than the other,  just different.  Women give for different reasons, give differently, are much more egalitarian in their approach.  As girls, we’re taught to be nice and share.  Men have been taught to be much more competitive, and to communicate status.  Men are strategic and women want to be equalizers.

[Oh, right, of course: no one's better, we're just different.  But the Nonprofiteer defies anyone to offer an example of how "less generous" can be better than, or even equal to, "more generous."]

If we’re lucky, the study will help eliminate the prejudice afflicting most professional fundraisers: that women are timid askers and chintzy givers who never donate without asking someone’s permission.  Not only will cultivating a female donor be more likely to yield a “yes” than comparable effort spent on a man, but women’s giving will increase faster than men’s relative to their economic power.  You’re betting on a stock that’s going up.

But you can’t treat your female donors like men in drag.  As Mesch notes,
If you’re a fundraiser, you have to communicate with women in a different way than with men.  You need to involve and engage them, because if you feel involved as a woman, you contribute not only your money but your time.

Thus the study suggests a lot more than it claims: that today’s efforts to find meaningful work for female volunteers will produce tomorrow’s major gifts.  That achieving equal pay is essential not just to women but to the charities we support (so, a little help here, guys?).  That female-headed households can be a resource to be tapped and not just a problem to be solved.  That the future of philanthropy rests in women’s hands.

What makes this more than a parlor game is the extent to which it reveals the role of empathy in giving.  Just as poor people give a greater proportion of their income to charity than rich people—presumably because they know how it feels to be on the needing side of the give-and-need equation—so women may give more generously because we know what it’s like to be dependent.  Women are less likely to imagine that having been born on third base means we hit a triple; and the feminist mantra that every woman is one divorce away from welfare makes most of us acutely aware that there but for the grace of God go I.

Part II of the study, scheduled to be released in December or January, will address gender differences in the kind of charities supported: secular or religious?  Large or small?  Do women’s gifts go to operating expenses, while men’s go to bricks and mortar on which they can carve their names?  Says Mesch,

What I can tell you is from the previous research, men and women do give to different causes.  We find women seem to give more to the social service areas, to helping the needy.  Plus women seem to spread their giving out [among multiple charities] and men are much more strategic.

The results of her research leave Mesch hopeful.

My ideal wish is that at some point, we won’t have a need to study women’s philanthropy.  It would be wonderful if philanthropy is just philanthropy, and we understand that women have caught up in terms of their income and education and wealth.

We can really change the world––women are at the tipping point.  It’s going to be a huge movement where women can really see themselves as making an impact and being philanthropists.

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Posted in Coverage of nonprofits, Current Affairs, Finances, Fundraising, International, Nonprofit management, Nonprofits--General, Personnel Issues, Philanthropy and Taxation, Poverty, Private Philanthropy, Relations with funders, Social Service Agencies, Volunteers/Volunteerism, Women's Issues | 3 Comments »

Children’s crusades

May 12, 2008

Nicholas Kristof highlighted some very impressive young philanthropists in his New York Times column yesterday; but one of his observations made the Nonprofiteer cringe.

The humanitarian prodigies like Ana and Nick are laudable for going beyond simple protesting to help their causes. Today’s young social entrepreneurs come across as more constructive than my generation of student activists, and more savvy about how to accomplish their goals cost-effectively.

“Simple protesting”–another term for that is “political action.” And as committed to the service-providing nonprofit sector as she is, the Nonprofiteer doesn’t imagine–and doesn’t want others to imagine–that it’s a substitute for monitoring, and where necessary changing, government policies toward those in need. Nor is it clear that organizing a nation’s worth of benefit dances to pay for anti-malarial bednets is more “cost-effective” than organizing a nationwide letter-writing campaign urging Congress to spend money on bednets instead of the Iraq war.

So while we’re celebrating charitable young people, let’s not devalue those who choose political involvement instead. There’s nothing “more constructive” they–or any of us–could do than holding our own government to account.

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Posted in Advocacy, Benefit events, Coverage of nonprofits, Fundraising, International, Private Philanthropy, Uncategorized, Volunteers/Volunteerism | Leave a Comment »

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