Posts Tagged ‘philanthropy’
Posted by Jon Howard on January 14, 2011 in Big ideas, Profiles of passion and courage
Last night, Gayle and I proudly attended the 17th Annual Latino Dollars for Scholars Award Dinner as LADO scholarship sponsors. We love LADO because it gives deserving and talented students vital help with the steep cost of a college education. We love LADO because it does its work with obvious, all-volunteer joy, pride and astonishing persistence.
But most of all, I think we love LADO because through LADO, we get to see the real American Dream unfolding before us, and the chance to play our small part in making sure that dream never dies.
This year, LADO awarded eighteen $1,000 scholarships to Latino college students from Rhode Island. It’s not a lot of money – unless you need a stethoscope for your nursing classes, like Marissa Laghana, who spoke at last night’s dinner. Or money for books or for travel home. It makes a difference – often it makes the vital difference between staying or leaving.
Marissa’s parents came to Rhode Island from Guatemala. Marissa was her family’s first high school graduate – and she’ll be their first college graduate, too. She knows what her parents struggled through to give her this chance and now she’s going to make their sacrifices worthwhile.
These 18 young men and women are talented, determined, directed. From this point onward they travel their separate paths to destinies they may only guess at today. For most, that future will include reaching back to help those coming along behind.
What strikes me now is the shared road they’ve traveled with their families to arrive at this night. Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on December 23, 2010 in Fundraising
This is certainly the time of year for accumulating more “stuff,” isn’t it. It’s even become downright patriotic to go out and shop.
When my kids asked this year -”what do you want for Christmas?” – I truly didn’t want one more thing that fell into the “stuff” category. Just having them home together, sharing conversation over lovely dinners and time together, that is enough to make me extremely happy.
I wish I could say I’m immune to stuff, but I can’t. I did my share of Christmas shopping, tempered by the desire to shop local and buy things people would ordinarily consume, like foodstuffs. I didn’t always succeed.
Tuesday afternoon, I had a short discussion about the difference between a recruiting an event sponsor and recruiting a philanthropic donor. I was making the point that the sponsorship exchange weighs heavily onto the side of tangible benefits– like size of logo, number of impressions, size of audience. Relationships matter, absolutely, but the tangible benefits the sponsors receive usually close the sale.
Stuff again.
This morning I went to the memorial service for a fundraising colleague of mine Steve Sorin. The rabbi spoke of Steve’s enthusiasm for life, his love of family and music, and his belief in his work. And how much the measure of a life isn’t about the stuff that we accumulate, but of the memories we leave, the impact we have on each other and the world around us.
As I sat to write, I couldn’t help thinking about so many conversations I’ve had with volunteer fundraisers or with fundraisers new to the profession. How often they’ve expressed the need to have stuff to give before they could possibly interact with a potential donor. Stuff like a beautiful printed brochure or a tangible reward for giving. The idea that a donor would give without getting personal stuff back was just an incomprehensible concept.
Sadly, too often in fundraising the desire to give or get stuff gets in the way of us having deep conversations with donors about change, about possibility, about human need and personal aspirations. About the “love of humankind” that is at the root core of philanthropy.
We really don’t need as much stuff as we have. Not in our lives, and not in our interactions with our donors.
(If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look at The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard).
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on October 22, 2010 in Research
A recent report by the Nonprofit Finance Fund confirms what I’ve been saying about the need for significant investments in nonprofit revenue development for some time. In their words,
“Many nonprofits with strong programs and great results fail to thrive. One reason is the way the sector is currently financed. Nonprofits are rewarded for keeping margins tight, and few have access to the type of capital needed to explore better business models, scale impact, and create lasting change. In contrast to the money needed to fund “business as usual,” philanthropic equity can radically improve our ability to address society’s critical needs.”
What’s philanthropic equity? It’s big high stakes, high risk “investments” which are designed to enable nonprofits to make significant leaps forward in their program delivery and/or their business model. The report calls these kinds of investors “Builders.”
The report distinguishes Builders from “Buyers” who support the ongoing programs or operations of a nonprofit. As I read the report, Builders understand that there are no guarantees, that they are taking a risk to help the organization undertake significant change. The payoff, if it arrives, is vastly scaled or improved program impact and sustainable growth.
The Nonprofit Finance Fund was able to collect multiyear data on nine organizations. The payoff: program delivery grew 3.1x and business model revenues grew by 2.0x in the organizations that received this philanthropic equity.
Here’s my layperson’s take on the report.
If you pump a lot of money (underscore “a lot”) into nonprofits over a few years, and they use it to make smart investments in transforming programs or business models, you might just get a big payoff in social impact and revenue enhancement.
To everyone thinking about replicating this out there, note that the amount of philanthropic equity invested in these organizations was pretty significant, ranging from a low of $3 million to upwards of $22 million (though not all of that money was spent by the receiving organizations at the time of the report).
For nonprofits: Here’s a great report to help you justify a growth campaign to prospective Builders that will radically improve your business model and/or transform your social impact.
For institutional funders: If you want to see significant increases in an organization’s philanthropic revenues, you’ve got to think at a much larger scale. Funding just one development director, with no other support, doesn’t really help organizations make the big leaps, in my opinion. But funding an entire staff in development, that would be a great take-away from this study.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on August 10, 2010 in Fundraising
Below the fold in Monday morning’s Providence Journal was a lovely story about Ram and Nishi Nehra, a retired couple from Middletown, Rhode Island, who have been supporting an educational NGO in their native India since 2001.
I know that their story is not unique, that each day there are millions, probably billions, of philanthropic acts across the globe.
But what made me smile over my morning tea was the way that Ram described his philanthropy:
“I get so much satisfaction, so much pleasure out of this — I can’t tell you in words. You have to experience this. This is full of life.”
Demonstrating again the principle of “giving till you feel good” that my departed colleague, Herb Kaplan, always espoused.
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Posted by Jon Howard on January 15, 2010 in Effectiveness, World News
It’s hard to be hard-headed about giving to Haiti when people are hungry, thirsty and injured. But before you reflexively hit the DONATE NOW FOR HAITI button on the first email (or text message) you see, take a moment to consider your own values. Even in emergencies, perhaps most of all in emergencies, it’s important to try to give in ways that can help to avert similar disasters in the future.
Timothy A. Wise reminds us that “aid is power” in his 2005 blog posting Humanitarian Crises: What is a Progressive to Do? A lot of American aid power goes, intentionally or unintentionally, to helping entrench American businesses and exports at the expense of local products and producers. Food aid often winds up driving local produce and producers out of business. Reconstruction contracts with international construction firms undercut local professionals, builders and workers. Wise advises sticking with agencies which were present before the crisis and will stick around later and those with clear strategies to build local capacity.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on December 21, 2009 in Fundraising
I’m always curious about donor thinking and like to explore the why’s of giving. As there is one donor I know pretty well, I thought I’d dissect her giving. 
Taking stock
Before the year draws to an end, I review my all my charitable contributions to see how I’m doing and to be sure I’ve haven’t forgotten any of my favorite causes.
I can do this pretty quickly because throughout the year as I make gifts I’ve been recording them on my “Contributions” spreadsheet. That way, I can see at a glance who I remembered and who I forgot. I find this a lot easier than my old system of searching through my canceled checks and credit card statements. The spreadsheet also helps me remember when I receive a new appeal if I’ve already reached my giving target for that organization. And it has really helped speed up my tax preparation.
Giving schedules
The end of year is a real cash crunch for me as our house insurance, car insurance, life insurance are all due. There are also holiday gifts and plane tickets to get my sons back from college. So it’s not a great time for me to be making donations.
I’ve been trying to spread my giving out throughout the year. Larger gifts I’ve been doing in installments or at times that I’m feeling more cash flush. I really don’t love putting gifts on credit cards as I’d rather all my giving went to the organizations I support.
But at the end of the year, if I’ve missed an important cause, out comes the credit card.
Giving Benchmarks
One of my speculations about giving is that people would be more generous if they had better benchmarks.
A few days ago my daughter shared that she was going to set a person tithing formula for her giving. Many faiths have a “tithing requirement” that sets a benchmark for personal support. States that have high percentages of their population in faiths that tithe seem to report higher overall giving. Yet most of us don’t view our charitable giving in this way.
In 1987 Independent Sector launched a campaign to Give Five, encouraging individuals to give 5% of their income and five hours a week to the causes they cared about.
Today, the average US donor gives to charity in these amounts:
- Low income households give about 4.5% of their income
- Middle class households give about 2.5%
- Higher income households give about 3%
So how does our household compare? Read More >>
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on June 16, 2008 in Great quotes, Tidbits
My friend and colleague Herb Kaplan died June 14, 2008 at age 78.
Herb taught me the word “tzedakah,” the Hebrew word for the acts we call charity. The root of tzedakah means righteousness, justice or fairness. Herb and I shared that belief in the power and obligation of philanthropy.
“Give until it feels good” was Herb’s answer to anyone who asked him “how much should I give?”
He loved young people and chose to mentor them, including young fundraising professionals.
The Association of Fundraising Professionals, Rhode Island Chapter, honored Herb by naming its endowment fund at the Rhode Island Foundation for him. Herb championed the growth of this endowment so that its earnings would fuel the professional development of more young fundraisers.
Thank you, Herb, for your life, your good works and your lessons.
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Posted by Gayle Gifford on May 28, 2008 in Better Boards, Big ideas, Fundraising
I just received a link from the Association of Fundraising Professionals to a Christian Science Monitor article on a proposal being floated in Massachusetts to tax college endowments that exceed $1 billion.
The pros and cons of the discussion are centered around whether the colleges are spending enough of their endowments to lower tuition … and the colleges are responding with all kinds of statistics about their contributions to the local economy.
But the question I haven’t seen posed yet to the Harvards of the world is the one I asked above: How much is enough?
A few years ago I was facilitating a strategic planning process with a community center in a small oceanside community. Overall, the townsfolk were pretty well-off financially (with the exception of the service folk and farmers whose families had lived in this community forever). The community center was fortunate to have a small endowment that helped supplement their annual operating expenses.
During the course of our conversation, one of the board members posed the question: If someone wanted to leave us a million dollars, should we take it? I was floored… in my 20 Read More >>
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