Posted by Rebecca Gschwend on Thu, Jan 19, 2012 @ 10:40 AM
By Lisa Chiu
A study released today from a foundation watchdog group says that advocacy efforts by charities can pay off, to the tune of billions of dollars to communities.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy study examined 110 charities in 13 states and found that work such as pushing for more aid to schools and housing for the poor resulted in $26.6-billion in benefits to communities over five years. Money for the campaigns came from foundations and other donors.
The study comes as the watchdog group is urging foundations to step up their spending on efforts to influence public policy and running a campaign called Philanthropy’s Promise, which asks grant makers to commit to devoting at least 25 percent of their grants each year to advocacy.
Altogether, the report said, the charities spent $231-million on efforts to influence policy makers and the public, meaning every $1 spent led to a $115 benefit to communities, the report says.
Some philanthropy experts say the estimates are not a reliable measure of what charities can achieve. William Schambra, director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute says it’s too hard to say that it was precisely the work of the charities that led to the policy changes.
“Any time you try to relate a very specific cause to a very large effect, you’re running into trouble,” Mr. Schambra says. “The notion that a foundation investing X amount of dollars led to this incredible piece of legislation overlooks a few other things, like most of politics, most of economics, and most of culture.”
The report combines the findings of seven studies by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. The three-year project was paid for by $1-million in grants provided by many foundations.
Posted by Sarah Barnes on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 @ 02:05 PM
Campbell & Company, a leading national nonprofit fundraising consulting and executive search firm headquartered in Chicago, expands its D.C. office with the addition of Dirk Sellers, Vice President.
The addition of Dirk Sellers is part of Campbell & Company’s long-range strategic plan to strengthen its ability to deliver quality fundraising, communications and executive search services nationwide.
“Dirk’s wealth of management and fundraising experience as a consultant and practitioner further strengthens our ability to provide valuable services to the nonprofits we serve,” says Peter Fissinger, President of Campbell & Company. “With our commitment to providing the deepest insights and strongest solutions for our clients, we are delighted to welcome him to our team.”
About Dirk Sellers
Dirk Sellers brings more than 20 years of professional experience in nonprofit management and fundraising in international development, health and human services, education, national associations, and religious institutions to Campbell & Company. Dirk has hands-on experience in developing and implementing successful fundraising strategies, board, staff and leadership relations, and volunteer engagements.
Prior to joining Campbell & Company, Dirk was Executive Director and President of the GAVI Fund, the U.S. arm of the GAVI Alliance (formerly the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunization). GAVI aims to improve health in the developing world by accelerating access to vaccines and strengthening health systems. Dirk oversaw a complex reorganization that led to a refocusing of the U.S. entity on private philanthropy and advocacy. He secured many of GAVI’s first lead investments from the private sector, including six- and seven-figure gifts from individuals and corporate partners.
Dirk also served as an executive at a national consulting firm, where he collaborated with a range of clients including The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB United Nations Foundation; Gonzaga College High School in Washington; White Plains Hospital Center; and the Diocese of Raleigh. He helped design and implement a professional development and training program for the firm’s client services team and received award recognition for customer service, development of collateral materials, and innovative work across a number of engagements.
Dirk is a graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is also a certified commercial pilot and has completed coursework toward a Master’s degree in community leadership.
About Campbell & Company
Campbell & Company is a national consulting firm offering advancement planning, fundraising, marketing communications and executive search for nonprofit organizations in education, health and medicine, arts and culture, environment, social service, and professional societies.
Through thirty-five years and thousands of engagements, Campbell & Company has helped nonprofit organizations anticipate and manage the challenges of the philanthropic marketplace. Campbell & Company’s offices are located in Chicago, Boston, Portland, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC. For more information, please telephone (877) 957-0000 toll‑free, email info@campbellcompany.com or visit www.campbellcompany.com.
###
Posted by Sarah Barnes on Wed, Jan 18, 2012 @ 09:40 AM
Campbell & Company, a leading national nonprofit fundraising consulting and executive search firm headquartered in Chicago, kicks off the new year with a fresh rebranding, celebrating its 36th year of partnering with more than 1500 clients.
Since 1976, Campbell & Company has helped nonprofits achieve their fundraising and staffing goals. The new visual representation of the company appears in the company’s new advertising campaign, collateral and website.
“When we started the rebranding process, we went straight to our clients and asked them what they thought about us. Organizations see us as true partners who carefully listen to their needs and develop sound, tailored strategies for their fundraising programs. The new Campbell & Company brand features clearer, more refined messaging that not only captures our accomplishments to date, but also shows where we will be as we continue to enhance our service offerings,” states Sarah Barnes, Director of Marketing & Communications for Campbell & Company.
About Campbell & Company
Campbell & Company is a national consulting firm offering advancement planning, fundraising, communications and executive search for nonprofit organizations in education, health and medicine, arts and culture, environment, social service, and professional societies.
Through thirty-five years and thousands of engagements, Campbell & Company has helped nonprofit organizations anticipate and manage the challenges of the philanthropic marketplace. Campbell & Company’s offices are located in Chicago, Boston, Portland, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC. For more information, please telephone (877) 957-0000 toll‑free, email info@campbellcompany.com or visit www.campbellcompany.com.
###
Posted by Sarah Barnes on Mon, Jan 16, 2012 @ 03:41 PM
CHICAGO, January 2012 - Campbell & Company, a leading nonprofit national consulting and executive search firm headquartered in Chicago, is excited to announce the addition of Molly Stack, Associate Consultant, San Francisco Bay Area office.
“We are excited to welcome Molly Stack in our San Francisco Bay Area office. Having over 10 years of fundraising management experience from a variety of institutions, Molly will enhance Campbell & Company’s capacity to serve its clients on the west coast,” states Peter Fissinger, President, Campbell & Company.
About Molly Stack:
Molly Stack’s career in fundraising management for community development, education and human service organizations spans a decade. She brings a commitment to mission fulfillment to each engagement, encouraging big-picture thinking to transform organizations.
Molly joins Campbell & Company from Architecture for Humanity, where she served for three years. As Development Director, and during her tenure, Molly facilitated major donor solicitation, supported the Board of Directors, and initiated and managed corporate promotions and sponsorships. In response to the March 11, 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, she drove a rebuilding fundraising program that secured $1.4 million in private, corporate and foundation support combined.
Prior to this, Molly served as Campaign Associate at the Schools of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco, where she worked closely with Board Members, staff leaders and colleagues in securing more than $9 million in capital campaign gifts and multi-year commitments.
Molly’s professional experience includes serving as Development Associate for the ALS Association, Greater Bay Area Chapter, where her careful segmentation of the donor pool was integral to substantial Annual Fund growth. Molly started her development career at FUND Consulting in Chicago, IL and as a development intern at the Chicago Children’s Museum.
Molly graduated from DePaul University in Chicago’s Honors Program with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a minor in communications. She serves on the Development Committee of the Daraja Academy in Kenya, Africa.
About Campbell & Company
Campbell & Company is a national consulting firm offering advancement planning, fundraising, communications and executive search for nonprofit organizations in education, health and medicine, arts and culture, environment, social service, and professional societies.
Through thirty-five years and thousands of engagements, Campbell & Company has helped nonprofit organizations anticipate and manage the challenges of the philanthropic marketplace. Campbell & Company’s offices are located in Chicago, Boston, Portland, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, DC. For more information, please telephone (877) 957-0000 toll‑free, email info@campbellcompany.com or visit www.campbellcompany.com.
###
Posted by Rebecca Gschwend on Wed, Dec 07, 2011 @ 09:45 AM
Written by Holly Hall
This fall, the Jewelers’ Building, an imposing Art Deco building here, was bathed in orange light to mark Hunger Action Month and call attention to the mission of one of its tenants, a national network of more than 200 food banks.
For Feeding America, the umbrella group that represents food banks, the first-time display of color was a coming-out party of sorts, as the once-quiet organization has transformed itself into a fund-raising powerhouse.
Behind those efforts is a new leader, Vickie B. Escarra, who left the top marketing job at Delta Airlines to take over the charity in 2006.
Food-bank leaders nationwide say Ms. Escarra’s leadership is a key reason that even amid the economic downturn, Feeding America will manage to increase contributions to nearly $115-million in the fiscal year that ends in June, compared with $33-million in her first year.
What’s more, the group has raised nearly half of the $500-million it hopes to garner in a five-year drive that started in 2009.
The organization has also increased pounds of donated food by 57 percent.
Such gains enabled food banks to aid 37 million people last year, a number that has grown by 46 percent in the past five years.
To be sure, the economic turmoil the nation has endured during Ms. Escarra’s tenure has made it easier for groups that provide basic necessities to make their case for donations.
But food-bank veterans say her decisions to transform the charity’s image, restructure its fund-raising staff, and make other changes has enabled the nonprofit organization to reach out to a broad range of national companies and wealthy Americans who had never previously paid much attention to food banks.
A Better Name
One of Ms. Escarra’s first and boldest moves was to champion a name change at the group, which had been known by some variation of the name Second Harvest for more than 30 years.
Anne Goodman, president of the Cleveland Foodbank, says that Ms. Escarra realized right away that Second Harvest’s name was a stumbling block to fund raising because it doesn’t say what the group does.
“It takes guts to say, 'I’m going to invest the assets of a charity in marketing,’ but she had the vision to do it, and it paid off,” Ms. Goodman says.
The new name helped persuade many companies that they wanted to be associated with an organization providing relief from the growing hunger problem in the United States.
More than 70 companies now give at least $150,000 annually in cash support, up from 31 before the name change. Today companies donate more than $33-million in cash annually, up from nearly $7-million.
Expanded Services
Beyond promoting the new name, Ms. Escarra has worked to help food banks become more efficient and expand their services to vulnerable Americans.
Many of those efforts have been underwritten by big corporate gifts, including a five-year pledge by Wal-Mart last year to provide 1.1 billion pounds of donated food.
Wal-Mart has also given $20-million this year to pay for refrigerated trucks and other efforts to help food banks better distribute products.
The retail giant Target is another big supporter, providing millions of pounds of food and $4.5-million to help local food banks feed children.
The Maryland Food Bank, in Baltimore, has received three Target grants totaling $200,000 to expand the food pantries it operates in public schools, where needy parents can choose grocery items when they pick up their children.
“As parents come to access food, they are also connecting with their kids’ education,” says Deborah Flateman, chief executive of the Maryland Food Bank.
With the Target grants, the food bank now operates pantries in 140 schools, up from 40. The expansion has helped persuade other donors to give because they like the combination of pushing education and nutrition, says Ms. Flateman.
Nontraditional Donors
While Wal-Mart, Target, and other companies that sell food have long supported food banks, Ms. Escarra has managed to greatly expand donations from other types of businesses, including pharmaceutical, insurance, and financial-services companies.
She helped persuade Morgan Stanley last year to commit more than $5-million in support over two years to expand a Feeding America program that fills the backpacks of needy kids with nutritious food before they leave school and return home for the weekend.
Morgan Stanley also helped Feeding America raise its profile by paying $1.2-million for a series of advertisements that appeared on the front page of The Wall Street Journal during the last three months of 2010.
“We wanted to bring attention to this issue among an audience where Feeding America traditionally has not had an opportunity to promote its work,” says Joan Steinberg, president of the Morgan Stanley Foundation.
Fund-Raising Powerhouse
Ms. Escarra also actively helps food banks raise money from local donors.
She says she spends nearly 70 percent of her working hours traveling outside Chicago, largely to work on fund raising. For instance, she hopped a flight to Tulsa last month to attend a dinner to honor Sara Waggoner, the outgoing chief executive at the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma.
In her two hours in Tulsa, Ms. Escarra spent half the time doing interviews with local reporters and the rest of the evening wooing donors at the dinner.
Just before the event, the food bank had raised $167,000, says Ms. Waggoner. “Vicki asked folks to make an additional gift, and we raised $223,000, the biggest amount we’ve ever raised with a single event.”
Ms. Escarra has also worked with local food banks to identify donors who might be interested in supporting national hunger-fighting efforts.
For example, the charity successfully appealed to Dennis L. Jilot, chairman of STR Holdings, an Enfield, Conn., company that makes solar products, for a $2.5-million gift to be split among Feeding America and food banks in Nevada and Wisconsin, where his family has roots.
Corporate Satisfaction
One reason Feeding America has been able to pull off such big increases in corporate gifts and donations from wealthy people is that it is spending a lot more money to seek donations than ever before.
Soon after Ms. Escarra’s arrival, a board member was so impressed, he mentioned the new chief executive’s work to the Lincy Foundation, the billionaire Kirk Kerkorian’s philanthropy.
One day Ms. Escarra received a call from three Lincy officials who invited her to submit a multimillion-dollar proposal to improve the food-bank network over the next five years.
Since then, Feeding America has gotten $62-million from Lincy, some of which has been used to hire more fund raisers.
After getting the infusion, Ms. Escarra says, “we began a strategy of fund raising rather than it being an afterthought.”
A key change was reorganizing the way Feeding America seeks corporate support.
The charity previously assigned one group of staff members to seek outright corporate gifts and another to handle marketing deals with businesses that wanted to tie donations to product sales. But that “drove companies crazy,” says Amy Franze, Feeding America’s chief philanthropy officer.
Ms. Franze combined the two corporate divisions into one and assigned several fund raisers to serve as the primary contact for a handful of corporate supporters. As a result, Ms. Franze says, “corporate satisfaction is now much higher.”
Feeding America has expanded the overall fund-raising staff from five to 30, including several new major gift officers, one person to focus on bequests, and three to conduct research on potential donors, a job that had been handled by one person in the past.
With help from a fund-raising consultant, Feeding America has also started a new project to help fund raisers form personal contacts with donors who give $1,000 or more.
Worries About Cuts
While Feeding America has achieved record increases in private donations in the past five years, Ms. Escarra and other food-bank leaders worry about cuts in government support.
Food banks get about a quarter of their fruits, vegetables, and other items through a federal program that buys excess goods from farmers and manufacturers, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture says the program isn’t needed now to meet its original purpose: making up for low food prices.
The Atlanta Community Food Bank, which has received more than 30 percent of its food from the federal program in recent years, is already feeling the pinch.
“We are down right now by about 40 percent in commodities, and we are working twice as hard because demand is still high,” says Bill Bolling, the executive director. “It’s harder now than it was early in the recession.”
To Ms. Escarra, such challenges are just one more illustration of how complicated it is to run Feeding America.
At Delta, she says, she faced many big challenges, especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, when a third of the company’s planes were grounded and “we were bleeding money.” But this job is tougher.
“It is a misnomer that the nonprofit sector is easier,” says Ms. Escarra. “It’s more rewarding than the corporate sector but every bit as challenging.”
Click here to view the article.
Posted by Rebecca Gschwend on Mon, Dec 05, 2011 @ 03:12 PM
By Leon Neyfakh with the Boston Globe
Every holiday season in America, as Thanksgiving fades and turkey sandwiches give way to Christmas trees and candy canes, Americans unleash an immense flow of charitable donations. For charities, it’s the busiest time of the year: Salvation Army bell ringers man their corners; workplace pledge drives abound.
The urge to give that is awakened around this time is an important one: Philanthropy plays a crucial role in American society, providing funding for a vast array of services. Giving also connects us as a culture: According to a study by the Giving USA Foundation and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, nearly two-thirds of all Americans gave to charity in 2008. American charities took in nearly $300 billion in 2010.
Underlying all those donations is a mystery: Why do we give at all? From a rational perspective, it’s hard to see why people worried about their own families, taxes, and bills would want to give money to help strangers. Though the tradition of giving to the less fortunate has existed for millennia — and though researchers have long been interested in what makes humans want to help others at their own expense — social scientists have only begun to seriously examine the act of donating money in the past 20 years.
The insights they’ve drawn have been helpful to fund-raisers, enabling them to craft better campaigns and tug at our heartstrings with greater precision. But for those of us just looking to donate, and donate well, the emerging research on charitable giving has yielded a difficult truth: Thinking harder about how to give makes us less likely to give at all.
This finding is concerning in light of the strong recent push to give more rationally — for even small individual donors to scrutinize the inner workings of charities and make sure their money is being spent productively. Research by economists and psychologists suggests that the impulse to give does not square with thinking in such a calculating way. On the contrary, it appears that giving is driven by emotional motives, rooted in deep impulses, cognitive biases, and even our own selfish needs. (Charity research isn’t necessarily flattering to donors.) And when we think too analytically about giving, we can deflate our initial generous instinct.
“What we find is that when people are thinking more deliberatively . . . they end up being less generous overall,” said Deborah Small, an associate professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Is it possible to be both generous and smart about it? A lot of donors would like to think so, but new research suggests that it may be harder than we realize. And while there may be things we can do to make sure our money doesn’t end up wasted, charity appears to be one area where we have to be extra-careful not to let our brains get in the way.
Why anyone is ever selfless is a mystery that has fascinated, not to mention frustrated, scientists since Charles Darwin, who considered it a major problem for his theory of natural selection. If every creature on earth was in competition with every other, then how to explain bees sacrificing themselves for the good of the hive, or men and women running into burning buildings to save the lives of strangers? These questions have led researchers to posit that helping others, even when it costs us dearly, is simply part of being successful social animals: Despite our imperative to compete, we ultimately find it pays off to be generous.
Of course, it’s one thing to explain why people in general are inclined to help others, and another to examine how it plays out in the mind of an individual person. Studying charitable donation has been a valuable window into that process for researchers, because it allows them to quantify the amount of good a person is doing, and how much he or she is giving up.
One dominant strain of thought among charity researchers is that our donations aren’t chiefly driven by concern for others, or a principled sense of altruism — that instead, it’s largely a way for us to indulge the desire to feel virtuous and happy about our role in the world. This theory was formalized in 1989 by behavioral economist James Andreoni, who described the rush of self-satisfaction and sense of purpose one experiences after committing support to a worthy cause as “warm glow.” The reason we give money, Andreoni wrote, is that it makes us feel good — regardless of how much it benefits the people we’re ostensibly trying to help.
Another prominent theory to emerge from the research is that people give because of social pressure. We want to avoid appearing selfish or coldhearted, especially in front of people who are suffering or people whose opinions we care about. We might feel this type of pressure when we find ourselves passing a homeless person on the street, or when someone at the office asks if we’d like to participate in the companywide campaign for United Way.
Those aren’t the reasons we like to think of ourselves as donating, but experimental research on charity tends to support the notion that donating and thinking occupy separate realms. Jonathan Baron, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, asked a group of participants which charity they’d rather give to: one that achieved its goals so efficiently that it could spend 20 percent of its money on advertising, or one that required more money to do the same amount of good, and thus spent less on promotion. Though the first charity was technically more efficient, people tended to favor the latter: What mattered to them was seeing more of their own money at work, Baron concluded, rather than the amount of good it did.
This conclusion is bolstered by the findings of John List, an economist at the University of Chicago, who tested the effectiveness of so-called matching programs, in which a major supporter agrees to match the contributions of individual donors. List expected to find that matching programs enticed people to give, by creating the (correct) impression that their money would go further. But List’s results were curious: While charities that offered a matching program did inspire more people to give than charities that didn’t, he was surprised to find that a higher matching ratio didn’t lead to larger donations. People whose donations would be quadrupled — a huge increase in the power of their gift — didn’t donate any more money than people whose donations would simply be doubled. “People get utility or satisfaction out of giving to a good cause. And they do not care how much public good is provided,” List said.
The lesson Baron took from his own research is that would-be philanthropists need to be more thoughtful: “People don’t ask themselves enough, ‘What is this charity actually doing, and what good does it do, and how important is that good?’” Baron has revised his own giving strategy, so that instead of spreading a number of small gifts across 10 different charities, he now focuses it on a couple of organizations that he believes will do the most with his money.
Can more of us be like Baron, and harness our charitable impulses while making smarter decisions about where our money is going? The latest findings from psychology suggest it’s unlikely — that when it comes to giving, at least, the deliberative thinking that’s associated with making informed choices actually makes it less likely that a person will give at all.
Small, of the Wharton School, conducted an experiment with George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University and Paul Slovic of the University of Oregon showing that when people were given more facts and statistics about the problem a charity was trying to address, they actually became less likely to donate. The best approach for a charity raising money to feed hungry children in Mali, the team found, was to simply show potential donors a photograph of a starving child and tell them her name and age. Donors who were shown more contextual information about famine in Africa — the ones who were essentially given more to think about — were less likely to give. Small sees her findings as evidence of a kind of contest going on inside of each of us, one that pits our emotional side against our intellect in a battle for control over our behavior.
Small’s findings are backed up by Daniel Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton and coeditor of the book “The Science of Giving,” who found that simply giving people information about a charity’s overhead costs makes them less likely to donate to it. This held true, remarkably, even if the information was positive and indicated and the charity was extremely efficient.
“When we start thinking about it, we might start analyzing it,” Small said. “Is this really going to be effective? Is this going to be the best use of my money? How else might I spend my money? What happens is you stop feeling.”
For humans, who distinguish themselves from beasts in part through their analytical powers, this is a troubling conflict. Why should thinking be the enemy of generosity? What does it mean that as soon as we enter the “deliberative mindset,” to use Small’s term, we become less altruistic towards our fellow man?
One reason analytical thinking might have this effect on the charitable impulse is that, once people really think through what the charity they’ve selected might accomplish with their money, they start realizing just how little their contribution is going to help. This is sometimes referred to as the “drop in the bucket” effect. According to List, thinking about all the people you’re not helping when you donate — the millions of children left to starve for each one you save — makes the act of giving a lot less satisfying. “If you really did the calculus,” List said, “my 25 dollars to the Sierra Club means nothing on the margins. So if I wanted to be really analytical about it, I’m not going to give.” According to List, that means that a world in which everyone thinks rationally about their charitable decisions might mean the most efficient, best organizations get the most money — but it might also be a world in which far less money actually gets donated.
To help donors give more rationally without getting too hung up in analysis, organizations such as GiveWell and Charity Navigator have set up websites that highlight good charities with simple rankings and “Top Ten” lists, rather than a complicated stream of financial information. “We do the analytics for you,” said Ken Berger, chief executive and president of Charity Navigator. (Small agrees that these can be a helpful way around the problem she identified — “a shortcut for donors so they don’t have to think too much.”)
For donors worried that even that much analysis might be overthinking, one solution might be to treat charity a different way — neither as an impulse nor a research project, but more as an appetite, one we can both indulge and control. Lise Vesterlund, an economist at the University of Pittsburgh, doesn’t share the dominant view of charity as being motivated primarily by people’s desire to attain prestige and feel good about themselves. Instead, she argues that existing research points to something she calls “the temptation to do good.” As she sees it, people are preprogrammed to help those who are suffering, and when we make an impulsive decision to give money to charities that don’t necessarily make the best use of it, we’re essentially indulging that temptation the way we’d indulge a sugar craving.
But appetites can be healthy, too, and Vesterlund’s solution is to be sure we indulge them the right way: essentially, putting carrots closer at hand than a chocolate bar. If you know that donating money to a food bank this holiday season is going to go further towards helping the poor than giving the same amount in quarters to panhandlers, then decide that’s how you’ll do it when the appetite strikes.
“We all know this time of year we’re getting tons of solicitations,” Vesterlund said. “If before going into the season you say, ‘I want to make substantial charitable donations, and these are the organizations I want to give to,’ you don’t fall prey to the temptations.”
Click here to view the orginal article.
Posted by Rebecca Gschwend on Wed, Nov 23, 2011 @ 12:57 PM
Toshiba, the electronics company, is using Facebook to give away a $100,000 technology makeover to one U.S. nonprofit and smaller prizes to four other charities.
The company is asking nonprofits to “like” its Toshiba for Good page, then submit a short video explaining why their organization would benefit from a technology makeover. The $100,000 prize includes consulting services, printers, computers, video equipment, televisions, and more. Four other groups will receive technology packages worth $28,500.
The deadline to submit a video is January 7. Winners will be announced February 20.
click here to view the article
Posted by Rebecca Gschwend on Tue, Nov 15, 2011 @ 11:48 AM
Written by: Lisa Bertagnoli
To celebrate its 25th anniversary this year, Chicago Shakespeare Theater turned its old Corporate Night, a decade-old fundraiser that grossed about $800,000, into a real gala, complete with dinner, a live auction and $500-per-person tickets.
The results were “humbling,” says Brooke Walters, director of institutional advancement at the theater. The party brought substantial new donors to the theater—including one who bid five figures on a live-auction item—and grossed $1.25 million. With expenses at $194,000, the cost of the gala as a percent of gross proceeds rang in at 15.5%.
Fundraising experts say the cost of a gala shouldn't exceed 30% of gross proceeds. Much higher, and donors start to get the feeling they're underwriting a party, not a cause.
With that figure in mind (and cognizant that most non-profits release gross, not net, figures in press releases touting the success of their galas), Crain's requested and received net gala proceeds from 16 Chicago-area non-profits with annual benefit galas that gross around $1 million.
Three galas hovered above that 30% mark; the rest fell below, in some cases well below. Non-profits with their own venues (museums, theaters) seemed to fare well, as did those with robust fundraising activities at the event such as auctions and paddle raises.
Costs of Brookfield Zoo's spring 2011 Whirl ball, a major fundraiser held on zoo grounds, ran 36% of gross revenue, due to higher food costs. “When food costs go up, they're passed along to us,” says Sarah Breen-Bartecki, vice-president of the conservation funding initiative at the Chicago Zoological Society, which runs Brookfield Zoo. Party planners trimmed costs elsewhere—for example, reducing the number of trolleys running around the zoo during the event.
An entree of sustainably raised lobster helped raise costs to 34% of gross at the Shedd Aquarium's Sea Jelly Soiree last spring. The Chicago aquarium felt obliged to serve sustainable seafood; after all, it is concerned with ocean and waterway conservation, says Jennifer Baryl, senior vice-president and liaison to the board of trustees. Fifty extra guests who attended but were not budgeted for also increased costs, she says.
Even with a higher cost, Ms. Baryl says the annual gala is worth the expense: Shedd's largest individual donor—she would not disclose the name— was introduced to the aquarium at a gala 10 years ago. “If not for the event, we wouldn't have met those folks,” she says.
See the costs and net proceeds of the area's 16 largest fundraisers
Steppenwolf Theatre's spring party ran 32% of gross receipts. The dinner was held at Blackhawk on Halsted, an event space, rather than at a hotel. Hiring caterers and decorators to turn the space into a party room accounted for the higher cost. But it cost less than erecting a tent in Steppenwolf's parking lot, as the Chicago-based theater has done in the past, says Sandy Karuschak, director of development.
No matter how closely a non-profit watches its pennies, such events are hardly a budget-friendly way to raise money.
ATTRACTING DONORS
Galas are “the most expensive forms of fundraising,” says Edith Falk, chair of Campbell & Co., a fundraising consultancy in Chicago. She says even the net-proceeds figure doesn't reflect the full cost of staging one: “If you add up the cost of staff time, you probably haven't netted as much as you could.”
At the same time, such an event can lead to contributions far exceeding total ticket sales, if it attracts new donors.
“It's who's coming and what pipeline of new donors they're bringing,” says Jason Saul, CEO of Mission Measurement LLC, a fundraising consulting firm in Chicago. “But if you just are trying to rally your base, it might not be worthwhile.”
Different organizations use galas for different purposes. For some, it's a party first, fundraiser second. For others, it's a critical part of the fundraising plan.
Lyric Opera's annual Opening Night and Opera Ball “brings in new people, but it is far more a long-standing tradition,” says Mary Selander, director of development, adding that the opera's triennial wine auction is more lucrative. Net proceeds from this fall's ball represent less than 5% of total contributed income of $20.6 million for 2011.
By contrast, proceeds from Cures 2011, Gateway for Cancer Research's fall black-tie gala, accounts for 50% of contributed income. “The event is critical for us,” says Lynette Bisconti, president of the Schaumburg non-profit.
The gala this fall at the Fairmont Hotel Chicago was heavy on fundraising; a live and silent auction plus paddle raise brought in $707,000 this year. That raised the total proceeds of the event, including ticket sales and sponsorships, to more than $2 million and pushed the cost ratio down to 11%. The organization sticks to a no-frills budget: Chairs at the event were left uncovered, and staff volunteers took photos and shot video.
Indeed, party planning means walking a fine line between spending enough to justify the ticket price—high-grossing events cost between $500 and $1,500 for a single ticket—but not appearing extravagant.
Non-profits haggle with hotels, caterers and other vendors. Centerpieces are more likely to be asters, not orchids, and volunteers often do most of the planning and legwork.
“We're always trying to find a balance,” says Kim Duffy, senior project manager at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Its 2011 Symphony Ball had a 21% expense ratio.
This year, the orchestra's Women's Board cut costs by switching to a less-expensive florist. While Ms. Duffy calls the decision “savvy,” she says some donors told her the cost-saving efforts dimmed the event's luster.
“I heard, ‘I wish (the gala) had a little more buzz, a little more pop,' “ she recalls.
Ms. Duffy says that in healthier economic times, it was easier to plan events without worrying that the “wrong” centerpiece would vex donors. Now contributors want reassurance that their dollars are supporting the orchestra, not a florist.
“People don't look at attending galas in the same way,” she says, adding that they “don't attend galas as easily as they did in the past.”
SHOWCASE
Elizabeth Hurley, who joined the Art Institute of Chicago in February as vice-president for museum development, thinks costs shouldn't exceed 20% to 25% of gross. “It's just paying attention to every dime that was spent, and getting as many contributions as possible,” she says.
The Art Institute will divulge neither gross nor net proceeds for its April 15 party honoring former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Maggie Daley; Ms. Hurley says expenses ran about 20% of the gross. The Art Institute's 2010 spring gala, to herald the opening of its Henri Matisse exhibit, ended with costs at 36% of gross. Ms. Hurley was not at the museum at the time and would not comment on the cost; an Art Institute spokesman says the museum considers the event a success.
As expensive and time-consuming as parties are, big donors seem to like them, calling them a unique way for a non-profit to showcase its mission to a well-heeled crowd.
“The gala is an occasion for giving,” says philanthropist Maureen Dwyer Smith, a board member at the Field Museum, the Joffrey Ballet and After School Matters, among others. Donors can buy a table or underwrite a portion of the event, making such fetes multilayered giving occasions.
Chicagoan Eve Rogers has been surprised after attending galas that look fabulous but don't work as fundraisers. “That's kind of disappointing,” says Ms. Rogers, director at Graff jewelers in Chicago. “You're here to raise money, not to have the most expensive flowers possible.”
As one of the planners of the Dec. 1 opening of the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, Ms. Rogers is being careful: The party will be a cocktail affair, not a dinner, which allows more people to attend and keeps food costs down. As far as the décor and the invitations, “it will look nice, but we are trying to stay within reasonable means,” she says.
Other philanthropists think galas matter less than the fanfare surrounding them might suggest.
Galas “are not the be-all-and-end-all of fundraising,” says Carol Prins, a Chicago resident who serves on several non-profit boards, including the Goodman Theatre's.
“It raises the visibility of the organization,” she says. “But if it's not going to raise money and will take a ton of staff time, I say skip it.”
Click here to view the article
Posted by Rebecca Gschwend on Mon, Oct 31, 2011 @ 10:13 AM
By Derek Lieu
Zombies often get a bad rap for their ghoulish ways. But it turns out that they also have a penchant for giving.
A growing number of nonprofits are taking advantage of the recent popular fascination with zombies by playing host to “Zombie Walks”—events in which horror fans dress up in their undead best and gather for fund-raising walks that raise money for their favorite causes.
In some cases, they are raising significant money. For example, Friends for Life, a nonprofit animal shelter in Houston, raised $8,100 earlier this month from a horde of ghouls ambling through a suburb in West Houston.
“The way that we tied it in to our mission and what we do, is that we’re a no-kill shelter,” says Kim Domerofski, communications manager at Friends For Life. “Zombies are undead, so for us, we’re trying to keep as many undead animals, undead.”
The Houston event began when Amy Lewis, an information-technology specialist who volunteers at the group, heard about a similar undead walk in Australia. She had hosted other fund-raising events before but had trouble attracting interest. That changed when Ms. Lewis decided to give zombies a try.
“It really picked up,” she says. “Every year we get more zombies, more photographers, more vendors.”
She estimates that 1,200 zombies attended the most recent walk, now in its fourth year. The suggested donation was $15, but people were also asked just to give what they could afford. In previous years, Ms. Lewis used the walk to raise money for a local food bank and an organization that supports U.S. soldiers.
Other groups have had success raising food donations through zombie crawls. The Food Bank of Northwest Louisiana, in Shreveport, for example, collected 1,460 pounds of food and $330 in donations at its recent zombie walk. Last year, a similar event produced 851 pounds of food for the organization.
“That’s been kind of the whole tongue-in-cheek thing about it—zombies are always hungry,” says Michelle McCary, a b-movie lover who has organized the Shreveport walk for four years. She estimates that 500 people, including many families with children, came out to walk this year.
The crawl, which in years past took place in a local mall, moved to downtown Shreveport this year. Ms. McCary said the organization received a lot of free publicity from the city’s tourism office, which advertised it on digital billboards, and from a local radio station.
“Even people who don’t normally like that kind of stuff come out of the woodwork,” she says. “It’s become a monster of its own.”
And if the trend continues, charities may soon face an interesting question: Do undead donors prefer an e-mail or handwritten thank-you notes?
Click here to view the article
Posted by Rebecca Gschwend on Thu, Oct 27, 2011 @ 03:19 PM
By Heather Joslyn
The founders of Washington Shakespeare Company chose the troupe’s name 22 years ago to signify civic pride: This would be a group of homegrown professional actors, not the New York pros who filled the stages of other local productions.
In the intervening years, the nonprofit theater company gained attention for its cutting-edge versions of the classics. In one notorious 2007 production, “Macbeth” was tweaked to emphasize the primitive passions of its characters. To make it seem as though the murderous Scots had “emerged from the primordial ooze,” says Christopher Henley, the artistic director, actors performed clad only in body paint, which gave the production a reputation as “the all-nude 'Macbeth.’”
With such daring as its calling card, Washington Shakespeare Company seemed to have outgrown its plainly descriptive name. Also, it sometimes found itself confused with a similarly named local troupe. So, its leaders sought a new name: something that described the nonprofit’s mission yet also was singular and unforgettable.
In August, the Washington Shakespeare Company rechristened itself WSC Avant Bard.
Response to the new name has been mostly positive, says Mr. Henley, though sometimes listeners “groan like you would at a bad pun.”
But then, he adds, “they go and tell it to their friends.”
A 'Sense of Identity’
In recent years, organizations with a variety of missions have renamed themselves—or, if they haven’t legally changed their name, they have “rebranded” it for common usage. In one high-profile case, YMCA of the USA has neither renamed nor rebranded itself officially but has simply embraced its nickname, the Y, in a more public fashion this year, says a spokeswoman.
Nonprofit officials who have been through the renaming process say that the experience can benefit an organization if the new name is chosen with care and if it is unveiled in a way that intrigues potential supporters without alienating existing ones.
Renaming a charity can provide a group with “a renewed sense of identity and an opportunity to deepen a relationship among staff, the board, partner organizations, clients, donors, and so forth,” says Howard Adam Levy, principal of the Red Rooster Group, a branding consultant in New York that works extensively with nonprofit clients.
Mr. Levy adds, “It starts a process: What is the organization all about? What are our values? What is our history? Why did we start doing this, and why are we doing this now?” (For advice on carrying out that process, see below.)
Inspire and Galvanize
The burden of bearing a name that has outlived its usefulness, Mr. Levy says, “is like walking around with a limp leg. When the pain gets unbearable enough, then an organization will say, 'Hey, we can correct this. We can run now, we can sprint, we can compete better.’”
Because nonprofits rarely have the resources to devote to marketing that for-profit companies do, he adds, a charity’s name bears a lot of weight. It has to convey the group’s mission but also “excite and inspire and galvanize people,” Mr. Levy says. “It has to have positive connotations and avoid jargon. It can’t be too long or people will wind up abbreviating it. It does a lot.” And, in a tough economy, when marketing resources are even scarcer than usual, nonprofits may have less tolerance for an imperfect name.
Charities change their names for many reasons. Some groups, like WSC Avant Bard, say the original name no longer fully represents what the organization does or is too similar to another group’s name. Sometimes a nonprofit seeks a more streamlined name because its original moniker is simply too long, clunky, or vague.
Beautiful Simplicity
Sometimes the original name uses antiquated or politically loaded words that make the group seem out of step with modern times. United Negro College Fund, for instance, founded in 1944, commonly goes by UNCF now.
In July, Campus Crusade for Christ International announced that it will simplify its name early next year to Cru.
The 60-year-old charity’s own surveys found that 20 percent of people who said they were open to the group’s Christian message were less interested in the organization itself when they heard its original name. And further study revealed that the words “campus” and “crusade” were hindering its mission, according to a statement on the group’s Web site.
“Campus” signaled an exclusive interest in ministering to college students, which didn’t fully describe the group’s work. And, said the statement, “the word 'crusade’—while common and acceptable in 1951 when we were founded—now carries negative associations.”
The charity chose Cru, a common nickname for its campus chapters, from a list of 1,600 alternatives in an effort to “accomplish a greater level of effectiveness in ministry,” says Steve Sellers, vice president for the United States operations of the Orlando, Fla., group, in a written statement. (The group declined The Chronicle’s request for an interview because, it said, its name-change process is still under way.)
United Jewish Communities, which was named following the merger of three groups in 1999, had a different problem: Potential supporters had little familiarity with the name.
Research commissioned by the New York umbrella association of Jewish philanthropies in 2008 found that while about 50 percent of those polled were likely to have heard of their local Jewish federation, only about 10 percent recognized United Jewish Communities and its mission.
The results were similar for respondents of both genders and all generations, adding up to a “dismal” verdict, says Adam Smolyar, the group’s senior vice president for strategic marketing.
To give the group a more defined identity, United Jewish Communities became the Jewish Federations of North America in 2009.
“There’s beauty in its simplicity,” says Mr. Smolyar. “It tells you everything you need to know: We’re Jewish, we’re a federation, we’re from North America. It’s not a convoluted, acronym-like name. By being descriptive, it needs a lot less explanation and therefore a lot less marketing behind it.”
No Panacea
But getting to that beautiful simplicity can be a long and winding road, and it’s a journey that won’t benefit every organization, says Julie Chapman, president of 501cTech, a nonprofit in Washington. The group changed its name last month from NPower Greater DC Region, to solve trademark issues and better signify its mission of offering technology help to charities.
“If it’s something you don’t need to do, I probably wouldn’t do it,” she says. “It’s very time-consuming. And, at the end of the day, these jobs are all about achieving the mission. And does that rename or that rebrand really help you deliver better on the real work of your organization?”
She advises charity leaders not to look to a name change as a cure for a group’s deeper problems. “Changing your name and having a new logo isn’t going to save an organization that’s in trouble,” she says. “But for one that is operating well and is effective, it can help sharpen the focus.”