15 Reasons Why People Donate

You can email your donor base until you’re blue in the face. You can make your donate button larger than the vat of coffee sitting between you and your computer monitor (yes, we can see it from here). You can share the latest statistics about your cause, and even make your brochure look flashy while you’re at it.

But, here’s the kicker: People have things to do other than care about your cause.

You’re not necessarily competing with another nonprofit whose mission is similar to yours; you’re duking it out with soccer practice, Must See TV (do they still do that, or has that gone the way of TGIF?) and that all-inviting couch beckoning your supporters to take a load off.

Today we’re going back to basics to remind you of why people convert from supporter (or even skeptic) to donor:

1. Someone I know asked me to give, and I wanted to help them

2. I felt emotionally moved by someone’s story

3. I want to feel I’m not powerless in the face of need and can help (this is especially true during disasters)

4. I want to feel I’m changing someone’s life

5. I feel a sense of closeness to a community or group

6. I need a tax deduction

7. I want to memorialize someone (who is struggling or died of a disease, for example)

8. I was raised to give to charity - it’s tradition in my family

9. I want to be “hip,” and supporting this charity (i.e., wearing a yellow wrist band) is in style

10. It makes me feel connected to other people and builds my social network

11. I want to have a good image for myself/my company

12. I want to leave a legacy that perpetuates me, my ideals or my cause

13. I feel fortunate (or guilty) and want to give something back to others

14. I give for religious reasons

15. I want to be seen as a leader/role model

To recap:

• People act from the heart, not the head. Yes, your nonprofit has to show that it’s a good steward of donor money and you need to impart where all that generosity is going, but your appeal must contain more than numbers and pie charts.

• Giving is a personal act. Notice any common thread in the list of 15? They all contain the pronoun “I.” The people you serve are important, but make sure to put the “you” and “your” (i.e. the donor and why s/he should care) front and center. Read more about crafting your call-to-action on Katya’s blog and in the Learning Center.

• The act of giving is immediate. Give your donors the opportunity to act here and now. Your relationship with them will be long-term, but their willingness to give is now–let them act on it.

There are many reasons as to why people give. When you’re crafting your next fundraising appeal, take this list out and ask yourself if you’ve tapped into these reasons or not.

courtesy Network for Good

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A skilled, committed, and diverse pool of next generation leaders would like to be nonprofit executive directors in the future, according to a new national survey of nearly 6,000 next generation leaders.

However, the survey also finds that there are significant barriers: work-life balance, insufficient life-long earning potential, lack of mentorship and overwhelming fundraising responsibilities which may prevent many younger nonprofit staff from becoming executives.

The survey, Ready to Lead? Next Generation Leaders Speak Out, is the largest national survey to date of emerging nonprofit leaders and was produced by the Meyer Foundation in partnership with CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, The Annie E. Casey Foundation and Idealist.org. According to the Urban Institute, there are currently more than 850,000 registered public charities in the United States.

Key Findings

• Salaries and actual or perceived insufficiency in earning potential are barriers to executive leadership (69% of respondents feel underpaid in their current positions and 64% have financial concerns about committing to a career in the nonprofit sector)
• The nonprofit sector is viewed as desirable by people interested in social change
• Most respondents working in the nonprofit sector feel that their work is meaningful and satisfying
• Only one-third of those surveyed have aspirations of becoming executive directors
• Of those who aspire to become executive directors, 40% reported that they are ready either now or within five years
• Lack of mentorship and support from current executive directors in helping to pave a career path is a source of frustration (only 4% of nonprofit staff are explicitly being groomed to become their organization’s leader. Women are being developed as leaders at a lower rate than men.

The complete report can be downloaded at www.meyerfoundation.org or www.compasspoint.org.

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“The nonprofit sector is at a major crossroads. After years of humming along at a familiar pace of ongoing programs, stable leadership, and status quo fundraising, a new wave of change is happening right before our very eyes. The thousands of idealistic baby boomers that started nonprofit organizations 20 years ago are calling it quits and retiring from their leadership positions in the coming years.

You’ve no doubt heard about it, but I’ll just confirm it for you here: there is indeed a leadership crisis looming ahead for the nonprofit sector.

At least three out of four executive directors plan to leave their jobs within the next five years and about half of current younger professionals plan to leave the sector altogether. So, who will replace these exiting executive directors and take up the torch in the nonprofit sector?” (Rosetta Thurman writing in the Stanford Social Innovation Review).

We in the Jewish communal world are not exempt from this problem and our various organizations need to think and plan for this coming generational upheaval.

While the following article by Prof. Michael Zeldin speaks about professionals in Jewish education, freely substitute fundraising professional, youth educator or administrator. Take your choice. The scenario shown exists all across our communal world and we need to be certain we are addressing it. Now; before we find ourselves in a bind.

Is this a job for a nice Jewish boy or girl? You bet it is!
by Michael Zeldin

“We are a great institution with a great program of Jewish education. We’re looking for a top-notch Jewish educator. It’s quite an opportunity for someone, and if we find the right person we’ll do whatever it takes to make it work. Do you know of anyone?”

This time of year, I get calls like this almost every day from congregations and day schools across North America looking for highly qualified Jewish educators to direct their education programs. Later in the spring, the calls will start coming from day schools and high schools looking for teachers.

To everyone who calls I have to say the same thing: “I know of a couple of people who are looking to change jobs, but it will be hard to get any of them. Well-qualified Jewish educators will get a lot of offers from which to choose. Most congregations and schools will go scrambling, often leaving searches open for two years or more before they find a candidate who excites them. In the meantime, they settle.

Facing this shortage of qualified Jewish educators at every job level and in every educational setting, I find myself wondering why more young Jewish adults, especially among this current idealistic generation, aren’t choosing careers in Jewish education. Why aren’t more of them clamoring to be Jewish educators?

It’s not that the work Jewish educators do isn’t meaningful. A veteran educator who came to speak in one of my classes told the students that she is one of the few people she knows who wakes up every day, looks at herself in the mirror and thanks God that she gets to do what she does every day. She feels that she touches the lives of children and adults in ways that few people do.

And it’s not about the salaries. It is not unusual for congregations to list jobs for education directors (now often called “Directors of Lifelong Jewish Learning”) for six-figure salaries plus a full package of benefits. Heads of day schools can earn considerably more, and while day school teachers earn less, their salaries are quite respectable (and they are rarely out evenings!).

Nor is it that the work is not creative and exciting. Congregations are re-imagining their schools and coming up with new formats for Jewish education every year. They are experimenting with family schools, camp-like religious school models and new modes of adult learning. Day schools are always seeking ways to remain on the cutting edge of education, always searching for more effective approaches to teaching and learning. Camps and youth groups are constantly creating new ideas for engaging their clients. And throughout the Jewish community, educators are inventing new ways to reach out to populations rarely served.

Yet, how much encouragement to pursue a career in Jewish education do young adults receive from their parents, the Jewish professionals they meet or the community at large? How many young adults will not even hear about the possibility of becoming a Jewish educator as they are grappling during those after-college years with decisions about what direction to take in their lives? And how often will talented adolescents and young adults interested in serving the Jewish people hear about other avenues of service, but not about being teachers or leaders in schools, camps, youth programs and other places where Jews learn?

We who care about the future of the Jewish people can do better.

We who are parents of young adults can remind them of the impact that teachers and educators had on them. We can tell them that they can touch others the way they were touched … and that they can make a good living doing so. We can tell them about teaching fellowship programs like DeLeT and graduate programs with generous financial aid packages. (One school in the East used to offer all Jewish education students free tuition. At my school, most students are eligible for scholarships that bring their total tuition costs for a master’s degree down to only a few thousand dollars.)

We who are clergy, educators and communal professionals can invite promising young adults to talk with us about their futures. We can show them the rewarding path that lies ahead for them if they choose to become Jewish educators. We can point with pride to colleagues in our own institutions who were trained at one of the schools or programs that prepare Jewish educators, and how they’ve made a difference.

And we who are in positions of communal leadership can make sure that our institutions honor all our teachers and educators, and not just those few singled out for awards by national and local philanthropies. In congregations, we can honor educational leaders as klei kodesh, holy vessels who, like rabbis and cantors, bring the delights of the divine and the joys of Judaism to life on earth. In schools, we can honor teachers all year long and not just on “Yom Ha-Moreh” with tangible rewards for excellence and intangible signs of our appreciation.

Maybe in a few years we will be able to look back and say that we changed the landscape of Jewish life by making sure that each Jewish child and each adult Jewish learner encountered passionate, well-prepared Jewish educators, and each institution was led by visionary leaders who brought with them the wealth of talents and the gifts they acquired as they prepared for their careers. But to be able to look back this way, we have to work today to bring larger numbers of young people into the profession of Jewish education and encourage them to seek out the very best professional preparation possible.

Michael Zeldin is Director of the Rhea Hirsch School of Education at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles.

copyright 2008, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles; posted with permission

for further reading on the leadership shortage, see “Crunch Predicted in Nonprofit Sector”, in yesterday’s Washington Post

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All to many nonprofit websites are making mistakes that discourage donors from browsing, donating, volunteering or referring others to the site.

The good news is 62% of adults visit a nonprofit’s site prior to making a donation (according to a recent online survey conducted by Harris Interactive).

This is also the bad news. For many nonprofits, the quickest way to scare away donors is to direct them to the organizations’ website.

Here then, are four common blunders and how to avoid them.

Click here to continue reading

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Monthly giving plans are one of the best ways to reduce donor attrition and to upgrade an individual’s giving level. In the next decade you will find that charities will increasingly look towards monthly donor programs to increase their income.

In a report titled “Myths of Monthly Donor Programs” Canadian consultant Harvey McKinnon talks about how easy it is for a nonprofit to lose annual donors to those organizations with more aggressive monthly donor campaigns.

“When a donor joins a monthly donor club it has consequences. She may even start reducing her single gift donations to other nonprofits — perhaps yours! — because she has committed a greater share of her charitable funds through monthly donor programs.

Here’s an example to illustrate the point:

A donor, Ms. Cindy Williams, regularly gives a total of $1,000 a year to 10 charities, or $100 each. That’s her limit. Then she’s successfully recruited by two of the charities into $25/month sustainer programs. This means she’ll give them $600 (or 60 percent of her annual giving), leaving only $400 for the other eight charities. If Cindy splits the remaining money evenly, the nonprofits will see their donations decline to one $50 gift each. This is a reduction of 50 percent. Or Cindy may even decide that she’ll give $100 to four nonprofits and stop giving to four others. She could choose a combination of the above scenarios.

But whatever decisions Cindy makes, the clear winners are the nonprofits with the monthly donor programs. They each upgraded her annual giving by 300 percent. And the clear losers are the remaining eight charities.”

Click here to read the report in its entirety.

tip to FundRaising Success magazine

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Sixty-two percent of Americans believe the typical nonprofit organization spends more than what is reasonable on overhead expenses such as administration and fundraising, according to a new survey.

When respondents were asked what is a reasonable level of overhead costs for nonprofits, the average figure was 22.4 cents for every dollar collected. However, when asked what they thought the typical nonprofit actually spends on overhead costs, the figure was 36.3 cents per dollar.

The findings, gleaned from a survey developed and conducted by Ellison Research involving more than 1,000 American adults, found that while respondents were fairly consistent in their thinking about how much charities should spend, their thoughts on how much charities actually spend were more diverse.

more from the Association of Fundraising Professionals

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When your charity extends beyond handouts to the people who knock on
your door, you should look at the management of your favorite charitable
organization in the same way that you would scrutinize a money manager.
For example, if you were to place $250,000 with an international equity
management company, you would examine a number of factors, such as the
return on the investment, management fees, risk, and how that investment
fits in with the rest of your portfolio.

Return on investment: The way you can view the return on your equity
investment is to look at the (hopefully) increasing value of your
monthly statement. But how do you judge returns from a charity? If you
donate money, will they find matching donors? Will they buy properties
that they can use and eventually sell for a profit? While the money is
waiting to be used, are they maximizing returns on their short-term
investments without taking undue risk?

Management fees: Though the directors certainly deserve to be paid for
their work, is the salary commensurate with someone in the business
world? Do they run the organization efficiently, or are they spending
most of their days in staff meetings?

Risk: Does the management have a track record, or are they an unknown
quantity? Are there regulatory or licensing issues that need to be
addressed?

Part of the portfolio: Just like wise investors must balance their
stocks, bonds, and cash, your specific philanthropic investment should
be well-balanced with your overall worldview.

One of the problems faced by many donors, however, is that although they
understand the importance of looking at these types of risk and reward
ratios, they may not have the tools or the time to get clear answers.
Reading charities’ brochures and talking with their fund-raisers is
important, but for larger donations, that’s only the beginning.
Consider the following story: A donor wanted to pay to build a building
for a school. The organization had been around for many years, the
directors’ salaries were reasonable, and the deal seemed
straightforward. When we sent in lawyers and accountants, though, it
turned out that the school owed millions of dollars in back taxes. Had
the donor given the organization the money, the donation would never
have reached its destination - the new building. Instead, the tax
authorities would certainly have put a lien on the bank account and
taken the funds to pay old debts. By having outside counsel to examine
the deal not only on a surface level, but rather by looking through all
of the records, the client was able to protect his multimillion-dollar
investment.

Douglas Goldstein, CFP, (doug@profile-financial.com) is the director of
Profile Investment Services. He offers securities through Portfolio
Resources Group, Inc., member FINRA (formally NASD), SIPC, MSRB, SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC, member NYSE/SIPC, a
Fidelity Investments company. His book, Building Wealth in Israel: A
Guide to International Investments and Financial Planning, is available
in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered at
www.profile-financial.com, Israel: (02) 624-2788, USA: 1 (888) 327-6179.

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Is your organization sending out junkmail? If so, shame on you. You are in the wrong profession. Before you send your resume to McDonald’s, let me clarify: Junkmail is any mail from any sender that’s irrelevant, annoying, or just plain stupid. It’s a subjective perception. Junkmail is often received. But it should never, ever be sent.

Here’s a quick way to see whether or not you’re guilty of sending junkmail. Check any of these statements you agree with:

• Our mail annoys our donors.
• I wish we didn’t have to ask for funds.
• Direct mail is a terrible thing—I wouldn’t do it if we didn’t have to.

If you checked any of the above, you are probably sending junkmail. You have an attitude against direct-mail fundraising that is self-destructive—and probably self-fulfilling. Your mail is junk before it reaches your donors’ hands. It’s junkmail before it even rolls off the presses. Now, check any of the statements below that you agree with

• Our mail delights our donors.
• Asking our donors for funds is a service to them.
• Direct mail isn’t perfect, but communicating with donors is great!

If you checked any of the above, there’s a good chance you are not a junkmailer. And your thinking is in line with the large majority of your donors’.

Anything you send to any donor has the potential to be perceived as junkmail. Maybe there’s too much other stuff in her mail that day. Maybe she just got some bad (or good) news that crowds out your message. Maybe the color of your envelope is the same as the color of her third grade classroom, where she suffered at the hands of a mean teacher.

No matter how brilliant and on-target your message, it will transform into junkmail for someone. If you use direct mail to raise funds, get used to it. You can minimize it by being smart about timing, being careful about whom you mail to, being relevant with your message, and having great creativity. But you can’t avoid it entirely.

The good news is—assuming you are doing a half-way decent job with your direct mail—you are sending out a lot of mail that’s interesting, delightful, and life-affirming to a lot of donors. Not junkmail at all. In fact, your mail is a great service to your donors in many ways.

And that’s where we get back to you and your career choice. If you are sending junkmail—that is, if you think your direct mail fundraising is irrelevant, annoying, or just plain stupid—you need to rethink your career. Because your attitude is leading you to make bad decisions that will only increase the chances of your mail being received as junkmail. And that’s where it counts. Do your donors, your organization, and the entire nonprofit community a favor: find a different job. You’ll be doing yourself a favor too—clearly you can’t be enjoying your work if you take such a low view of it.

On the other hand, if you can say with pride and conviction, “Our donors love our mail!” you are on the path to personal and organizational success.

Jeff Brooks is creative director at Merkle, a direct-response agency serving the nonprofit world. He blogs at the Donor Power Blog.

Copyright © 2008 Stanford University Center for Social Innovation

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We’ve had two recent posts (here and here) concerning the impact an economic downturn will have on our Jewish communal world. Today, comes an article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Bracing for Tough Times, speaking about how many charities feel vulnerable as the economy slips.

“The faltering economy is starting to affect a growing number of charities and the people they serve. In recent weeks, nonprofit organizations have heard from donors who are putting off big gifts, and some groups that rely mostly on small donations have also seen a falloff.

Many social-service charities — especially those in states like California, Florida, Michigan, and Ohio, which economists believe have already entered a recession — are facing increased demand and such a severe budget crunch they may have to lay off workers. Rising gas and construction prices are adding to the challenge of financing services and expansion plans that numerous charities have under way.

“This is scary to me,” says Michael Seltzer, a philanthropy expert, consultant, and author of Securing Your Organization’s Future, a book about how nonprofit groups can survive hard times. “It’s going to have a dramatic impact on individual giving, foundation giving, corporate giving, government giving. We’re coming off a period of incredible accumulation of capital that led to major philanthropic gifts. We hope [a recession] won’t deter that.”

If past recessions are a guide, many charities can expect donations to tumble. According to figures released last week by Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy, giving dropped an average of 1.3 percent — after adjusting for inflation — during the five national recessions since 1973. (Giving during non-recession years rose 4.3 percent.)

to continue reading, click here

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