At Ketchum, we receive a lot of questions from nonprofit organizations about fundraising, the economy, giving recovery after the recession and even more. We’ve put together a list of the top most frequently asked questions for 2009, and here are Ketchum’s answers.

More and more research is showing that high net worth individuals outside the United States are philanthropic. 

One recent report, discussed here, states that “there had been an upsurge in Asian philanthropy as wealth grew, mainly focused on providing social services or post-disaster relief, or supporting religious organizations.”

And as recently as a few weeks ago, Children’s Hospital Foundation in Washington, DC, received a $150 million gift from outside the United States.  Read about it here.

While this certainly has ramifications for U.S.-based international relief organizations, this growing trend also suggests that building relationships within the global community can have benefits for U.S. nonprofits with missions that reach beyond borders.

For the third time this year I am writing about the passing of someone who had a significant impact on  the world of fundraising.  And for the second time this year, that person is someone I consider a mentor and friend.  Charley Trimble passed away today.  For more than 45 years, Charley served Ketchum’s clients and taught Ketchum consultants how to run successful capital campaigns.  The campaign he directed for Johns Hopkins in the early 70s was Ketchum’s first $100 million campaign.  He was the one who created Ketchum’s modern campaign “manual.”  He also developed KCP, Ketchum’s first commercial software program for the management of capital campaigns.  In the words of Elliott Oshry, “Charley was a mentor, a tyrant, an extraordinary strategist, a disciplinarian, and a good friend to fundraising consultants, volunteer leaders, and Ketchum clients for more than 45 years.”  I cannot even begin to fathom the number of indviduals who credit a portion of their fundraising knowledge to Charley but I know I am one of them.  Please consider posting your own memories of Charley here. 

American individuals, corporations and foundation were very generous in 2008, contributing more than $307 billion to nonprofit organizations.  As in the past, more than 80% of these dollars were given by individuals. While foundations showed a slowing increase over 2007 in giving, corporate giving, which comprises only 5% of all giving, fell for the second year in a row.  

While 2008 was only the second year that giving surpassed the $300 billion mark, the Giving USA report does show the recession’s impact on philanthropy.   For the first time since 1987 and only the second time since Giving USA began publishing annual reports in 1956, total giving decreased in current dollars. 

Our fundraising forefathers have navigated similar times in history when the economy was challenged and fund raising significantly affected.  In fact, Ketchum was founded in 1919 and has help steer organizations through times as tough as the Great Depression.  As sponsors of the Giving USA report, we know that the historical perspective provided by the Giving USA report helps to show that people continue to faithfully give during tough times.

It also shows that the economic impact on giving is not always equitable to all sectors of nonprofits and all nonprofit organizations.  While education and arts non profits saw wide swings in giving and human services saw the largest decline ever reported, some groups like society benefit based non profits and faith based groups actually saw increases in giving. 

According to Guidestar and AFP many non-profits are still seeing their total dollar giving go up in this economy.  The 2008 edition of the GuideStar Nonprofit Survey: Charitable Organizations and the Economy report found volatility in the giving to charitable organizations. When asked if there was a change in contributions from 2007:

• 35 percent reported an increase in charitable revenue;

• 25 percent reported that contributions had remained about the same; and

• 35 percent of respondents reported a decrease

• 2 percent didn’t know.

The Guidestar study reaches any charity that wants to complete it (a convenience sample). At least 2,730 separate organizations participated in the 2008 poll. The percentage reporting a decrease is approximately the same as the percentage that reported a drop in giving in 2002.

The Association of Fundraising Professionals surveyed its membership. With several hundred respondents, this study found:

• 46 percent of organizations raised more funds in 2008 than in 2007;

• 14 percent raised about the same amount of money in both years; and

• 40 percent raised less in 2008.

Certainly,  Giving USA data is important to understanding general philanthropic trends as well as understanding philanthropic trend within various economic climates.  However, this data alone is not enough to explain the fundraising ups and downs of a single organization.  As the Guidestar and AFP data above, and individual cases noted in the media show, some nonprofits saw success last year and are still succeeding in this climate.  And data from the Fundraising Effective Survey , which shows that most nonprofits have been losing 5 donors for every 6 they gain, suggests that other non-economic factors have been inhibiting fundraising success for at least a couple of years leading up to the historical decrease in 2008. 

At Ketchum, we know that the decline shown by the Giving USA numbers is significant.  However, $307 billion is a lot of money.  People are still giving.  Keep asking and showing the impact of philanthropy on your mission.

Previews of the 2008 Giving USA report suggest that Americans were very generous in 2008 in spite of the economic train wreck of the fourth quarter.   We’ll be posting highlights of the report as soon as it is released as well as hosting a series of webinars to explore the data in detail.  I hope you will join us.

The fundraising consulting world as we know it today had some founding fathers (and even a mother or two but I’ll save that for another blog).  Carlton Ketchum was certainly one of them.  George Brakeley Jr. was another.  He passed away last Friday.  I did not know him, I know his son George III who is still active in the firm, Brakeley Briscoe.  But George Jr. was known throughout our industry for his support and commitment to organizations such as AFP and AAFRC (now the Giving Institute) and as an amazing strategist and salesman. 

The links below provide additional information about Mr. Brakeley.    

http://orammatters.blogspot.com/

http://magnetmail.net/images/clients/GIVINGINST/attach/BrakeleyJrobit.pdf

http://magnetmail.net/images/clients/GIVINGINST/attach/ARemembranceofGeorgeA.pdf

Recently we had a great e-mail debate among some of Ketchum’s senior consultants that was triggered by news stories noting that Vice President Biden’s 2007 charitable contributions totaled $995, and his giving in 2008 was $1,885.  This exchange led one consultant to quickly point out that Senator Biden was one of the least wealthy U. S. Senators.  Vice President and Mrs. Biden had an adjusted gross income of $269,256 in 2008.

I am not in a position to judge someone else’s perceived wealth or their philanthropic activity.  However, this debate did remind me of a conversation I had recently with a major female philanthropist who told me, “I just don’t feel as rich anymore” as she contemplated giving just a $5 million gift instead of something larger!  How much must one have to feel rich?  I do not know, but clearly it is a different answer for each of us. 

Around the country, Ketchum is seeing how the feeling of being rich or poor is driving organizations’ leaders and fundraising efforts.  Those feeling “poor” may be delaying projects and limiting fundraising efforts.  Others are more like the board chairman of an independent school who told me last week, “Moving forward with a capital campaign right now is a tough decision, but I just cannot stomach the notion of telling some parents that we are not going to do this for their kids because we are choosing to wait for ‘things to get better.’  Their kids need this now.” 

When Jon Duschinsky wrote Philanthropy in a Flat World: Inspiration Through Globalization (John Wiley & Sons Inc. 2009), he did not have the time to reflect upon the recession’s impact on global philanthropy.  His arguments for non-profit innovation and global thinking were tied to other factors.  But they ring even truer today, especially his admonishment that nonprofit leaders should

Take this opportunity to look long and hard at your core competency.  Work out what makes you great and what makes a real difference.  And then do it more and better and give the rest to someone else to do.

In other words, perhaps we will feel truly rich when we understand why our organizations are great and how they make a difference in people’s lives. 

This post was written by Sue Acri, Senior Vice President, Ketchum

A Sidney Poitier film festival is in my future…  After listening to him reminisces about his life for an hour, I am transformed. 

As Poitier walked on stage, I heard everyone around me echo the question that was rolling around in my head: “When did he become so old?”  After all, I am only a few years older than I was when I saw “To Sir With Love” at age 13, aren’t I?  (We later learn that he is 82 years, 1 month, and 11 days.)    

Though his overarching theme was “the oneness of the human family” and the importance of ethics and values, he asked us to reserve judgment about who he is until he finished…and he proceeded to provide anecdotes about his life and the “traumas” that shaped him..  For an hour, you could have heard a pin drop in the back of the crowded room as this eloquent actor spoke from the heart and showed his own emotions, not just those in a script.

Here are the few of his musings that made the biggest impression on me:

1) Born at home as the seventh child of Caribbean tomato farmers, Sidney was so small and so sickly he wasn’t expected to make it through the week.  His father went out and got a shoe box in which to bury his tiny bones.  The family gathered around because they knew he would not be with them for very long.  The following day, his mother went to visit a soothsayer to learn what was to be her youngest child’s fate.  The soothsayer told his mother that Sidney “would live a long life; he would walk with kings; and he would be known in every corner of the earth…”

2) Sidney’s family lived in Cat Island in the Bahamas.  As an infant, his mother stood on a makeshift raft and tossed him into the ocean.  She “threw (him) away” and he quickly dropped below the surface.  His father jumped in the water, swam to find him, carried him back, and handed him to his Mother only to have her throw him away again.  Once again, his father rescued him.  This went on and on for hours, for days…  It was his parents’ way of teaching him to swim.  As Sidney said – “today babies attend swimming lessons for six months.”  But his parents didn’t have that luxury; they knew that when he learned to walk, Sidney would surely find his way to the water that was only 25 feet from their home.  They were trying to protect him from drowning.

3) Several anecdotes were descriptions of times Sidney got into trouble between age 6 and age 12. 

     a. At age 6, he and his niece were caught “playing doctor” and his parents punished him (the “wap, wap” method.) 

     At age 11, he wrote a “sexy love letter” to which he signed his name.  The note made its way from the girl to her parents, to his parents…who punished him (do you recall the “wap, wap” method?)  Lesson learned: Sidney never again signed his name to sexy love notes.

     c. At age 12, Sidney and two friends discovered alcohol.  They climbed over a fence with a case of rum.  After drinking several bottles, they could not climb back over the fence.  (“Bit by bit, one learns,” he said.)

     d. At age 15, he and the same two friends planned and executed a raid on a corn field.  Common sense was in short supply, however, as they started a fire in the field to roast the corn, a fire that could be seen for miles.  He was arrested and spent his first night in jail as his father couldn’t afford the $7 bail.

4) Following that last adventure, his mother and father sent him to live with relatives in Miami, Florida, the first integrated place he ever called home.  As his father bid him farewell at the dock, he gave him 50 cents to put in his pocket.  He was “sent out into life.”  Though the words “ethics” and “values” were unknown to him or even to his parents, their values had been instilled in him “through the way his parents treated family, friends, neighbors, and strangers; by their actions…and by the ‘wap, wap’ method.”

5) In 1943, Sidney was arrested for vagrancy in New York City.  A kind police officer gave him the name and address of an orphanage run by nuns.  He showed up at the orphanage’s door where they took him in and gave him food and a place to sleep.  After two weeks at the orphanage he enlisted in the United States Army.

6) The last story I’ll share with you is the one about Sidney’s “first experience with philanthropy.”  One day he was sitting in a “modest restaurant in Queens, NY, reading the newspaper.”  A Jewish waiter asked him “what’s new in the newspaper?”  Sidney explained that he didn’t know how to read very well and that he was trying to teach himself.  For weeks on end, he recalled, the waiter sat with him at that table and taught him how to read.

For Sidney Poitier, “what you believe in yourself will determine your life… Philanthropy is a profound manifestation of the very best in us all….And it doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down, it only matters what you do after you get up.”

Today The Giving Institute, formerly the American Association of Fundraising Counsel (AAFRC), is hosting its Spring Meeting in New Orleans.  Last night the program was phenomenal.  Four representatives from New Orleans organizations talked about how they survived and are now thriving as a result of Katrina.  Dr. Norman Francis from Xavier University, who amazingly has been president of that school for 42 years, discussed the importance of passion, commitment and faith in getting the school re-opened within 4 months.  Julia Bland, Executive Director of the Louisiana Children’s Museum, shared how Katrina cut their staff by 65%, left them with no audience for months (there were no children in New Orleans for months after Katrina), but in the end gave them the opportunity to think in a broader way about how they serve the community.  Now, they have a greater commitment to early childhood education and are bringing more programs into neighborhoods.  Andy Wisdom, Trustee, RosaMary Foundation spoke about his foundation’s renewed commitment to education post-Katrina.  Prior to the disaster, New Orleans schools were in such disarray that a major philanthropic gift would make little difference.  Today, the school system is being rebuilt with such innovation that philanthropy can make a difference.  Finally, John Bullard, Director of the New Orleans Museum of Art described how members of his staff moved their families into the museum to protect the art.  They also had to learn how to carry guns! 

In each story, there was the message that with commitment, innovation and faith, the disaster has made their organizations stronger and more meaningful for the community.  A great message to hear in these “tough” economic times.