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.

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.

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.”