About Bob Bob serves as President and CEO of GuideStar and serves on the boards of Vision TV, Grameen Foundation USA, and the AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy. More...
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Posted By Bob Ottenhoff on August 1st, 2011, in these categories: Fundraising | Nonprofit PracticeI recently spoke in Richmond at the Virginia Fund Raising Institute conference. VFRI is a cooperative effort of all of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) chapters throughout Virginia. These chapters organize annually to coordinate the VFRI in order to advance philanthropy through education and fellowship.
I like speaking to fundraisers because they deal mostly with people outside of the organization. They’re the ones that need to articulate the value proposition of their organizations and try to convince donors to part with some of their hard-earned money. Fundraisers face reality in the eyes of their constituents every day: How is our organization perceived? Do people value our work? What could we be doing better? As I frequently remind my staff, we don’t get a vote on determining how we are doing – it’s our users and stakeholders that do.
The title of this year’s conference was “Navigating the New Normal,” and that gives you some idea of what was on the minds of these Virginia fundraisers. I presented a session along the lines of the same theme, focusing on how big changes in society (such as more demand for data and more skepticism about institutions) and trends in philanthropy (such as more donor engagement and the power of the Internet) are changing the scope of work for fundraisers and in many ways making their jobs more difficult. Hanging over our heads was the down economy and the cloudy prospects for the year ahead.
As part of my session, I introduced them to Charting Impact, our new effort we recently launched with Independent Sector and the BBB/Wise Giving Alliance. We are urging every nonprofit to take the time to commit some serious effort towards answering the Charting Impact questions and spending time with their board and major stakeholders to discuss the answers. The five questions are:
1. What is your organization aiming to accomplish?
2. What are your strategies for making this happen?
3. What are your organization’s capabilities for doing this?
4. How will your organization know if you are making progress?
5. What have and haven’t you accomplished so far?
To test the value of these five questions at VFRI, I broke the room into small groups and asked the participants to test out the questions using their own organization as an example. The response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. The fundraisers found the questions “valuable,” “meaningful” and “exactly what we need to be successful fundraisers.” One person told me it helped him more than any other session that day in learning what he needed to do in order to raise more money. If you haven’t done so, I hope you will take a look at Charting Impact and let me know what you think.
I ended the day with a quote from Andrew Watt, President and CEO of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, and coincidentally the keynote speaker at the conference. Commenting on Charting Impact, he said “Donors don’t support a cause
because of its efficiency; they support a cause for the impact that it secures for society – for all of us. Charting Impact will help to focus nonprofits – and their boards – on how to communicate who they are, what they achieve and how they achieve it, skills that all of us need to develop.”
Fundraisers: what other tools do you use to showcase your organization’s impact?
Posted By Bob Ottenhoff on June 29th, 2011, in these categories: Fundraising | Nonprofit PracticeAre the newly released Giving USA numbers good news or bad news?
The Good
It is good news that philanthropic donations from individuals, foundations and corporations increased 3.8 percent to $291 billion in 2010, or little more than 2 percent adjusted for inflation. After two bad years, it is good to know that we’re starting to experience an increase, albeit a small one.
It’s good news to realize that Americans gave $291 billion to philanthropy despite the terrible toll that the Great Recession has taken on employment and retirement accounts. It is indeed an extraordinary act of generosity. Even more remarkable is that giving remained at about the 2 percent level of GDP, where it has been for years.
The 2010 numbers are good news if your nonprofit is engaged in international affairs, since giving this past year increased by over 15 percent. This is a category that includes development and relief activities, including more than a billion dollars to Haiti relief. 2010 wasn’t so bad for education and the arts, either, with increases over 5 percent.
The Bad
However, it’s truly sobering to think that after peaking at over $310 billion in 2007, giving plummeted nearly $19 billion in 2008 and 2009. It took Giving USA two revisions of its numbers in order to recognize the full extent of the fall. No wonder our economic survey last summer reported that 8 percent of all organizations feel that they are on the brink of going out of business.
At this point, philanthropic giving is looking a lot like the state of my 401k account. As Patrick Rooney, Ph.D., executive director of the Center on Philanthropy, pointed out, at an average growth rate of 2 percent, it will take at least six years just to return to 2007 levels. More proof that my theory of a “new normal” is going to be here for a while in the nonprofit sector.
The Ugly
If you run a human services organization, 2010 wasn’t a good year at all with a decline in contributions of 1.5 percent (in inflation-adjusted dollars). If giving to Haiti disaster relief were not included, giving to human services would have declined by 4 percent.
Ruth McCambridge and Rick Cohen, in an interesting piece in the Nonprofit Quarterly, recalled the days of the 1962 study titled “The Other American” and pointed out that we are seeing a class divide where the groups that do well in charitable solicitations are those with higher income social connections. Ruth observes that there is a crisis among human service or social safety net groups, with declining charitable giving coinciding with decreases in government support for those that need it most.
In the end, the Giving USA statistics remind me a lot of the characteristics of GuideStar’s economic surveys and the country’s general recovery from the Great Recession. The recovery is uneven and unfair. Some are doing quite well (corporate profits are better than ever; the stock market has regained 90 percent of its value since 2007) while others are suffering greatly (high unemployment; high mortgage defaults). In the nonprofit world, the recovery is also uneven depending on what your organization does and where it is located. Averages can be deceiving.
We have long known that people think globally and act locally, which is why community philanthropy may be a real solution for organizations that continue to struggle for funds and increased demand for their services. These trying times may require a new approach. If you haven’t connected to your local community foundation you may want to consider it. Community foundations offer a powerful and personal approach to giving – they simply know the nonprofits in their areas the best, and they can funnel donations to those organizations in the community that need it the most. Check out GuideStar’s DonorEdge Learning Community, a group of community foundations who are the model of effective local philanthropy.
What do you think of the Giving USA numbers? Are they good news or bad news for your organization?
Posted By Bob Ottenhoff on December 20th, 2010, in these categories: Fundraising | GuideStar At GuideStar, our efforts are focused on revolutionizing philanthropy and nonprofit practice by providing information that advances transparency, enables users to make better decisions, and encourages charitable giving. At the end of the day, we want nonprofits to be as effective as possible, and we want donors to be able to easily determine which organizations with missions they care about are the most effective.
Whether you use GuideStar to make your year-end personal charitable contributions or to award a major grant, we hope you’ll consider the value of GuideStar’s contributions to improving the nonprofit sector. It is in the spirit of this commitment to philanthropy that I humbly ask for your small donation to continue our important work. Your donation allows us to continue to offer most of our information to users at no charge, a vital part of our mission as a nonprofit ourselves. Please check back here as I provide continual updates on our progress, and our steps forward on behalf of philanthropy nationwide.
I also want to extend my personal thanks to everyone who has dug deep and already contributed to GuideStar. I know times aren’t easy for anyone right now, and the fact that we are worthy of your donation is a resounding endorsement of everyone’s efforts at GuideStar.
As always, thank you for your time and energy on behalf of the sector and the causes you care about, and may the blessings of the season be upon you.
Posted By Bob Ottenhoff on September 27th, 2010, in these categories: Fundraising | General | GuideStar | Nonprofit PracticeThis Saturday I did what thousands of Americans do: I attended a fundraiser for a nonprofit organization. All across America on a typical weekend, hundreds of thousands of people are participating in events to raise money. The list is long and interesting: runs of all sizes and lengths, long and short bike rides, walk-a-thons, bake sales, telethons, and flea markets─to name only a few of the more familiar ones. It’s a great combination of two American virtues: perpetual motion and a passion for wanting to do something useful. After a life time of such events, I’m gradually de-acquiring─ primarily donating─an amazing collection of T-shirts and tote bags from a slew of 10k races and public broadcasting fundraisers in particular.
This Saturday I was in New York to cheer on my wife Faith as she ran in a race to raise money for the charity Women for Women International and the organization Run for Congo Women. She not only finished the race─a feat in itself─she surpassed her fundingraising goal by 150 percent and was one of the top fundraisers for the day.
Run for Congo Women was started by a human dynamo by the name of Lisa Shannon. Listen to how she describes herself and her book, “A Thousand Sisters,” on her website:
“I had a great life—a successful business, a fiancé, a home, and security. But in the wake of my Dad’s death, and soon-to-be thirty years old, I found myself depressed, camped out in my living room watching Oprah. It was there that I learned about Congo, widely called the worst place on earth to be a woman. Awakened to the atrocities─millions dead, women being raped and tortured, children starving and dying in shocking numbers─I had to do something.
A Thousand Sisters chronicles how I raised sponsorships for Congolese women, beginning with a solo 30-mile run, and then founded Run for Congo Women. Despite countless warnings, with no credentials, I abandon my quickly collapsing home life and plunge into an unlikely lone journey through eastern Congo on a mission to ignite a movement for the world’s most forgotten women, to meet hundreds of my sponsored “sisters,” and hear their stories firsthand. But in a place where no man with a gun is the good guy, I confront militias, massacres, murder cover-ups, and unspeakable horror. Along the way I am forced to learn lessons of survival, fear, gratitude, and love from the women of Congo. A Thousand Sisters is a portrait of the world’s deadliest war through the intimate lens of friendship. It is a story of passion, hope, and my journey to carve out human bonds that cannot be touched by terror.”
That’s all it took: one woman, some motivation, and lots of determination. Now her passion is turning into a movement.
On her website Lisa suggests 9 things you can do. Here’s her number nine:
“Dream up something all your own, like I did!”
What are we doing this week?
You can read more about Run for Congo Women here: http://www.runforcongowomen.org/index.html.
Posted By Bob Ottenhoff on November 11th, 2009, in these categories: EconomyWe’re in the midst of the giving season, a time when many nonprofits raise the majority of their contributions for the entire year. Last year individual donations fell for the first time in many years. Soon we’ll know how 2009 turns out, but so far the indicators—things like the unemployment rate and the psychology of the stock market and personal confidence—suggest a tough year. Read about GuideStar’s own economic surveys >
There is an important new report out from Giving USA that looks at how long it will take for the nonprofit sector to get back to normal funding levels. The bottom line from the report is sobering but not surprising: it will take a few years for the sector’s contribution revenues (as opposed to fees and contracts) to match where they were in 2007. Regarding individuals, the report concludes, "It is likely that donations from households and individuals will not reach their 2007 levels until at least three years after the end of the current recession." Why is this important? As we know from the annual Giving USA surveys, 75 percent of charitable contributions come from individuals. In comparison, foundations contribute about 13 percent and corporations only about 5 percent.
As for foundations, the recovery could take even longer, depending on the state of the stock market. After the 1973-1974 recession, for example, it took foundations nearly 10 years to recover to pre-recession levels. But some of this slow recovery could be affected by the creation of new foundations and tax policies. The Foundation Center is out with a new report that reports foundation giving will likely decline by more than 10 percent in 2009. Based on responses of close to 600 foundations, Foundations’ Year-end Outlook for Giving and the Sector also finds that continued reductions are expected in 2010.
The Giving USA report ends with a few good tips on fundraising strategy. The key one to me: "Keep demonstrating your organization’s success and impact. Continue to communicate and to make your organization’s story known." Nancy Rabin, a New York-based fundraising consultant, suggests this as well: "Be candid, but upbeat. Donors are hungry for good news." Good luck to all, and stay positive.
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articulate the value proposition of their organizations and try to convince donors to part with some of their hard-earned money. Fundraisers face reality in the eyes of their constituents every day: How is our organization perceived? Do people value our work? What could we be doing better? As I frequently remind my staff, we don’t get a vote on determining how we are doing – it’s our users and stakeholders that do.
