July 30th, 2008
Barack Obama’s decision several weeks ago to forgo public funding of his presidential campaign was made for one reason: He had so much money already in hand or pledged that it would have been detrimental to his campaign to limit himself to the lower public amount. Expect a pricey battle between Senator Obama and John McCain between now and Election Day.
To those who fear that the deluge of political fundraising will leave nonprofit fundraising high and dry — money is not infinite, after all — Jeff Brooks of the Donor Power Blog has good news. Brooks is the creative director of the database marketing firm Merkle, whose new report, Examining the Impact of Political Fundraising on Nonprofit Direct Mail Performance, includes these conclusions:
- Elections have little impact on charitable contributions.
- We largely aren’t competing for the same donors. Political donors are typically younger, more likely to be male, and have higher incomes.
- While political fundraising grows to new records with each presidential election, charitable giving also continues to grow. Chances are, new political donors likely become better prospects for charitable giving.
I have some concerns about Merkle’s observations. For example, shouldn’t nonprofits be targeting younger people with higher incomes? Hook them now and reel them for years to come, right? And Brooks’s “chances are” worries me a bit; I’d love to see some data on whether those who have flocked to fund Obama, especially, have an inclination to support nonprofits. Like Brooks, I suspect that’s true, but can it be quantified? That could help organizations tailor messages to this new group of donors. | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 29th, 2008
The tanking economy’s deleterious effects on the nonprofit sector have been well reported. But one part of the sector has found a way to make lemonade from lemons. As the Associated Press reported earlier this week, plunging real estate prices have provided conversation conservation nonprofits with a terrific opportunity to pick up and protect lands that only a few years ago would have been way out of their reach.
“It’s the green lining of the current market,” [Trust for Public Land president Will] Rogers said.
There’s also a silver lining: permanently protecting land from development often helps drive up values of nearby property.
These actions represent a nice piece of strategic thinking on the part of the conservancies. Finding a way to capitalize on what would appear to be a uniformly negative situation is no mean feat, but their success is a reminder that the best leaders refuse to get stuck in conventional thinking and predictable solutions. | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 2 comments
July 27th, 2008
- A new means of “raising awareness in a realistic way.” | The Guardian
- It’s wicked easy to subscribe to 501(c) Files feeds: Just click here and follow the simple instructions. As always, thanks for reading! | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 26th, 2008
Several recent blog posts have examined various benefits to nonprofits of newer online phenomena.
Graduate student Alyssa Walden writes about the sector’s increasing use of social-networking sites to attract donors and volunteers:
MySpace and Facebook are making it easier for non-profits to set up accounts, with both adding Impacts and Causes[, respectively,] for non-profits to use. These social networking sites allow the organizations to connect with a large audience that ranges in age.
Brett Meyer of the Nonprofit Technology Network discusses how nonprofits can quickly (and cheaply) leverage search engine optimization to drive online readers to their websites:
By integrating best practices into the standard operating procedures for your various teams, you can achieve significant SEO benefits without investing large amounts time.
And consultant Katherine Watier explains how YouTube’s Web analytics tool can help drive viewers to the videos your organization has posted online:
I think it’s important to know how any marketing initiative is performing, so if you haven’t already, I would encourage you to log into YouTube Insight to see how many people are looking at your YouTube videos.
The danger is that as soon as you master one online tactic, something newer has replaced it, but people are using the tools cited by these bloggers in such rising numbers that it seems a no-brainer to determine whether they might help your organization. There are plenty of websites and consultants and white papers and books that could set you up, but the posts above aren’t a bad place to start. | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 25th, 2008
Here’s another reason for nonprofits to cheer the ascendancy of online advances: According to Elizabeth Wasserman, writing in Contribute magazine, the Internet has allowed the sector to skate closer to the line separating issue advocacy from political advocacy than ever before.
With the need to woo more young, social-networking converts to their causes, issues-advocacy nonprofits — 501(c)(4)s — have been flocking to the Internet in droves, from the left-leaning MoveOn.org Civic Action to the right-leaning Christian Coalition.
Don’t underestimate the online power of nonprofits in public policy debates. MoveOn.org was formed to use the Internet to fight the impeachment of President Clinton in 1998 and wound up generating enough support to help convince the U.S. Senate to acquit Clinton of the charges — even after the U.S. House of Representatives had voted for impeachment. Since then, conservatives have used the Net — in sites like Focus on the Family and Citizens Flag Alliance — to push for legislation banning gay marriage, as well as to force a vote on whether to make flag-burning illegal. Liberals, in turn, also have successfully used sites like MoveOn.org to exert political pressure. One example? Their 2005 campaign to discredit U.S. Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers and get her to withdraw her name from consideration.
Not everyone is clapping. Some observers worry that the new paradigm the ‘Net has opened up is causing nonprofits to trip over that line I mentioned above. They think the IRS should be more specific in what constitutes tax-exempt advocacy and what does not. Of course, then you bump against free speech concerns and questions of whether taxpayers should be subsidizing partisanship. Anyone else’s head hurt? | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 24th, 2008
Operating under the theory that a strong regional economy helps everyone, nonprofits are springing up around the country to fund start-ups that would have trouble attracting capital from more traditional investors. The starring role in today’s New York Times trend story is played by the Cleveland-area nonprofit Jumpstart Inc.
Like a venture capital firm, Jumpstart identifies companies to invest in and advises them on their next steps.
But unlike a venture firm, Jumpstart relies on charitable donations, many of them from the private sector, for its financing and does not return a share of profits to those who provide the investment dollars. The return comes as satisfaction for elevating a region’s economic standing.
I love this kind of partnership, but my cynical side tells me that the private funders are in it for something more than regional pride. The kind of start-ups they’re funding attract talented workers, people who like to spend money. Economically strong regions are able to command higher real estate prices. Entrepreneurs who don’t have to kick back a percentage of their funding look positively on their funders. You get the idea. Like I said, it’s a cool notion, but while the funding organizations are nonprofits, many of their donors most certainly are not — and they’re the kind of people whose motivation isn’t the warm-and-fuzzies. | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 23rd, 2008
Interesting damage-control tactic: Point to how you help charities. And so, facing criticism that its attempts to go green are nowhere near as comprehensive as they should be, the direct-mail industry’s response is to play the nonprofit card:
“Our industry employs quite a few people, generates billions of dollars in revenues for the economy and a huge number of donations for nonprofits,” said Richard E. Bushee III, president of MSP, a direct mailer. “Yes, the guidelines are a bit loose, and yes, we need to put numbers to them soon. But at least we’re showing the world that we’re talking about this, that we think it’s important.”
As the piece, from today’s New York Times, notes, the reason direct mail is so prevalent is that it works. “The return on investment is just too high,” notes one corporate marketing director. That said, should nonprofits, many of which lean green, rethink the abuse of the environment that their direct mail entails? Especially when a very profitable industry is using the sector to justify a greening that many critics feel is merely cosmetic? | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 1 comment
July 23rd, 2008
How much would you pay to hang in Howard Stern’s Sirius studio while he and his crew do one of their daily broadcasts? To buy a piano Elton John played on tour? To name a new species of monkey?
Charity auctions are nothing new, but as BusinessWeek notes, nonprofits are using online auctions to open up the fundraising to new audiences — and to garner far larger winning bids in the process. The auctions noted above, all conducted online, are among the most lucrative ever conducted. Technology has long been touted as a great way to do more with less. In this case, it would seem, the hype has been worth it. | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 22nd, 2008
The September 11 attacks elicited, however briefly, a spirit of common decency that united Americans as nothing had in decades. There was real dialogue about the need to engage our fellow citizens humanly and humanely. Donations poured in to organizations set up to help victims of those horrendous deeds. Charities and foundations seemed poised to leverage the new wave of American civic-mindedness.
Yet according to a harsh new report from the nonprofit OMB Watch and Grantmakers Without Borders, “since Sept. 11, 2001, we have witnessed counterterrorism programs erode the freedom and ability of charities and their funders to carry out their missions and improve the lives of the world’s people. We believe that this is damaging civil society in the United States and negatively impacting the nation’s reputation and effectiveness on the global stage.”
That’s an awfully serious charge.
The authors write that the government’s view of “nonprofits as conduits for terrorist funding and a breeding ground for aggressive dissent” means that those organizations now “operate within a legal regime that harms charitable programs, undermines the independence of the nonprofit sector, and weakens civil society.” The report describes a massive overreaction by federal officials to a few isolated incidents of nonprofit malfeasance, leading to a crackdown that has weakened nonprofits’ ability to effectively carry out their missions.
After watching the Constitution get trampled by an ethically sketchy executive branch and overly compliant legislature who all seem to believe that we need to destroy liberty in order to save it, I sympathize greatly with the sector’s complaints. I also wish it luck in convincing the American public, which has allowed itself to be scared into submission, that the threat to nonprofits is real. It will need that luck. | 501(c)
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By Tom Durso -- 0 comments
July 21st, 2008
Bad news, Generation X, Generation Y, Millennials, and whatever the hell else they’re calling anybody under the age of 50 these days: The Baby Boomers are coming to the nonprofit sector.
Yesterday New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote breathlessly about the coming trend of retiring Boomers who are shelving their golf clubs in favor of “encore careers” that involve “giving back”:
Some 78 million American baby boomers are now beginning to retire, and one survey this year by a research institute found that half of boomers are interested in starting such new careers with a positive social impact. If we boomers decide to use our retirement to change the world, rather than our golf game, our dodderdom will have consequences for society every bit as profound as our youth did.
And, later, after swooning over a British management consultant who launched an anti-malaria charity:
Some 78 million American baby boomers are now beginning to retire, and one survey this year by a research institute found that half of boomers are interested in starting such new careers with a positive social impact. If we boomers decide to use our retirement to change the world, rather than our golf game, our dodderdom will have consequences for society every bit as profound as our youth did.
It’s terrific that Bill Gates is making such a visible jump from corporate America to foundation work. It’s terrific that, if the trend spotters are right, a lot of his contemporaries will be joining him. But let’s not forget that there were plenty of retirees who were riding that train before Gates et al got on board, and there were plenty of younger folks getting their hands dirty setting up the organizations that the Boomers plan on helping while they were spending their newfound wealth on Botox milkshakes. Over-extolling the ambitions of those who rediscovered their ideals when it was convenient does a disservice to those who live the mission daily. | 501(c)
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