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The World's Best Fundraisers Charities in the United States raised $260 billion during 2005 and there is every indication that 2006 was at least as good. The American public stands up when asked in the right way by skilled fundraising professionals. And while that $260 billion is more money than the gross domestic product of some small countries, there are some standouts in the fundraising industry in the United States and across the globe. That’s why the spotlight is trained on the people honored in this second annual World’s Best Fundraisers. Editors of The NonProfit Times talk to thousands of fundraisers every year. We also sought suggestions from those in the industry regarding who should be honored. These people and organizations are doing things on the cutting edge. That means that they might not be raising the most money – yet. But, they are testing new paths for philanthropy. Cause Marketing Susan G. Komen Foundation By Mark Hrywna It’s like a mutual fund of cause marketing partners that’s expected to raise $35 million when everything is totaled for 2006. Whether it’s Pier 1 Imports donating 25 percent of each $14 candle, Sip for the Cure products from The Republic of Tea, or 35 cents from every 14-ounce package of pink M&M’s, it’s all adding up. The cause marketing program evolved from the Race for the Cure sponsorships, said Katrina Drake, director of cause-related marketing at the foundation. “People wanted to be active in the cause all year long, so they would sponsor races around the country but wanted to take it to an in-store presence, not only to expand the revenue they could raise but also the educational message reach,” she said. The foundation receives millions of dollars in cause marketing-related contributions, with many annual guarantees in the six figures. But not all of the partners are active at the same time, Drake said, adding that about half of the sponsors have programs year-round while others do them for three, six or nine months. The foundation’s New Business Committee examines proposals received from potential partners, which number 50 a month on average and more in the fall, around Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October. “We have a pretty extensive process where we vet proposals that come in from partners that are interested in working with us,” Drake said. The committee looks “at everything from the reach of the program -- are we reaching audiences we may not be currently reaching -- the quality of the product; the percentage of proceeds to the foundation; are they willing to incorporate educational messaging; are they committed to the breast cancer cause; are they doing embedded philanthropy in terms of educating their employees, as well as helping to educate the general public.”
From there, the foundation works with the partner to determine the duration of the promotion, whether it’s seasonal, or a pilot program, and other details. “It’s really a collaborative decision…in terms of what’s going to be best around that particular product,” Drake said. “We obviously want someone that’s well respected, somebody that’s a leader in their field, somebody that can take us in front of audiences that we don’t normally reach; willing to incorporate the educational messaging as well as raise revenue for us; willing to significantly commit to the cause in terms of the dollars that they raise and the length of the relationship and getting their employees involved in volunteerism as well,” Drake said. There’s more to Komen’s cause marketing strategy and its success than just raising money. “We are extremely committed to utilizing it as a vehicle to reach new audiences, because we recognize with the things that we do alone by ourselves, there are huge pockets of the communities that we might not ever speak to,” Drake said. “Some people’s first interaction with the key messages or with the Komen Foundation is actually through our cause marketing department.” International Free The Children By Marla E. Nobles “Age does not impact the kind of social change we are capable of,” said the boy, Craig Kielburger, now 24. Kielburger said that he spoke out that day; standing in front of his seventh-grade class, article in hand, and asking his peers, “Who will help me?” What started that spring day with a dozen seventh- graders has grown into the international nonprofit Free The Children (FTC), the world’s largest network of children helping children through education. And as founder and chair, Kielburger is its leader.
A fourth-year student at the University of Toronto’s Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies, he said it is FTC’s mandate that young people are engaged in all aspects of the organization. According to Kielburger, 65 percent of donations are from involved youth, with just 7 percent of every dollar going towards administration. FTC offers a two-year internship to recent university graduates, and the average age in the office is 24. “We do have retired teachers, an amazing accountant and some generous adult volunteers, but the spirit of the staff is youthful,” said Kielburger. FTC has engaged more than 1 million youth through its leadership programs and Youth in Action (YA) groups, based mainly in elementary and middle schools. Kielburger and company also founded Leaders Today, a sister nonprofit dedicated to teaching youth tangible skills, including public speaking, writing and researching. FTC has garnered the support of school boards across North America, and partnered with National Bank Financial, Oprah Winfrey’s Angel Network and the United Nations. FTC received three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize. Internationally, with the help of the more than 1,000 YA groups, FTC has built more than 450 schools in 16 countries; delivered 202,500 school and health kits; implemented alternative income projects to benefit more than 22,500 women; shipped $11 million (USD) worth of medical supplies to 45 countries; and provided 132,000 people with access to clean water and improved sanitation. To learn more about child labor, at 13 the Toronto native set off for India and Thailand. “I needed to see it firsthand.” Kielburger also met with Canada’s then-prime minister, Jean Chretien, to discuss the issue of trade practices, particularly imported goods made by child laborers. The media played a significant role in publicizing FTC, but participating youth are its biggest champions. “I have been fortunate enough to have spent time with amazing individuals such as Mother Theresa and former United States President Bill Clinton, but to this day our organization is helping millions of children around the world because of the dedication of young people here in North America.” Kielburger noted a Toronto daycare center that recently raised $12,000 for FTC, and Monarch Park Collegiate in Toronto that raised more than $32,000 in medical supplies for tsunami relief. “Youth are the heart and soul of the organization.” Online Athletes For Africa By Marla E. Nobles “We’re grassroots, bottom up,” said Adrian Bradbury, co-founder of the international nonprofit Athletes for Africa (A4A), and the first person to register online for the organization’s sophomore run of its global GuluWalk campaign. More than 5,400 people worldwide registered for the 2006 event, which according to Bradbury, became “something of a phenomenon.” The 2006 event posted an astounding 1,200-percent increase compared to last year’s, raising nearly $600,000. Additionally, via promotion on popular websites like myspace, YouTube and facebook, GuluWalk connected to thousands and eventually netted for A4A more than 15,000 unique email addresses. Bradbury and A4A co-founder Kieran Hayward kicked off a much smaller version of GuluWalk in July 2005 with a 31-day walk to promote advocacy and awareness for the children suffering in northern Uganda. The pair completed a second walk that October, this time joined by thousands of others worldwide. “We never intended it to be a fundraising initiative,” said Bradbury, who noted they never intended GuluWalk to be an online initiative either.
Bradbury and Hayward established the Toronto-based A4A in early 2004. “We wanted to do something that wasn’t exporting sports, but was simply using the profile or the platform that sport provides to tell a story and raise money for sustainable development projects.” Just as A4A was getting off the ground, the two began hearing stories about the atrocities occurring in northern Uganda. After two successful walks during 2005, the second raising $40,000 and garnering worldwide interest, the partners went looking for a concept for the 2006 GuluWalk with the objective that “anybody can get involved,” said Bradbury. The theme became “10,000 reasons for hope in northern Uganda,” the platform was the Web, and the concept was in one word, grassroots. A4A created a Web page (www.gulu walk.com/main/) that would display 10,000 icons. Each gray icon would represent an individual who pledged money to GuluWalk, and using flash technology would turn black upon registration. The ingenious part: scroll over each black icon and a bubble pops up, with information about the donor. “We got great feedback,” Bradbury said of the main page. “We also had some challenges, too. When you do something like that, in Flash, and it’s pretty robust from a user standpoint to load, you’re going to lose people. It’s about understanding your audience.” GuluWalk’s audience is largely university age and young families who are tech savvy, added Bradbury. “Everything that we’ve done we’ve really focused on or want or make sure that it’s grassroots, and that everybody has an opportunity to impact it,” said Bradbury, who calls each GuluWalk donor “the star of our campaign.” Ideally, A4A had hoped to fill each of the 10,000 spots with donors pledging $100, ultimately raising $1 million. “To go from $40,000 to $1 million, people thought we were crazy,” said Bradbury. “But we thought we might as well give it a shot, and if we fail, it’s going to be a pretty good failure.” Athletes for Africa will use 85 percent of the $600,000 raised for its programming, with 60 percent specifically for programs on the ground in northern Uganda. Trend Setter Family Foundations By Marla E. Nobles
Two young philanthropists, one who at age 25 gave up her $3 million inheritance to start a foundation, the other who’s worked extensively within her own family’s foundation to promote social justice, are leading the way with a rare look inside the world of the “next generation” of family philanthropy. According to the Foundation Center, only 7.6 percent of family foundation funding during 2004 went to support communities of color. Even less went to low-income communities; to immigrants; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people; and women and girls’ programs. According to Alison Goldberg, the next generation of family foundation members is poised to change all that. “A couple years back, we started to notice more and more young people who were getting involved, who were asking questions about how to get engaged in their family funds in a way that made sense to them,” said Goldberg. “There’s definitely a conversation happening,” added Karen Pittelman. “And it’s not just through the lens of next generation, but in other areas, about how family philanthropy can be an elitist institution, and how oftentimes those funds have not been set up with social change in mind.” Through their book, Creating Change Through Family Philanthropy: The Next Generation, authors Pittelman, 31, and Goldberg, 32, provide the next generation of leaders with the tools to begin that conversation, and possibly transform the field of family philanthropy. The book includes interviews with 40 next generation leaders, each involved with Resource Generation (RG), a New York City-based group of wealthy young people working for social justice.
The pair, who wrote the book for RG, met while working in program development at the nonprofit. “The idea (for the book) was germinating back then,” said Pittelman, who said she and Goldberg noticed a scarcity of resources available to young people looking to impact their family foundations. “So we’re trying to give them the tools and analysis they need to try and do that.” Pittelman authored another book for RG in January 2006, Classified: How to Stop Hiding Your Privilege and Use It for Social Change, which she calls a “useful companion tool” to this latest one. “It focuses more on helping young people with wealth move through their guilt to take action,” said Pittelman, who moved through her own unease by using her inheritance to co-found in 1999 the Chahara Foundation, a fund run by and for low-income women activists in Boston. At 28, Goldberg was selected to Worth Magazine’s list of “25 Most Generous Young Americans.” The Tufts graduate’s philanthropy includes a year with AmeriCorps, establishing Foundations for Change (which has since merged with RG to become the program Creating Change Through Family Philanthropy), and her tireless dedication to social change philanthropy. She also sits on the board of the Robert P. & Judith Goldberg Foundation and is an outside consultant for RG. “The final goal is really creating change,” said Pittelman. “And it’s starting to happen, and the conversations are starting to happen.” Younger Than 40 Jean Simmons By Mark Hrywna As director of direct-response fundraising, Simmons, 35, spends her days at the Baltimore, Md.-based humanitarian relief agency directing efforts to raise $60 million annually. The trip back to Africa in 2005 proved to be “a real life-changing experience,” she said, providing a glimpse of what all that money can do and seeing “how grateful the people we help are.” The trip reinforced “all the positive things,” Simmons said, of “why I chose the career path I did, and why I enjoy coming to CRS every day.” A 1994 graduate of the University of Maryland-College Park with a degree in consumer economics, Simmons also has worked for the Direct Marketing Association. “I’ve always been in direct marketing,” she said. Simmons initiated a mid-level donor program two years ago to serve as a bridge between direct response, major gifts and planned giving. It was set up as a distinctive cultivation and solicitation program, for donors who originated in direct response and have “a history that called for a higher degree of investment,” Simmons said. It also identified major gifts prospects to the major giving department.
The hybrid program – because it combines traditional direct response with a cultivation approach, said Simmons – has approximately 4,500 donors, slightly more than 1 percent of the total CRS file. One full-time development officer coordinates six part-time development associates, each with portfolios of about 750 donors. Associates develop ongoing relationships with donors through telephone, e-mail, personal contact or special mailings. “The key aspect of that is that the development associate is not a solicitor. They’re charged purely with cultivation and the direct response program makes the asks,” said Kristin McCurry, principal of MINDset Direct, which counts CRS as a client. “Their value is going up because they are being nurtured and cared for -- not because they’re asked more often, for larger gifts, or even through this personal contact.” That nurturing seems to be paying off. According to analysis by CRS, donors contacted by a development associate were worth twice as much as those who were not, with an average gift of $1,978, compared to $996. Revenue from the mid-level donor program has grown steadily, from $7.3 million in Fiscal Year 2004, spiking at $13.5 million in FY05 (thanks in part to increased giving across the board related to the Asian tsunami), and $12.1 million in FY06. Revenue per donor from the mid-level also has climbed, from $1,900 in FY04, again spiking in FY05 at $3,152, and $2,910 in FY06. Double-digit growth was seen for average gift per donors ($939 to $1,1047; 11 percent), and number of gifts per donor (2.55 to 2.83, 11 percent). Before joining CRS five years ago, Simmons spent four years at the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, where she worked for McCurry. “The fact that she holds her donors’ wishes and their best interests above all else,” McCurry said, is consistent from Simmons and that comes through in the message from CRS to its donors, particularly high-value donors. “She’s willing to make the long-term investments in a donor because she understands the bond between the donor and the organization and knows how to feed it and nurture it.” Living Legend Kay P. Lautman By Mark Hrywna
The memorials that Kay P. Lautman has helped to build might pay tribute to people and history, but they also could be considered a testament of sorts to her nearly four decades of fund-raising for some of the most prominent and important causes. As president of Lautman & Co., she’s helped raise money for a number of memorials around Washington, D.C., including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, National Museum of the Marine Corps, National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism and the Women in Military Service for America Memorial. People say Lautman wrote the book on direct mail fundraising -- and they’re not kidding: Dear Friend: Mastering The Art of Direct Mail Fund Raising, with Henry Goldstein, was first published in 1984. Judy Maneval, president of Sanky Communications in New York City, formerly Sanky Perlowin Associates, said it’s required reading for new employees who need to learn about direct mail. Anyone who’s been in the business any length of time has a copy of it, she said, even though it’s no longer in print. “It’s a practical, hands-on, sensible book…and we all thank her for it.” Lautman said that she sort of stumbled into a fundraising career 35 years ago. When she started out, there were no schools or any places to learn direct mail. She answered an ad in the help wanted-female section of The New York Times to work at Oram Group Marketing. Despite being young and not knowing what she wanted to do, Lautman said, it was “a job made in heaven for me. I got to do all these wonderful things and get paid for it… I did everything, I did it badly but I did it, and I got to learn a lot from that,” she said. Founded some 15 years ago, Lautman & Co. helped start the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s donor file before the monument was built. “That was one of the proudest moments of my career,” she said, adding that the first dozen years were extraordinary, seeing it built and being there for the opening of the museum. After 17 years working with the museum, it was time for some new perspective and Lautman’s firm took the unusual step of declining to bid on another contract. “We really felt that it was time to go.” Lautman also has helped to develop fundraising campaigns for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “People are more important than animals, but like most people I can’t stand to see an animal or small child suffer,” she said. “In many ways that motivates me, being able to help people who can’t help themselves.” An active member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Lautman has served on its National Board and its Foundation Board. She is a founding board member of the Association of Direct Response Fundraising Counsel. She also helped to establish the Community Council for the Homeless in Washington, D.C. “You have to love what you’re doing in order to be effective,” Lautman said. “You have to love all the components of it…including the down and dirty work; then, and only then, do you get to share in all the glory of the project.” NPT |
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