Nolo’s Fundraising Tips for Busy Nonprofits

Every nonprofit that hopes to attract gifts from donors’ estates knows how hard it is to find language with which to refer to that possibility in print. Words like “estate,” “bequest,” and “planned giving” are vague or jargony. And this is one case where simplifying the language — for example, saying something like, “leave us money after you’re dead” — really doesn’t work.

That’s why my eye was caught by a page in an Audubon magazine (January 2008 happened to be the one I was looking at), with the heading: “Your Beneficiaries: There are more of them then you realize!”

Accompanied by a photo of children looking at a bird nest, it aptly, even humorously, reminds people that they care about a wider circle of life than their immediate family; and that by naming Audubon as a beneficiary in their wills or other documents, they can contribute to a better future for all.

Unfortunately, now that they came up with this nice language, it’s off-limits, copyright-wise, to anyone else who might want to use it. But it’s a good source of inspiration, and proof that you don’t have to get into a language rut over this.

Some interesting news tidbits recently:

First off, did you notice the FTC warning consumers about scam charities supposedly fundraising for people affected by the earthquake in China and cyclone in Myanmar? (It was written up by Dan Thanh Dang in the June 15th Baltimore Sun.) Potential donors are being warned to double-check that any phone calls really came from the charity, ask what percentage of the donation will go toward services, and more. Of course, this affects every nonprofit as donors’ level of suspicion goes up. No sense fighting it — just be ready to provide every possible tidbit to reassure donors that you’re for real.

Another interesting story came from the June 12th edition of Conde Nast’s Portfolio, written by Dalia Fahmy and titled “Charity Prize Fight”. The story discusses how nonprofit foundations are using contests — for example, to create the best, most commercially viable solution to global warming — as a way to simultaneously address a problem, get publicity, and stimulate more giving. (The global warming contest is, by the way, from Richard Branson’s Virgin Unite foundation.)

How is this news important to smaller, non-foundation charities? Aside from staying alert for a contest you can enter (been keeping a solution to global warming up your sleeve?), creating contests among your donors and members might make for an interesting change of pace. The simplest would be an online contest — say, to raise the most money through grassroots efforts, suggest the best name for an animal under your care, or the like. Instead of cash prizes, offer a personal tour of your facility or a meeting with the E.D.. And be sure to call the media!

Finally, on the lighter side of fundraising, it’s interesting to watch overseas trends. As far as I can tell, the British are maniacs for stunt-based fundraising — like this bungee-jumping priest, or this skydiving grandmother. And then there were the two store managers who (voluntarily, it appears) were locked in their shop window, given a phone, and told to raise 1,000 British pounds for charity before they’d be let out. Is there a lesson to be taken from these? I await your comments.

Here’s an interesting blog post by Christopher Campbell on Cinematical, talking about the practice of enlisting movie theatre ushers in efforts to collect donations for nonprofits.

At first glance, it sounds like a reasonably creative idea: The ushers will be walking the aisles anyway, among theatre-goers in a presumably good mood. Why not have these ushers carry a can to collect some coins for a cause?

But as Cristopher’s blog points out, the results have made some patrons feel they were being hassled — especially when ushers were given incentives to “do whatever they could to get as much money as they could.” He describes some ushers’ aggressive tactics, including name-calling behind the non-givers’ backs, and other ushers who may have skimmed money from the donation jar, referring to it as the “cigarette fund.”

If ever there was a reminder that every volunteer needs proper training, this is it. I’m guessing those ushers didn’t feel they had much choice in their charity collection activities. Did they receive an in-depth orientation from actual members of the charity, to inspire them about the cause and make sure they were committed to helping out? The blog doesn’t say.

Before your organization says, “Wow, free volunteer help!” in any similar way, make sure to do the training first, to avoid the need for damage control and retraining later. And if it’s going to be an ongoing effort like this one, follow up to see how it’s going.

Recession or not, reports of empty storefronts are popping up nationwide — signs advertising “Free Rent” have actually been spotted in Las Vegas. That’s bad news for the economy, but could actually be good news for some nonprofits.

Landlords hate to have an empty storefront. It’s a potential target for thieves and vandals, and reduces traffic to other stores in the same strip or complex. But finding another tenant and negotiating a new lease can take weeks or months to complete.

Some nonprofits have been finding ways to fill the gap. For no or very low rent, they’ve used empty retail space for such temporary purposes as animal adoptions, a soup kitchen, a depot to collect and contribute clothes to the poor, and more. It’s a win-win situation: The nonprofits get higher visibility and a way to reach more people (both clients and potential donors); the landlord gets the benefits mentioned above, plus possible increased foot traffic to other stores; and both might get some good media coverage from the partnership.

If your nonprofit could benefit from such an arrangement, look around your area for empty storefronts and get in touch with the landlords. They might have already heard of your idea — particularly if they read the “Commercial Lease Law Insider,” a respected publication that featured an article called “Protect Yourself When Temporarily Filling Retail Space with Nonprofits” in its September 2007 issue.

The “protection” part of the article simply referred to the fact that the landlord needs to sign some sort of agreement with any nonprofit to which it lends or rents space. Signing such an agreement is in your interest, too, to make sure everyone has the same understanding of price and other terms.

Instead of a standard lease, the landlord is most likely to want a license agreement, which is appropriate for situations where the arrangement is so temporary that the landlord shouldn’t have to evict you if you refuse to leave by the agreed-upon date. If, however, your organization turns into a long-term tenant, you’ll want to sign a standard commercial lease. For help with this, see Negotiate the Best Lease for Your Business, by Janet Portman and Fred S. Steingold (Nolo).

Don’t miss Ilana DeBare’s excellent article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “B corporation plan helps philanthropic firms.” It profiles a new melding of for-profit and nonprofit status, in which a business explicitly adopts socially conscious goals — in one case, donating all profits to charity — and writes these goals into its founding legal documents. The originators of the concept call it a B corporation.

DeBare is careful to point out that, unlike C and S corporations, B corporations have no actual status under the tax code. And if you’ve researched the dividing lines between taxable and tax-exempt corporations, you know that the tax rules can get gnarly. But by banding together with a self-invented status, B corporations at least put the shareholders and would-be company buyers on notice that they’re serious about serving other ends besides sheer profit.

Remember the days when Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls were the only folks selling sweet stuff for charity? Now you can’t turn around without someone peddling a chocolate bar, candle, or discount coupon on behalf of some charitable cause.

And the services providing these goods have mushroomed — try Googling “fundraising” if you want to see what I mean. The Internet is awash with services promising to provide items everyone will want to buy, while making it easy for you, the nonprofit, to sell them.

So, I recognize that there’s something to be said for ease of setup. And many small charitable groups rely on candy and other sales for a lot of their revenues. But as a donor, I’d always assumed, when laying out a ridiculous $2 for a candy bar, that much of the money was going to the charity. Now I see from these online providers that they’re charging the charity as much as $1.20 a bar! (They don’t always make that clear — you may have to do the math yourself.) Meanwhile, they tout the virtues of a 40% profit to the charity. Hmm.

Why not just go down to your local drugstore or discount grocery, see what’s on sale, and buy a few cases? A quick online search shows that various energy bars are on sale near where I live for only $1 apiece, and I’ll bet I could do better if I looked harder.

You’ll have to create your own forms for the volunteers to fill out when selling, but really not much more. And is that so much work compared to the time you’d spend online figuring out which middleman service offers the best services for the lowest (but not all that low) price? For no less work, you could easily have profits over 100%.

I seem to have been attending a lot of meetings lately, both in for-profit and nonprofit settings. That’s given me a chance, while I wait for people to file in, to notice that it’s often the meetings where the announcement contained the magical word “food” that draw the most attendees.

That’s hardly a headline-worthy revelation — but then why are some organizers still missing their chance at a little bribery? Particularly when the weather is getting better and motivation to sit around inside is going way, way down?

Maybe bribery is too harsh a word — anthropologists can give us plenty of examples where the first words out of a host, even when greeting a stranger, concern whether the person would like some food. It’s a primal welcoming thing.

Anyway, if the reasons are budgetary, that doesn’t seem like much of a barrier. No one needs to promise a hot gourmet meal, just some snacks. In fact, two or three people planning to come (board members or other volunteers, for example) can be asked to bring those snacks. Some cookies, fruit slices, nuts, and cheese and crackers will not break anyone’s budgets.

Tired of the printed word? Check out Nolo’s new series of podcasts about fundraising, where I interview experienced fundraisers about hot topics and their organization’s success stories.

The first three interviewees are Pat Joseph, talking about his experience blogging for The Sierra Club; Lynn Eve Komaromi, sharing insights from ten years at Berkeley Repertory Theatre; and Elizabeth Stampe, discussing strategies for attracting new members to Greenbelt Alliance.

Enjoy — and let me know your suggestions for future interviewees!

I just got an email from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) that grabbed my attention enough to read to the bottom (and that rarely happens).

It contained excerpts of actual letters from people responding to WWF’s “Time for Change” challenge to make changes in their lives and/or raise money in honor of Earth Day (April 22). My favorite was the one from the ten-year-old having an earth-friendly birthday party, complete with endangered-animal sponsorships instead of gifts.

It’s not that the ideas in the letters were particularly revolutionary — one person planned to raise money with a garage sale, another to collect loose change at a school — but there’s something irresistible about seeing people coming together and sharing their own enthusiasm about participating in a cause. (Who knows, maybe some of the younger participants will grow up to be fundraisers!)

Does your organization have members who could be encouraged to take up a similar challenge? Even if this doesn’t raise a lot of money on the spot, it seems like a great way to create a sense of energy and community.

For any fundraiser, the idea that your hard-won grant and donation money might be eaten away by employee theft is, if not unthinkable, demoralizing at many levels. And, if discovered, it will make future fundraising a lot harder.

But if we’re to believe a recent analysis in the Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (December 2007 issue), around 13% of the roughly $300 billion given to charity in 2006 was stolen by organization insiders. (I confess upfront, I didn’t pay to read the actual report, but read an excellent analysis of it by Stephanie Strom in the March 29 issue of The New York Times).

My first reaction is disbelief — which may be justified since, as Strom notes, they arrived at that figure by simply applying the same assumption to nonprofits as to government and for-profit organizations, namely that they lose 6% of revenue to fraud each year.

That’s a pretty broad assumption. And I’d like to believe that nonprofit employees are “above” the rest, since most of them are working for a cause they believe in.

But the most disturbing part of the report may be the finding — which does appear to have been nonprofit-specific — that the typical thief was an employee, usually female, who earned less than $50,000 a year and had worked for the nonprofit at least three years. She wasn’t going for million-dollar temptations, but took less than $40,000.

I’m projecting here, but doesn’t that sound like someone who’s frustrated by how little she’s earning for a lot of hard work? Who perhaps doesn’t even think of what she’s doing as stealing, but just getting back a little of what she deserves?

If that’s true, then this is a classic “no free lunch” illustration: Underpaying nonprofit employees will come back to hurt the group eventually. So my concluding pitch would be, in every grant proposal or other project budget, to try and give the hardworking employees a raise. Even a small amount can go a long way toward showing appreciation and preventing employee disgruntlement.