2 Years Later, Fundraising’s ‘Trump Bump’ May Have Stopped Growing

Ilana Panich-Linsman/ACLU

For some nonprofits, the election of President Trump was like clamping jumper cables onto their fundraising operations, delivering a jolt of electricity that revved up their revenue.

Starting in November 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union, Sierra Club, and scores of other organizations that work on issues perceived to be under threat in the new political climate saw a surge of support, much of it from new donors.

The surge continued flowing through 2017 and into 2018. Organizations that benefited from the “Trump bump” are still seeing gifts arrive at a healthy clip, fundraisers say. But based on preliminary results from some nonprofits last month, giving appears to be flattening:

• The ACLU, which ends its fiscal year in March, brought in $230 million in fiscal 2018 and is on track to bring roughly the same this year, says Mark Wier, chief development officer. In fiscal 2017, which included Donald Trump’s election, inauguration, and announced ban on travelers from some Muslim countries, the civil-rights advocacy group raised $300 million, or nearly three times its usual haul.
• The Sierra Club, which is still counting its December gifts, expects 2018 to come in within $1 million of its 2017 giving, according to Mary Nemerov, chief advancement officer.
• The National Women’s Law Center, which is also still calculating year-end gifts, chalked up an incremental increase in 2017 after a big spike in support in 2016 and expects only an incremental gain for 2018, says Mary-Frances Wain, senior vice president of external affairs for the advocacy group.

A report released last month by Cygnus Applied Research indicated that the donors’ passion for giving in response to the Trump administration may be cooling. One in three donors who said they planned to give more in 2018 said they would do so in response to President Trump. That’s down from 51 percent who said the same in Cygnus’s 2017 report.

Preparing to Shift Gears

With two years left in President Trump’s first term, midterm elections putting the House in the hands of Democrats, and the 2020 campaign getting underway in early primary states, these nonprofits’ fundraisers are starting to think about what comes next.

At the ACLU, the question is all about timing, says Wier.

Keith Lane/ACLU

“The closer we get to the end of four years, the closer we get to the possibility that we will have to start pivoting,” he says.

When the organization does switch gears, he says, “the message will be about rebuilding our democracy, restoring what was lost. Also, knowing that a lot of our fights are going to be at the state level, maybe more so than federal, if a more civil-liberties focused person is the White House.”

Donations to the ACLU weakened after the midterms in November, but giving picked up again in December. Still, Wier says, “December was in some ways lower than we expected. The trends got softer,” a development he attributes in part to the volatile stock market and the new federal tax code, which caused some donors to hesitate.

The new tax law gives some people, especially those who are middle income, less of a direct tax incentive to give because most people will no longer gain a benefit by itemizing their taxes and claiming a charitable deduction. But its impact remains unclear, Wier says.

“We’ll have a better sense next December after people have gone through a year, have done their taxes,” he says. “They won’t be so uncertain.”

‘Gun-Shy’ Donors

At the Sierra Club, online giving sped up December 31 after several slower days in 2018’s final week. Still, that day’s giving ended up only about $100,000 less than the December 31, 2017, haul, says Nemerov. In 2017, it raised $68.5 million in private support over all for the year, according to its annual report.

“We got a number of very large gifts toward the end of the year from new Sierra Club donors,” she says. A report released in October by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which forecast that humans have only 12 years to limit the effects of a warming planet, helped spur those gifts.

“The report about climate change caused some philanthropists to reprioritize their giving,” Nemerov says. The charity received two anonymous gifts from new supporters, one reaching seven figures, the other six.

But over all, “people were making the decision to donate less,” she says. “They were kind of gun shy.”

As the new year begins, Sierra Club isn’t necessarily going to stop pummeling the Trump administration in its messages to its supporters. “Some of our highest-performing mailings were about ‘stop Pruitt,’ " meaning Scott Pruitt, the controversial head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who resigned in July. “Calling out those bad actors has always been very effective and motivating to our donors.”

The organization is, however, making tweaks. With Democrats now in control of Congress after the midterms, the Sierra Club’s communications are also likely to highlight some of the new lawmakers who are working to further policies that the nonprofit supports.

The organization is likely to focus more on planned giving and seeking contributions from its supporters’ donor-advised funds, the accounts that donors open to receive a one-time tax benefit and then gradually send the money to charities of their choice.

“We saw a nice increase [in gifts} at the $500 to $5,000 level from DAFs,” Nemerov says.

It’s also keeping an eye on the economy, the stock market, and other matters that could affect small and midlevel donors, Nemerov says.

“We’ve emphasized monthly giving over one-time giving, and we’ve leaned into that even more,” she says. “It’s a hedge against economic stability, and it’s less costly to maintain that relationship.”

Over all, she says, the organization is being cautious, sending a message to its supporters to “stay close to us, stay loyal, and keep supporting us in different ways.”

Young, Diverse Supporters

The National Women’s Law Center, which oversees the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, for which $22 million has been raised to combat sexual harassment in the workplace, saw its pool of individual donors expand rapidly starting in 2016, with bursts of growth during periods when gender discrimination or harassment issues were in the news.

The support the center has received, though, has not been purely reactive, Wain says. “The ‘rage giving,’ if you will, is not what’s sustained people’s interest in and support of our organization.”

Instead, she sees a sea change. “The issues on which the National Women’s Law Center works are top of mind for people, and certainly for voters. It’s happened as a sort of awakening, particularly for women of color.”

Before 2016, foundations were the core of the National Women’s Law Center’s support. But the election of President Trump saw individual giving grow exponentially, Wain says. Individual donors, she says, “are a bigger part of the pie — and the pie is also bigger.”

The newer supporters of the 46-year-old organization are younger and more diverse than before, she adds. They’re sending the group more handwritten notes of encouragement with their checks.

To keep cultivating them, the center has made adjustments. “We’re significantly increasing our presence on social media,” Wain says. And when communicating with supporters, the group takes pains to highlight the interconnectedness of its work: for instance, the fact that unequal pay and sexual harassment are related issues.

As candidates have begun to announce their candidacy for the next presidential election, Wain is not worried that her organization will see donors shifting their support away from the nonprofits like hers and toward political campaigns.

“It’s not an either/or,” she says. “Our constituency is feeling like they’re going to do everything they can to ensure forward progress.”

Besides, she adds, “potentially, depending on who is in office in 2021, we will need to remind people that there’s a lot of work to do to undo the damage that’s been done.”