Fundraisers nimbly adjusted to a host of changes during the pandemic, and many groups enjoyed a tidal wave of support from donors who gave in response to the crisis. This super-charged giving buoyed fundraising expectations for chief executives and boards. With the pandemic now in the rearview mirror, fundraisers are tracking giving trends closely and working to recalibrate leaders’ expectations.
“The influx of support lasted longer than we thought, and then it started to feel, I think, to some people like, ‘Oh, this is normal now,’” says Ali Colbran, director of development at Feeding San Diego, a food bank.
Colbran went into the final months of 2022 feeling confident. Her team’s projections for gifts in the pipeline looked good, and donors seemed motivated to give. After a strong turnout on GivingTuesday, she expected the food bank would close out the year on goal or just shy of it.
“It did not go that way at all,” Colbran says. “We were wrong — like really wrong.”
Last year was an annus horribilis for many nonprofits: “Giving USA” pegged the overall decline in contributions at 10.5 percent after inflation. Over 66 years of data collection, “Giving USA” has only reported drops in charitable giving four times, one of which happened in 2022. Data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project show that decline didn’t meaningfully begin until year-end, when contributions dipped nearly 2 percent before inflation.
The boom years have fizzled out — and Colbran and other fundraisers now face the challenge of how to manage their leaders’ and board’s expectations. Stagnant inflation and an up-and-down stock market — to say nothing of the disappearance of state and federal pandemic supports — have changed the game.
According to a new Chronicle survey of 1,000 fundraisers, roughly four in 10 say their leaders and boards have unrealistic expectations for how much money fundraisers can raise from donors right now. What’s more, the same share say these unrealistic expectations are contributing to low morale among fundraisers.
A negative economic outlook can hamstring fundraisers’ ability to meet their goals, says Laura MacDonald, principal of the Benefactor Group, a fundraising consulting firm. “In some cases, those goals are not realistic,” she says. “They’re not based on strategy or an understanding of the pipeline of gifts that will be coming in.”
Talking About a Shortfall
So how can fundraisers, leaders, and trustees get on the same page? Experts say they need to go back to the data.
Even as many fundraisers in the Chronicle’s survey complained of goals being unrealistic, 85 percent said it was at least somewhat likely that they would meet their objectives. Four in 10 said it was very likely they would do so. That could be the result of fundraisers’ natural optimism or a testament to the sweat and tears of frontline development folks.
At the Mohawk Hudson Humane Society, fundraising is currently 18 percent behind where it should be to meet its annual goal. This time last year, the animal shelter was on target, says Whitney Philippi, the vice president for development. As she works to move past fundraising challenges, Philippi is keeping the board informed of what’s in her way.
At the September board meeting, Philippi discussed the organization’s fundraising; she identified a drop in individual gifts under $250 as the reason for the shortfall. Individuals contribute nearly 60 percent of the nonprofit’s $3.2 million budget.
As of September, however, the number of contributions of $1 to $49 was down 1,571 from that time the previous year. The number of gifts of $50 to $99 was also down — 158 below last year’s total at that time — and contributions of $100 to $249 were 53 gifts behind that time last year. “Every other gift-size category is up or steady,” Philippi says.
While board members were surprised to hear that these donations were down, Philippi says, they understood her predicament. Talking about the deficit helped her involve board members in a solution.
Philippi says the chair of the board’s development committee started to brainstorm ways to demonstrate the impact of small gifts to donors, such as by sending an impact report or gathering volunteers to make thank-you calls to donors who give small sums. Other board members volunteered to approach acquaintances who had made large contributions in the past but not recently.
‘Things Just Fell From the Sky’
When the executive team at Feeding San Diego questioned why Colbran lowered fundraising goals from the previous year, she walked them through the funding sources that helped the food bank raise more money than ever during the pandemic. “We have to have a conversation about what made up that number and how many of those things in that number I know are not renewable because they’ve said as much to me,” Colbran told them.
For example, a business that contributed its travel budget in 2020 — $120,000 — couldn’t repeat the gift once business travel started up again. Other businesses that made first-time gifts during the worst of the pandemic shifted back to the causes they’d historically supported, Colbran says. State and federal pandemic grants provided a roughly $5 million boost to the food bank in 2020, but those funds are also largely tapped out now. With lower returns on their endowments, some foundations are now making smaller grants. What’s more, she says, some wealthy donors were also able to make bigger-than-usual contributions during the pandemic, such as the donor who gave $1 million to Feeding San Diego in December 2021. “They said, ‘We had a one-time windfall. This is a one-time thing for you guys.’”
Colbran pointed to these and other examples to successfully make the case to leaders that the flood of support that sustained the food bank during the pandemic has receded. Now in the second quarter of its 2024 financial year, the food bank is working toward fundraising goals based on contributions and grants it knows it can count on — and Colbran says she’s cautiously optimistic.
“None of it is expecting something to fall from the sky — which is what was happening the last several years,” Colbran says. “Things just fell from the sky, and then we were like, ‘It’ll rain next year, right?’”
Rasheeda Childress contributed to this article.
