Lutheran Social Services of the South had a multipronged mission: serving children, the elderly, and the poor. It also had a problem: The average age of its donors was 72.
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More urgently, the charity’s leadership was worried that it wasn’t having the impact it could. So it underwent an extreme makeover.
Gone were parts of its mission, such as the retirement communities it ran. “We made a very conscious decision to get out of that particular space,” says Kurt Senske, chief executive of the group based in Austin, Tex.
Instead, he says, “we became very focused on breaking the cycle of child abuse. We made a decision to make an investment in how we tell the story, making sure all our external pieces of communication fit together.”
The organization had grown out of Lutheran charities started in the 1860s. In 2015, it unveiled its new mission, newly aligned communications, and a new name, Upbring.
The strategy has paid off. Upbring saw its private support grow 9 percent in fiscal year 2018, which ended April 1, compared with the previous year, and it nearly doubled the number of new donors from 2017.
“The trends are in our favor — they’ve become our friends. And we don’t see that ending anytime soon,” Senske says. Though results are preliminary, the charity leader says his organization is making “slow progress” on lowering the average age of donors. Upbring’s success mirrors that of several of the 300 member agencies of Lutheran Services in America: a revamp, investment in reaching new donors, and an emphasis on impact and storytelling.
Lutheran Services in America, (No. 10 on the Chronicle’s list of America’s Favorite Charities), brought in nearly $732 million in cash and stocks in 2017. That number has grown by 9 percent since 2005-7, beating a national trend of declines for social-service charities, which traditionally depend on small donors. Up to 80 percent of the group’s fundraising in any given year comes from individuals.
The national organization, with most of its 14 staff members tucked into the historic United Methodist Building, directly across the street from the U.S. Capitol, rolled out a sleek, impact-focused logo, visuals, and messaging in 2017, aimed at raising the group’s profile in an era when government support for the safety net is endangered.
Although Lutheran Services in America formed in 1997 from a merger, lots of its member agencies sprang from Lutheran congregations in the 19th or early 20th century. Its members are innovative groups that tackle a wide variety of issues: children, homelessness, veterans.
Today, many, like Upbring, have renamed themselves and have rejiggered or narrowed their missions to respond to changing needs. “We’re deep in the community. We came out of the community, and we’re constantly reinventing ourselves in what we do,” says Charlotte Haberaecker, the organization’s leader.
New Name, New Focus
Another Lutheran Services member, Wheat Ridge Ministries, based near Chicago, started more than a century ago as a charity aimed at raising money to fight tuberculosis. Its mission evolved over the decades, and after a long history of grant making to Christian nonprofits, from funds raised largely through direct mail, in January it changed its name to the We Raise Foundation. The new charity focuses on raising money and making grants to nonprofits that fight poverty, violence, and inequality.
“We had a pretty specific identity — not simply Christian but Lutheran Christian,” says Paul Miles, the president of We Raise. “If you weren’t Lutheran, you would look at us and say, ‘This isn’t a place I can get connected to.’ "
The organization also needed to revitalize its static, aging donor base, which had only 14 active donors under age 45.
The revamp included a new investment in digital marketing and fundraising — and in helping grantees get better at raising money. The organization buys digital ads and runs crowdfunding drives for its grantees and helps them mine their donor databases to get more support.
We Raise is also applying these tactics to its own fundraising. Before the new investments, Miles says, the organization could have reached only about 60,000 people through its direct-mail list. Now, thanks to online appeals and social media, it’s reached 6 million people over about six months.
Miles credits Lutheran Services in America’s national office with fostering conversations among its members to help those that are undergoing or have undergone makeovers share ideas. “LSA is the glue that holds us together,” he says.
Seven years ago, Mosaic, a Lutheran Services member in Omaha that serves people with intellectual and developmental disabilities across 10 states, started focusing on raising more private gifts to fill a gap caused by shrinking Medicaid funding; Medicaid makes up 96 percent of its $235 million budget.
Over the past 10 years, fundraising increased 300 percent, according to Linda Timmons, Mosaic’s chief executive. A greater emphasis on planned giving helped; the group got $7 million in planned gifts in 2017, double what it raised five years earlier, Timmons says.
But key to Mosaic’s fundraising success, and that of other Lutheran Services members, has been an emphasis on showing donors the tangible impact of their social-service work.
“So often as nonprofits we say, ‘Here’s the success,’ but we fail to tell people what brought about that outcome. We just want to show the beneficiary,” says Timmons.
Showing Impact
To make the charity’s work clearer to donors and potential donors, Mosaic started running one-hour “virtual tours” of its programs twice a month. The group invites members of communities near its agencies to a breakfast or lunch; the local executive director talks about his or her vision for the organization, and at least three people discuss Mosaic’s impact on their lives.
Each local agency follows up with the people who attend, asking them if they can see themselves participating in Mosaic’s work in some fashion. “The power has been in the one-on-one follow-up, with people who better understand what it is we do,” Timmons says.
In the last seven years, 30,000 people have attended the “virtual tours.”
Encouraged by its success in tapping new support, the organization is in the quiet phase of its first comprehensive campaign since the 1990s. It’s raised 40 percent of the $63 million it’s seeking; the Call to Be Bold campaign goes public next September.
With the help of the Lutheran Services staff, Mosaic provides training to staff and volunteers from its far-flung agencies at its Omaha offices to help them tell the story of their work. “Most of the executive directors are social workers like myself,” Timmons says. “People who came up in human services never dreamed we’d have to do public speaking.”
Making the work and its impact tangible is particularly important to younger donors, says Deborah Hoesly, vice president for development for Lutheran Services in America. “Across the board, our organizations say how important that is to our fundraising effort and how that continues to grow in importance.”
