About three years ago, Sweet Briar College announced that fiscal woes would force it to close. Such gloomy financial forecasts are not unusual; research suggests that half of nonprofits are on the fiscal brink.
Sweet Briar alumnae rallied, however, including some graduates who are professional fundraisers. They raised $21 million in gifts and pledges in just three months. The college stayed open, albeit with new leadership, and has raised a total of more than $44 million since the crisis.
Even the fundraisers involved are surprised at this. “I have always been told, and have always believed, that crisis fundraising doesn’t work,” says David King, CEO of the Alexander Haas consultancy, which worked pro bono on the effort.
Sweet Briar now joins a select group of near-death nonprofits that beat the odds and raised the cash to stay alive. In higher education, Wilson College, Antioch College, and Birmingham-Southern College have famously staved off closure. The San Antonio Symphony this winter announced it would suspend its season, only to have support emerge that allowed for a slightly abbreviated schedule.
High-profile arts groups that survived harrowing fiscal meltdowns include the Kansas City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre.
Fundraising in a financial crisis is tricky, say veterans of such endeavors. Here’s some of their advice.
Don’t shy away from a last-ditch effort.
Sweet Briar’s leaders gave up on the college too quickly, some say, announcing its closure without mounting a campaign to keep the doors open.
“You don’t give up until the courts tell you that you’re bankrupt,” says Michael Kaiser, who engineered the turnarounds at the American Ballet Theatre, the Kansas City Ballet, and other arts organizations.
Phil Stone, a longtime president of Bridgewater College who served as Sweet Briar’s interim president for almost two years after its near closure, says donors enjoyed playing the role of hero. “They were glad to be asked to do something that mattered,” he says.
Be candid.
Olney Friends School, a tiny private school in Barnesville, Ohio, didn’t sugarcoat its situation when it went to alumni and friends this year seeking $250,000 in donations. School leaders sent a late January letter in an envelope stamped “Emergency Appeal” in red ink. It declared Olney Friends “at risk” and said that unless they raised $250,000 in two months, they would be forced “to lay down the school.”
In keeping with the school’s Quaker tradition, its previous fundraising had been quiet, almost reverential, says Lars Etzkorn, a board member. “There was a very conscious effort to do something different here — to make clear from the very beginning of the campaign that we’re at a precipice.”
The blunt talk apparently worked. The school raised nearly $380,000. “The momentum is clearly there,” says Etzkorn. “We’re confident, and we pray it foretells open wallets in the future if we do our job of creating a sustainable school.”
Spread the word.
When the Sweet Briar alumnae fought the college’s closing, they developed a nationwide network of representatives committed to getting information out. “You can’t raise a lot of money quickly in a crisis situation unless people understand what is at stake,” says Mary Pope Maybank Hutson, who helped lead big-gift fundraising for the effort to save the college.
The board has to back the effort — fully.
The Sweet Briar board voted to close the college, but most experts say trustees must unanimously back the decision to go out for emergency funds — and must donate themselves. Etzkorn says the Olney Friends trustees had many long, painful discussions about whether to make a last push; some ultimately left their positions because they weren’t comfortable with the school’s direction.
“I can say that the night or two before that board meeting, I would lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. I just thought: If we don’t try this, how many nights am I going to wake up and say, ‘Why didn’t we?’ "
Start with your most loyal supporters.
“You have to go to your best friends first,” Kaiser says. “If your stalwart donors are not going to stick with you, it’s very hard to create a whole new base of donors when you’re in a mess.”
Forget conventional practice.
The urgency of the Sweet Briar campaign meant that Stacey Locke, an alumna who’s also a fundraiser for the University of Maryland, was suggesting five- and six-figure gifts in her first calls to donors. “That just went against everything that I’d been trained to do, or maybe gotten comfortable doing,” she says. “Yet it was successful.”
Claire Dennison Griffith, an alumna who now leads the college’s alumnae-relations staff, remembers asking donors for gifts upon first meeting them. “We called it speed dating,” she says. “I even said to one donor: ‘I am really sorry that I’m speed dating with you. But given our situation, we really have to ask you to think about a major gift now.’ And she and her family still gave.”
Ask for multiyear pledges.
During Sweet Briar’s crisis, the alumnae fundraisers asked donors for four- and five-year pledges, knowing the college had long-term financial issues. Birmingham-Southern asked for three-year pledges.
Craft a compelling vision for the future.
Frank Pisch, founder of Compass Group and a consultant who’s worked with Wilson and Antioch, says a rescue fundraising operation has several distinct phases. Once the crisis is over, organizations typically ask donors to help stabilize operations. After that, however, supporters must see a promising plan for the organization’s health and growth.
“There comes a point where donors are going to get tired of seeing the same old, same old,” he says. “They’ll say: ‘We don’t want you to hang on and just be mediocre.’ "
When Kaiser took the helm of the financially beleaguered Royal Opera House of London in the late 1990s, he says the tabloids and media feasted on its woes. He refused to indulge in the negativity and instead focused on the future — specifically, a renovation underway that promised to make the facility a high-tech showcase.
“The British press called me a Pollyanna, but it worked,” he says.
A rescue won’t work every time.
King doesn’t believe Sweet Briar alumnae would respond if the college hit rocky shoals and asked for a bailout again. “That would fall on deaf ears, I’m afraid,” he says.
Says Pisch: “You see organizations in crisis-fundraising mode a lot: ‘Oh, my gosh, the sky is falling.’ Donors get tired of hearing that. It works a couple times, maybe, but after that, they want to know: How are you fixing yourself so you are a solid philanthropic investment?”
