The revolution in civil and legal rights for LGBTQ Americans has wrought a parallel shift in fundraising tactics for nonprofits that worked to bring about those changes. Charities that once focused mostly on unmarried, often childless people are now dealing with a marriage and baby boom among their donors.
Take the Human Rights Campaign.
The number of contributors to the advocacy group has grown by 16 percent since 2014, a period during which a crusade the organization helped lead produced the Supreme Court ruling allowing same-sex marriage across the United States. The number of married donors grew by 80 percent in that period, while the number of single-person households making contributions increased by just 12 percent. About 9 percent of the organization’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender donors are married.
In June 2016, 49 percent of same-sex couples who lived together were married, up from 38 percent before the landmark ruling, a Gallup poll found. By June 2017, two years after the decision, more than 10 percent of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender adults were married to someone of the same sex, according to Gallup data analyzed by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
The transition has put LGBTQ organizations in an unusual position compared with the rest of the nonprofit world, which faces the task of raising money from America’s growing number of unmarried and childless adults.
“Really what we ought to be doing is the mainstream organizations that have mostly dealt with straight donors ought to be talking to me about how we have been dealing with single-individual households, and I ought to be talking to them about how they deal with families,” says Lorri Jean, head of the Los Angeles LGBT Center.
Between the marriage-equality ruling and the 2016 election, HRC saw fewer new donors and had weaker donor retention, even as the amount raised per donor continued to increase. Leaders there attribute the dip to a perception that the nonprofit’s mission was fulfilled.
Since the election, HRC has seen “huge increases in giving,” says Susan Paine, director of analytics and strategy in the organization’s fundraising office.
Cultural and political trends drive that growth more than the fact that more same-sex donors are marrying, she says, but it’s those donors’ “stories and lives that inspire us and help make the case for giving — that such progress could happen in our lifetimes, and that is all at risk.”
One concern is looming large for the years ahead: Bequests, long a strong source of donations for LGBTQ groups, might decrease.
“Frankly, we have been in a very fortunate position because a lot of people leaving estate gifts now are childless and may be single,” Ms. Paine says. “We do understand that dynamic may be changing.”
Increasingly complex family structures and nontraditional households pose new challenges for nonprofit fundraising.
More Families
Fundraisers at groups that work on LGBTQ causes have found that it’s their midlevel and big donors who are most likely to be in couples, married or otherwise. Many fundraisers have had to become experts at using records to correctly match donors with different names at the same address.
The Human Rights Campaign started to pay closer attention to demographic data about four years ago when it increasingly reached out to straight allies, a shift the organization saw as critical to its growth.
“We talked a lot more about family,” says Dane Grams, HRC’s membership director. “In doing that, we opened ourselves up to straight women and straight families, but we also have seen a big baby boom of LGBT couples having children and raising families in big, big numbers.”
Some direct-mail pieces were women-focused and touched on themes like imagining one’s children and grandchildren inhabiting a world in which everyone can feel comfortable being who they are.
Today, it’s common to see messages in HRC communications about husbands, wives, children, brothers, sisters, and schools, Ms. Paine says.
“We definitely use a lot more storytelling and family-focused messaging in our fundraising.”
Affect on Bequests
Ms. Jean, of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, says that for the first 15 years she worked on lesbian and gay causes, most of the donors she solicited did not have children and many were not interested in giving to other types of nonprofits.
That was a boon for bequests and other planned gifts, but Ms. Jean says the increase in LGBTQ families with kids will probably diminish such gifts eventually. She occasionally hears from donors who have had children that a smaller portion of their estates would be left to the center than would have been donated if they had not started families.
Still, she believes there remains untapped potential when it comes to securing planned gifts from LGBTQ people — and that predictions about how the societal shift will cut into fundraising for LGBTQ nonprofits are premature.
She notes, for example, that LGBTQ people have long made space in their wills for relatives — just for nieces, nephews, and other extended-family members rather than daughters and sons.
Over all, donations to the Los Angeles LGBT Center have consistently increased year over year, showing no ill effects from donors marrying and having children at increasing rates, Ms. Jean says. Annual revenue from fundraising approximately doubled to $17.8 million from 2010 to 2016, she says, and the group secured an additional $5 million in pledges last year as part of a capital campaign.
“Looking only at 2017, we have seen a significant bump that we attribute to reaction to Trump,” she says.
Successfully engaging donors is largely about speaking to individual needs and interests, Ms. Jean says. For example, when gay marriage became legal, she began talking more to supporters about things like financial planning and the tax consequences of marriage. When making the case to parents, she talks about setting an example for their kids through philanthropy.
Her organization, she says, is “trying to build a world where kids like theirs do not have to suffer discrimination, because regardless of the sexual orientation or the gender identity of the kids, kids of same-sex parents or gay parents or transgender parents still experience a lot of discrimination.”
