Some of 2017’s biggest philanthropic gifts came with instructions almost as precious as the money itself: Do what you want with this — we trust you.
Donors made at least 15 unrestricted charitable contributions of at least $1 million last year, eight of them above $10 million, according to a Chronicle tally. They made just six gifts of $1 million or more in 2016 and only one that topped $10 million.
This doesn’t suggest a trend — unrestricted gifts remain hard to come by, fundraisers say — but donors may be more predisposed to them than you might think. Nearly three-quarters of high-net-worth individuals in a 2016 U.S. Trust survey said they made their largest gift with no strings attached.
So how do charities lay the groundwork for landing such contributions? Here’s advice from experts and some of the institutions that received unrestricted gifts.
Ask for them. A year into the public phase of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s $5 billion campaign, President Rafael Reif wrote to donors specifically asking for unrestricted dollars. He says such contributions represent a gift of confidence — “confidence in the mission, power, and people of MIT to do good for the nation and the world.”
MIT last year received a $140 million contribution from an anonymous donor. On its campaign website, the university describes unrestricted funds as “the vital fuel that helps big ideas take off.”
Point out the limits of restricted gifts. Donors who make contributions free of conditions realize that circumstances may change. A gift today to train students in a certain technology, for instance, could quickly lose value if that technology becomes obsolete.
Donors could achieve greater success if they don’t hamstring organizations with rules, says Lowell Weiss, president of Cascade Philanthropy Advisors. Instead, he says, donors ought to be treated like business investors who bet on building sustainable organizations.
“The best commercial investors don’t say to companies, ‘We’ll give you money, but you can only use it for adding new machinery,’ " he says. “They put trust in the leadership of the organization to direct the resources to the areas that will yield the strongest results.”
Inspire confidence. Big donors must have deep trust in the organization, says Michael Andreasen, University of Oregon’s vice president for advancement. He worked with a donor (or donors — he wouldn’t say which) who gave Oregon $50 million in 2017, no strings attached.
The gift followed years of tumult. In 2014, the university and other Oregon public colleges were untethered from the state’s university system, to be governed by new, autonomous boards. The University of Oregon’s current president, Michael Schill, is the institution’s fifth leader since 2011.
In 2016, a year after Mr. Schill took over, Nike co-founder Phil Knight donated $500 million to build a new science campus in Eugene. The running-shoe magnate’s contribution gave other donors confidence that the university had a workable strategy as a stand-alone public institution, Mr. Andreasen says.
Show results. Even with unrestricted gifts, most donors want to know their money is providing specific benefits. In addition to its daily articles, ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization, periodically publishes on its website summaries of the actions resulting from its reporting — such as passage of new laws governing New York City police-department practices resulting from the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series with the New York Daily News on noise-abatement evictions.
“It’s much easier to track the results of your giving to us because the outcomes are instantly very public,” says Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s president.
Fifteen of the 20 largest gifts to ProPublica have been unrestricted, including a $1 million contribution last year from Craig Newmark, founder of Craig’s List.
Use one gift to encourage others. MIT certainly believes in this: It sent the note from Mr. Reif on the same day it announced the $140 million anonymous gift.
Usually fundraisers are sheepish about asking for an unrestricted gift. But Oregon’s Mr. Andreasen says last year’s big contribution made it easier for his development team to tell smaller donors: “Boy, it’s good enough for them, maybe it’s good enough for you.”
Large donors still prefer to give to specific programs and scholarships, often based on their own experience at the university. But that isn’t stopping Oregon fundraisers from raising the issue with new assertiveness.
“My guess is that we’re not going to see a series of large, million-dollar unrestricted gifts,” he predicts. “But there is a moment to introduce something new into the dialogue, and we intend to take advantage of it. We’re talking about it in a way we haven’t for a while.”
Donors must have faith in the organization’s leaders. Business executive Larry Gies and his wife, Beth — who ranked No. 14 on the Chronicle’s ranking of the 50 biggest donors from 2017 — gave $150 million to the business school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but only after reassurances that the school’s leaders planned to stick around.
The Chronicle’s 18th annual ranking of America’s biggest donors.
At an early meeting, Mr. Gies made it clear to Jeffrey Brown, the dean of what was later christened the Gies College of Business, and Robert Metzger, a former business associate who is a lecturer at the school, that he was banking on them personally.
“He looked at us both and said, ‘How long are you planning on being in these roles?’ " Mr. Brown remembers.
Like Oregon’s Mr. Schill, Mr. Brown was a relative newcomer to the job hoping to make a mark. In his first 18 months, he developed a plan to improve the student experience there, launch new programs in addition to the traditional MBA, attract faculty, and introduce online postgraduate degrees.
Mr. Brown says Mr. Gies, who declined an interview request, shared his go-for-it attitude and felt comfortable that the dean had made some early headway.
“I had been in the position short enough to have a new vision but long enough to have progress to show against it,” Mr. Brown says. “He finds people he believes in, and he invests in them. He doesn’t micromanage. He said, ‘You as a dean know better than I do how to move the school forward.’ "
Turn to loyal donors, even if they haven’t made a big gift previously. Though Mr. Gies hadn’t made any huge gifts to Illinois before, he was a regular donor and is deeply committed to the university, Mr. Brown says. He’s returned to campus to guest lecture nearly every year since he graduated in 1988.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for big, unrestricted gifts. Instead, fundraisers should work to secure donations tied to the organization’s priorities, says Ronald Schiller, a fundraising consultant and author of Raising Your Organization’s Largest Gifts, out later this year. That takes building close relationships in which donors play a role in developing the institution’s vision.
“There is no ‘us and them,’ " he says. “The donor is just as much a part of the institution as the president. They have as much claim on creating the future of the organization as any paid staff member does."n
