At the end of 2016, some nonprofits were “like a cash register, just ringing after the election,” in the words of one leader of a nonprofit advocacy group. And as the end of President Trump’s first year in office is nearing, he continues to help many charities — the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and United We Dream — raise significant sums and increase their staffs, including adding fundraisers, to keep up with growing demands.
Last week saw a big new gift aimed at helping people endangered by Trump administration policies: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, and his wife, MacKenzie, gave $33 million to TheDream.US to help undocumented immigrants brought to America as children attend college.
And Mr. Trump may have touched off a new round of giving to international charities after reports last week of his disparaging comments about Haiti and African nations in a negotiating session with members of Congress.
Partners in Health, a medical charity that works in Haiti and several African nations, ran a digital campaign beginning January 12 in response to the president’s comments. During the first four days of the drive, the charity raised three and a half times the amount it did during the same period in 2017, according to a spokeswoman.
“Anecdotally, when we test Trump versus non-Trump messages on email, we see higher donation volume and larger average gifts in response to the Trump-themed messages,” she said in an email to The Chronicle.
For all organizations that benefited from a “Trump bump” in giving, new challenges loom in 2018: persuading new supporters to give again and again, responding in real time to Twitter-fueled policy battles, a new tax law that could affect donations, and looming midterm elections that fundraisers fear could siphon off attention and support.
At PEN America, an advocacy group that promotes press freedom and raised 18 percent more last year than in 2016, Suzanne Nossel, executive director of PEN America, is worried that the midterms in particular could hurt giving in 2018. (Even though recent studies show that political donations don’t usually come at the expense of philanthropy.) But she believes her organization and others can keep their momentum going.
“People are fighting a sense of futility,” she says. “They feel, how do I play a role in the fight? If you can offer a way to do that, that’s inspiring and motivating.”
Ringing In a New Year
For some groups, the cash-register rings that started after the 2016 election just keep getting louder:
- United We Dream, focused on young immigrants, saw its fundraising triple last year and just hired its first director of development to help it keep support rolling as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, faces court and Capitol Hill battles. Roughly 71 percent of its online supporters are women, and about 70 percent are millennials.
Something it learned last year about its donors, according to Mina Devadas, its new top fundraiser: “Donors do not give because of the time of year. Where they gave most fervently was around the spikes of news coverage on immigration and DACA. They were responsive to what they cared about.”
- Rainn, which runs the National Sexual Assault Hotline and provides other services to assault and abuse survivors, said its support leaped “literally the day after Election Day” in 2016, says Scott Berkowitz, its president. Gifts slowed at midyear, but in the last three months of 2017, both donations — and demand for Rainn’s services — accelerated, he says, propelled by the #Metoo movement and the resulting media coverage of sexual harassment and assault.
Giving was up 50 percent in December over that month in 2016. But also in December, its hotline served more than 20,000 callers, compared with just over 14,000 at the beginning of 2017.
To keep up with the furious pace of both support and demand, the group has added 40 staff members since November and is still looking for more fundraisers.
- DonorsChoose, a nonprofit that connects supporters with teachers who seek money for classroom needs or projects, may not appear at first glance to be a candidate for a “Trump bump” in giving. But last year, it solicited and won seven-figure matching gifts from donors like Google co-founder Sergey Brin and LinkedIn chief executive Jeff Weiner that have helped finance thousands of projects aimed at serving immigrant and refugee children and fostering compassion.
The surge in interest in diversity topics, Mr. Best says, “was bottom-up at the same time it was top-down.” The number of diversity-related projects that sought support on DonorsChoose has grown by 66 percent since the presidential election, compared with the same time period the previous year.
New donors grew by 25 percent for the fiscal year, which ended in June, Mr. Best says.
Motivated Donors
Charities of a variety of missions say their supporters remain highly motivated.
At Tides Foundation, which helps donors connect with and support social-justice causes, officials are uncertain what impact the new federal tax law will have on their donors. (The new law doubles the standard deduction for taxpayers and thus eliminates an incentive for charitable giving for all but the wealthiest donors.)
But they’re not worried.
Tides’s high-net worth donors “have given far more than they can get back in taxes,” says Amanda Keton, managing director of the nonprofit’s Advocacy Fund. She’s not hearing from supporters that they plan to pull back on giving in 2018. “What we’re hearing is that they’re very energized, and they feel their philanthropy matters more than ever.”
One corporate donor, Credo Mobile, a telecommunications company that supports progressive causes, gave $1.8 million to groups last year, including the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the environmental nonprofit 350.org.
The company picks three charities to support each month and asks its data-plan members to vote online on what portion of that month’s roughly $150,000 grant should go to which nonprofit. Credo goes out of its way to find “groups that are doing good work but aren’t appearing in The New York Times all the time,” says Josh Nelson, the company’s deputy political director.
As an example, he cites Adapt, an advocacy group for people with disabilities, which staged protests on Capitol Hill last year — with many members in wheelchairs — against repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Adapt got nearly $50,000 from Credo in October.
“We’ve been throwing everything at the wall, like the Trump administration has been doing. It’s been like a new catastrophe every day,” Mr. Nelson says. “We can’t say, Hey, it’s the year of #MeToo, #TimesUp. We can’t ignore climate change and Black Lives Matter. We have to spread our contributions around to all our allies.”
The formula for charities to gain support in this climate is simple, he says: “We want them to take bold stands. We want them to fight with everything they have.”
Tweaking the Message
Nonprofits that work on progressive causes will need to evolve their messages this year to keep supporters engaged, moving toward a positive appeal, says Phil Hills, chief executive of Marts & Lundy, the fundraising consulting company.
“It’s a pretty good strategy to think about: Make sure you protect whatever hard things we fought to win, whether it’s climate change or civil rights,” Mr. Hills says. “That should be the message.”
Visitors to the Sierra Club’s website are still being greeted with a home page emblazoned with a rallying cry: “Fight Back. Protect America From Trump.” The organization, which expects its 2017 year-end fundraising will match its year-end 2016 results, has found continued success by balancing hard-nosed appeals with softer ones, says Mary Nemerov, Sierra Club’s chief advancement officer.
“People want both good news and to feel that their contribution stopped bad things,” she says.
So an appeal for support after Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced recommendations to scale back national-landmark protection for a number of sites, such as the Bears Ears Monument in Utah, performed well, recruiting 750 new monthly donors in two days and seeing a jump of 20 percent in online gifts over those same days in 2016. But, Ms. Nemerov adds, “we simultaneously got really strong response from our Adopt a Wild Animal program, where you donated and you got a stuffed animal.”
In communicating with new donors, the charity leader says, the organization has “been more attuned to the idea that some of these people aren’t lifelong environmentalists.” In appeals, it eschews shorthand terms and focuses on educating new supporters.
Tactics for 2018
A key to keeping new donors giving again, say fundraisers, is to demonstrate their gifts are making a difference.
To retain thousands of new donors and volunteers, the sexual-assault group Rainn keeps them informed about its work. The group has racked up legislative progress, Mr. Berkowitz says, including action on extending statutes of limitations on sexual crimes in several states and the passage of a federal bill that would increase the use of DNA in prosecuting rape cases.
“After the initial gift, which may be based on passion, you have to show them what you have accomplished with their funds,” Mr. Berkowitz says.
His organization is also planning to expand its work to persuade people to give regularly throughout the year: The number of monthly givers grew about 400 percent last year. Fundraisers at United We Dream and the Sierra Club also say they plan to pour more resources into monthly giving promotions, heartened by how those programs accelerated last year.
At the Sierra Club, the number of monthly donors zoomed from 37,000 before the election to well over 90,000 now. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought we’d have so many in such a short time frame,” Ms. Nemerov says.
PEN America hired a new membership senior manager to help further professionalize its work to keep donors engaged and foster membership renewals. “That’s making a difference,” Ms. Nossel says. Members are asked to write to the organization to tell why they joined. Once a week, she says, PEN’s membership senior manager reads some of those notes to staff members. Pending approval by membership vote, this year the organization will merge with the PEN Center, which has a similar mission. “I reached out to my counterpart in Los Angeles and said, ‘Given what we’re up against, would you and your colleagues consider joining forces?’ "
Going Viral
Two of the biggest benefactors of the “Trump bump,” the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, are turning to technology to help keep supporters excited for the fights ahead.
The ACLU has attracted 1.2 million new donors since the election, boosting its membership roster to more than 1.6 million, according to Mark Wier, the nonprofit’s chief development officer. Giving has cooled slightly: Online contributions were down 16 percent last month from December 2016.
For the 2018 fiscal year, which ends in March, the organization expects to take in $220 million, down from the $300 million of the previous fiscal year. But that’s still far ahead of the $120 million raised in fiscal 2016.
The ACLU’s new supporters have an average age of 53, compared with 68 before Mr. Trump’s election. Its donor pool is now 67 percent women, compared with the near 50-50 split between genders previously. The organization plans to invest heavily this year in data and analytics to help it communicate with and mobilize its members, Mr. Wier says. In March, the ACLU is unveiling new “plug and play” resources for its members to start their own peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.
“If I could go back in time, I would have had a peer-to-peer program before the election,” he says.
All that communication is aimed at achieving policy goals, Mr. Wier says. “We’re being more bold in asking our members to hold their lawmakers accountable for civil liberties and civil rights.”
Planned Parenthood, which also saw a tsunami of new support — 700,000 new donors since November 2016 — is also using technology to help harness its donors’ activist energies, according to Jethro Miller, the nonprofit’s chief development officer.
Last year the nonprofit started a digital organizing program called the Defenders, through which dedicated supporters can organize in-person meetups and social-media campaigns. Tweets that Defenders sent in late November to oppose a Trump administration effort to roll back part of the Affordable Care Act “drove more than 250,000 people to join our campaign to protect birth-control access,” Mr. Miller said in a statement to The Chronicle.
He added, “We’re finding new and innovative ways to engage with these donors, so they continue to fuel the resistance that’s still going strong.”
