What You Can Learn From an Ambitious Joint Fundraising Campaign

Six years after a district court order stopped the Trump administration’s family-separation policy and required it to reunify immigrant families, a handful of immigration nonprofits are still working to bring families back together and provide them with legal aid and services.

“We all know each other and are in touch,” says Hannah Chotiner-Gardner, chief development officer at Kids In Need of Defense, or KIND.

Now, those groups are staring down a deadline.

In December 2023, the settlement of Ms. L v. ICE, a lawsuit over the family-separation policy, granted review of asylum claims for most separated families and gave them until December 2025 to apply for it. The government may expedite review for some of these claims during the two-year window. The settlement, however, did not equip families with lawyers to help them navigate the asylum process. Immigrant advocates quickly grasped that they would have to fill that gap.

With the deadline in mind, six immigration-rights nonprofits started talking to each other and decided to take an unorthodox approach: raise money together to provide legal support for families.

Their reasoning: Winning asylum isn’t easy. In the 2022 financial year, just 22 percent of all asylum claims were granted. Formerly separated families would need legal support to make strong claims, advocates say. And with some 5,000 children and parents potentially applying for protection, there is a lot of work to do — more than a single nonprofit can accomplish on its own.

“The clock is ticking,” says Chotiner-Gardner. “We’re going to be far more effective if we pool our resources and work together.”

The six nonprofits banding together are Al Otro Lado, Justice in Motion, KIND, National Immigration Project, Together & Free, and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.

Led by Kelly Albinak Kribs, co-director of the technical assistance program at the Young Center, and Kate Wheatcroft, founder of Together & Free, the nonprofits discussed what support they could offer families, how much work they could get done in two years, and how much money they needed to pay for it. They settled on a $3 million fundraising goal to cover legal aid for 500 cases and signed a memorandum of understanding to guide the campaign. The effort launched on February 12 and will conclude on June 1. To date, the groups have raised $1.75 million.

While unusual, the collaborative approach has impressed grant makers, representatives at the nonprofits say.

“When they are being asked for the same thing six different times in six different ways from six different organizations — who are all saying, ‘We’re the ones doing the work’ — that gets old,” says Wheatcroft. “In this case, we are all the ones doing the work and we’re all acknowledging that and saying, ‘We can work together to get this done.’ And I think that’s so refreshing for funders.”

The Chronicle spoke to representatives at five of the six groups about how to successfully plan and execute a collaborative fundraising campaign. Here’s what they say their peers need to know.

Structure Your Campaign

This wasn’t the first time Together & Free collaborated with other groups to raise money, Wheatcroft says. Past efforts were informal — nothing like the structured campaign she’s helping lead now. That’s thanks to Kribs, a lawyer who Wheatcroft says added scaffolding and process to the effort.

Kribs asked each group how much work they had capacity to do and what that work would cost. Out of that came a memorandum of understanding, signed by all parties, which set a $3 million fundraising goal and broke down how much of that money each group will receive.

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Although Wheatcroft initially thought the groups should start fundraising immediately, rather than taking the time to first make a plan and divide up tasks, she says she’s glad they started by creating the memorandum of understanding.

“It solidified what each person was doing for the amount of money that they were receiving,” Wheatcroft says. “That always creates accountability, and I think it creates unity.”

Included in the memorandum of understanding is a system to divide up the money if the nonprofits fall short of their goal.

Although the nonprofits agreed that groups that could take on more cases would receive more funds, every group agreed to put the same effort into appealing for donations.

“Everybody would engage in social media promotion. Everybody would help get attendees to webinars. Everybody would email their major-donor list and try to fundraise. Everybody would share the list of institutions that had funded this work over the last five years,” Chotiner-Gardner says. “It’s been incredibly collaborative.”

By sharing their major donor and foundation contacts, the nonprofits have cast a wider net for support of their work. Each group was responsible for communicating with their individual donor and grant-maker contacts to eliminate cold calls and make use of each nonprofit’s established relationships.

“The lack of competition and ego is really lovely,” Chotiner-Gardner says.

Create a Unified Communications Strategy

The nonprofits involved say the campaign’s coordinated, unified message has been key to its success. The groups join a call each Friday to update each other on the campaign’s traction in the media, with donors, and with grant makers.

“One of us created a spreadsheet, where we keep track of who’s pitching to whom and the status of each [media] pitch,” says Melissa Flores, communications manager at Al Otro Lado.

All six nonprofits draw from the same pool of graphics and language to promote the campaign in direct appeals to donors and foundations and on social media. Before the campaign launched, a few staff members at different groups volunteered to produce that content and submit it to the campaign team for approval. After a week of review and edits, they dropped the files into a shared folder where every nonprofit can access them as needed.

KIND

Central to the campaign’s message is the fact that this opportunity is time-limited. The participating nonprofits hope that urgency will shake some donors and grant makers out of their donor fatigue. Wheatcroft says donors passionately funded family-reunification work six years ago, but have since rerouted their dollars to other causes. “A lot of people are worn out on it,” she says.

The groups, Chotiner-Gardner says, are telling grant makers, “This is how this ends. We have two years to get as many families as we can, not only aware of the settlement benefits, but registered. And then that door closes.”

Emphasizing the urgency has helped grant makers understand that this is the last time they’ll be asked to fund efforts to reunify families who were separated under the zero-tolerance policy, Chotiner-Gardner says.

Margaret Benze, development manager at Al Otro Lado, has put in extra effort to explain the collaborative nature of this campaign to individual donors. “The [donation] link went to Together & Free, which is not what we would ever do, typically. We always tell people to give to Al Otro Lado,” she says. “It took some explanation.”

When promoting the campaign to individual donors, Benze says she emphasizes the unique opportunity of the Ms. L settlement. “We really made the point that this is about the families. There is a time limit. This isn’t about each individual organization,” she says.

There were at least two donors who said they weren’t comfortable giving to a different organization, and chose to give directly to Al Otro Lado, rather than the collaborative campaign. Overall, however, Benze says once the nonprofit made the impact of donations front-and-center, donors got it.

Pick Your Moments and Partners Carefully

The nonprofits involved in this effort emphasize the pleasure and efficacy of working with peers to meet a shared goal. But it isn’t appropriate, necessary, or even possible for every fundraising effort to be collaborative. This $3 million campaign works, participants say, because it has strong leaders in Kribs and Wheatcroft, and because the nonprofits involved have previously worked together on other projects.

“I could see all sorts of things going wrong with something like this,” says Cathleen Caron, executive director of Justice in Motion. “It really depends on the leadership.”

This collaborative campaign not only has the benefit of effective, transparent leaders, but also participants who know each other and a discrete goal that is time-limited. As Caron puts it, there is “no hidden agenda.”

Because of all this, the participating groups have felt comfortable throwing out the dusty philanthropy playbook and designing something new. “The way philanthropy is set up is very much more competition than collaboration,” Caron says. “There’s no question the way it’s currently structured limits all of our impacts.”

Working together on this fundraising goal has created more opportunities for collaboration. “It’s brought us together to talk about more than just money,” says Erin Anderson, managing attorney at Al Otro Lado. She and other lawyers plan to keep in touch once they start compiling asylum claims so that they can pool their knowledge and help each other work through similar issues. That support network is rare for lawyers working on family-separation cases, which are novel, traumatic, and technical.

“We’ve all been kind of operating on our own little islands,” Anderson says. “It feels like we’re really coming together now to try to make sure all these families are represented and win asylum.”

Chotiner-Gardner, the chief fundraiser at KIND, says the campaign has opened her eyes to other opportunities for collaboration in fundraising.

During moments of urgent needs, Chotiner-Gardner says, fundraisers should consider whether there’s room to put aside the traditional, competitive approach to fundraising. Chotiner-Gardner encourages fundraisers to ask themselves, “What is the ultimate goal, and how can we be stronger and more together, as opposed to apart?”