The black-tie gala had been scheduled nine months earlier. A Park Avenue venue with a ballroom and arcade had been rented. The charity had assembled a murderers’ row of comedic talent — Seth Meyers, John Oliver, George Lopez, Hasan Minhaj — to entertain some 400 invitees. A menu featuring chicken Milanese with lemon caper sauce and saffron arancini had been chosen. With tickets starting at $1,500 each, staff hoped to raise seven figures.
Then, the night before, the unexpected happened. Donald Trump won the presidency — the same candidate who had campaigned to bring back dirty coal plants and called climate change a Chinese hoax. Suddenly, the work of the charity, Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the country’s largest environmental nonprofits, was thrown into upheaval — and no one felt much like attending a comedy event.
Today, at nonprofits dedicated to civil liberties, the environment, reproductive rights, and many other issues at odds with Mr. Trump and his agenda, a war-room mentality has set in. As donations pour in — and nonprofits like the American Civil Liberties Union smash fundraising records as they fight Mr. Trump’s earliest executive orders — charities are trying to overcome meager scenario planning for a Trump presidency; pivot to defensive strategies in Washington; plot possible paths for state and local progress; secure their operations from safety threats and harassment; retain and mobilize new donors; and build on a rising tide of civic engagement.
People have had to scramble to adjust to a world in which the most fundamental things they care about are under assault.
‘Feeling Shell-Shocked’
The night had started to sour around 9 or 10, with Mr. Trump pulling ahead in Florida and Michigan. At 12:15 a.m., when his path to victory seemed all but assured, senior NRDC officials got on the phone to discuss next steps. They pressed forward on a media event that day with the Sierra Club and other environmental groups. Staff members started to finalize a predrafted email to supporters about Mr. Trump’s win, one they had expected to send to the digital trash heap.
After four hours of sleep, David Goldston, director of government affairs, logged into his work computer to find a document listing recommendations of staff members for a Clinton administration. He clicked it closed.
Anders Yang, who’d joined NRDC as its chief development officer in the San Francisco office less than a month earlier, trudged from his hotel to the group’s Manhattan headquarters. He’d come to the job with plans to focus on building a campaign for the group’s 50th anniversary in 2020 but mentally shifted that work from the front burner.
At 11:20 a.m., NRDC hit send on the email. “Feeling shell-shocked is an appropriate response,” it said, before noting that the charity had “a far more potent combination of grassroots activism, courtroom power, lobbying expertise and media outreach than we ever have had before.” Donations began to roll in.
Staff members gathered in ninth- and 12th-floor conference rooms near Madison Square Park and through a videoconference from at least four other offices. Pizza was ordered. People cried. Top officials including Rhea Suh, the group’s president since January 2015, reminded employees that environmentalists had faced hostile administrations before.
As evening fell, NRDC’s senior staff members slid apprehensively into their dining-room seats on Park Avenue alongside wealthy patrons and a few celebrities. The house was packed. Mr. Meyers, the longtime Saturday Night Live writer who’d headlined NRDC’s Night of Comedy events in past years, had scrambled that day to rewrite his jokes. “You definitely want to be playing a Manhattan room the night after a Trump victory to save the environment, ’cause everybody’s in a fantastic mood,” he said. And later: “Alicia Machado had an incredible story, but she shouldn’t have been mentioned more than Earth,” he joked, referring to the former beauty-pageant contestant whom Mr. Trump had derided as “Miss Piggy.” “I get that she’s Miss Universe, and Earth is just one of the planets.”
With Mr. Trump now in the White House, NRDC is moving to add digital advocacy and development staff, bolster its litigation team, and expand fundraising for its advocacy arm.
Under Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, chief program officer, a battle plan has taken shape designed to maximize the group’s ability to defend existing environmental rules in Washington while making gains locally and overseas. The group is also trying to inspire many of its donors — who gave four times as many gifts in the two months after the election as they had over the same period the previous year.
More Lawyers
Similar conversations are underway at nonprofits of all sorts. “People have had to scramble to adjust to a world in which the most fundamental things they care about are under assault,” says Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, a network of progressive donors. “Every house in town is burning.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations is launching a $5 million defense fund, setting up a hotline for reporting discrimination and hate crimes, sharpening its focus on ethnic and religious profiling and on immigration and deportations, and even filing a lawsuit Monday challenging Trump’s travel ban. Sierra Club plans to add lawyers to fight rollbacks to federal environmental regulations and local staff to help utilities transition to renewables and make other climate-change gains. The ACLU plans on making 50 to 100 new hires this year. The Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal and advocacy group, is preparing for possible litigation in four key areas — national security and Guantanamo-related human-rights issues; racial and religious profiling; immigration; and crackdowns on dissent.
“Under the Obama administration we were more like a teaching hospital in terms of civil and human rights,” says Vincent Warren, the center’s executive director. “And under the Trump administration, we’re really organizing ourselves more like an emergency room, the idea that you don’t know exactly what’s going to come walking in the door, but you still have to be ready for it.”
So far, donors have stepped up in a big way. Sierra Club acquired 26,000 new monthly donors in November and December, a 16-fold increase over the same period in 2015. One-time gifts in December totaled $4 million, double the previous year. Planned Parenthood recorded a 40-fold increase in giving the month after the election, with about a quarter of the gifts — 82,000 — contributed in the name of the future vice president (and abortion foe), Mike Pence. Council on American-Islamic Relations saw a roughly 300 percent increase in giving, and Center for Constitutional Rights tripled the number of new donors compared with the same period last year. NRDC acquired 55,919 new online donors compared with 4,050 during the same period in 2015.
The fundraising boost is akin to the cash infusion that relief groups typically receive after a natural disaster, says Leslie Lenkowsky, an Indiana University expert on philanthropy and public affairs. Nonprofits have to start planning ahead for leaner times, he says. But for now, Mr. Trump remains the most potent fundraising tool for left-leaning and progressive organizations. “I don’t think we’ve seen the end of our Trump bump yet,” says Mr. Warren. “There’s an opportunity to gain new supporters with every Tweet he sends.”
Nonprofits could also find themselves, not just their work, in the cross hairs of Mr. Trump and his allies. House Speaker Paul Ryan has already announced his intention to defund Planned Parenthood; threats could also come from surveillance tools, a politicized Internal Revenue Service, or congressional investigations. On- and offline harassment has been rising, too, groups say, and charities including the Sierra Club and Center for Constitutional Rights are assessing their security protocols and taking extra precautions.
Nonprofits also want to tap into the mounting public outrage over Mr. Trump that inspired street protests after the election, the Women’s March on Washington, and protests in cities nationwide this past weekend in response to his travel ban. Dozens of groups, including Amnesty International, Planned Parenthood, Sierra Club, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance, signed on as partners in the march.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club, along with groups such as Green Latinos, the NAACP, and the Service Employees International Union, are organizing a climate march in Washington this April similar to 2014’s New York event, says its executive director, Michael Brune. More than 5,000 people signed up to volunteer with Council on American-Islamic Relations following the election and that number is growing. The group is hiring a manager of volunteers and other new staff to engage those supporters, according to its executive director, Nihad Awad.
But liberal and progressive groups may face difficulty in activating the grass-roots, in part because they lack the infrastructure of their conservative counterparts. Progressive organizations are concentrated on the coasts. And they have historically underinvested in black and Latino communities and done very little to build ties with the white, working-class voters who helped propel Mr. Trump, says Mr. LaMarche. That needs to change, and fast. “People are desperate to play an individual role in this movement, and we may lack the vehicles to mobilize them, but we have to develop them quickly.”
Conference Calls and Emails
As NRDC readies for courtroom battles over the emissions-cutting rule known as the Clean Power Plan, and other issues, it’s in one sense returning to its roots. The organization was founded in 1970 by a group of lawyers as a sort of NAACP-style legal defense fund for the environment. Today, though, it’s a $150 million organization with roughly 500 employees spread across seven offices.
Some of its leaders are relatively new. Ms. Suh, a former foundation and Interior Department official who declined an interview for this article, has been on the job two years. Six top fundraisers — more than a 10th of the development staff — have started since the summer. In the coming months, the group hopes to bring on additional fundraisers and marketers with digital, major-gift, and other expertise. Those workers will join at a time of unprecedented threats but also rare marketing and mobilizing opportunities.
Since November 9, NRDC has been ramping up its communications to supporters and the broader public. Five days after the election, the group sent a second email to supporters, a direct fundraising appeal, noting Mr. Trump’s promise to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, approve the Keystone XL Pipeline, and zero out clean-energy funding. That same day, Mr. Oliver, the comedian, highlighted the work of NRDC and several other nonprofits on his first post-election show, providing a fundraising boost. After Giving Tuesday, NRDC sent a more detailed email with the basic outlines of its anti-Trump battle plan.
Sierra Club acquired 26,000 new monthly donors in November and December, a 16-fold increase over the same period in 2015.
The group held two conference calls for members with its leader and top program staff. On December 6, the organization published a full-page ad in The New York Times designed to get its name and vision before the paper’s 500,000-plus weekday print readers. Like the Sierra Club and other environmental groups, NRDC kept donors informed about good news, too: President Obama’s decisions to ban drilling in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic and protect Bears Ears Buttes in Utah, for example.
All told, between the election and early January, the group sent 47 emails to members, a roughly 15 percent jump over the same period last year. “I don’t see oversaturation as a threat,” says Ben Smith, senior director of digital advocacy and fundraising. “If anything, [members] are looking to us for more effective messaging and really clear guidance.”
NRDC is investing in recruiting donors by email and social media. After the election, it saw first-time supporters give in large numbers through Facebook — a few thousand a month compared with just a few dozen before, Mr. Smith says. The group is also developing new “click to call” online tools that make it easier to prod supporters to both sign petitions and call legislators. NRDC is organizing more offline advocacy, too, in the form of webinars and briefings, and it’s also culling through election data to analyze lessons.
Sierra Club, meanwhile, is surveying some of its supporters who voted for Mr. Trump in an effort to shape an environmental message that resonates with all Americans, says Mr. Brune.
Mr. Goldston, NRDC’s director of government affairs, says the environmental movement is stronger today because of Keystone, the Clean Power Plan, and other climate-change battles of recent years. He says the goal will be to ensure a public backlash that will persuade the Trump administration and Congress that “anti-environmental battles are not the best place to spend your political capital.”
Mr. LaMarche, meanwhile, urges progressive organizations to fight their individual battles while still finding way to collaborate. “There has to be an overarching sense of shared concern,” he says. “Everyone can’t work on every issue, but there has to be a shared sense of how all these issues fit together into a whole narrative about Trump and what he plans to do.”
