Fundraising Update

Welcome to Fundraising Update. This week, four Latino fundraisers share how they are raising more money thanks to help from an affinity group. Plus, the state of giving this year is looking up, according to new reports.

I’m Emily Haynes, senior reporter at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. If you have ideas, comments, or questions about this newsletter, please write me.

Thanks to our sponsor DonorPerfect for supporting Fundraising Update.

We’ll be taking a break from the newsletter next week, but we’ll be back in your inboxes on April 10 with news from this year’s AFP ICON conference.

‘We Are On The Right Path’

This week, you’ll get to hear from a fundraiser in her own words. Four fundraisers spoke with me about how membership in Somos El Poder — a professional development organization for Latino fundraisers — helped them hone their skills and raise more money. Long-time fundraiser Armando Zumaya founded the member organization for Latino fundraisers in 2022. The goal was to offer professional development resources and opportunities for fundraisers to connect with one another. Since then, fundraisers from roughly 140 organizations have joined the group. This newsletter will spotlight the experience of one of those fundraisers, Monica Vasquez.

In 2021, Vasquez opened a letter from a former Eisenhower Health patient that enclosed a check for $86. Handwritten in Spanish, the letter read, “This isn’t a lot, but I give it with lots of love.” The gift got Vasquez thinking: How many more Latino donors were willing to make gifts like this?

Vasquez, then director of donor engagement and events at Eisenhower Health Foundation, a nonprofit hospital in California’s Coachella Valley, started researching her community’s demographics and putting together a case for launching a small-dollar fundraising program aimed at Latino former patients. She pitched the idea to the president of the foundation and the chief executive of the hospital and got the green light in 2022.

Ruth Castillo, LO Boston

But Vasquez was new to fundraising, so she turned to Somos El Poder for help designing the program. With the help of Somos El Poder, Vasquez has cultivated the skills she needs to build a program dedicated to winning large and small gifts from the Latino community in Coachella Valley. The Chronicle spoke with Vasquez about how Somos El Poder is helping her professionalize her development program and raise more money. Here is her story, as told to the Chronicle. Her words have been edited for clarity and brevity.

I presented this idea about raising money specifically from the Latino community, not knowing how or when to do it. The foundation and hospital leaders said yes to the concept. Almost immediately, I joined Somos El Poder and started taking advantage of the online courses and being able to reach Armando directly. I talked him through my thought process as I designed the program, and he told me about lessons that he had learned along his fundraising career. I was able to gain so much knowledge from the Somos El Poder community, and I continue to. There are times when something isn’t working out the way I thought it would, and I get discouraged. But then I go to these Somos El Poder classes, and I get re-inspired.

In Somos El Poder classes, the presenters literally speak your language. I attended a webinar about how to build a grateful-patient fundraising program. The presenter gave me some ideas about how to talk to prospective donors. Recently, I attended another webinar led by a fundraiser who talked about how she inspires working-class donors to give and the type of events that she organizes.

You would think that someone like myself who has extensive knowledge of events would find it easy to plan them for my program. But when you step into the role of a fundraiser, you want to be clear on not just the type of event that you’re going to do, but who you’re going to invite and what you’re going to say to them.

Armando helped me recruit an advisory board to build the fundraising program that became Latinos in Philanthropy. There are 10 board members, all very successful business people within the community. In January of 2023, I held a reception for the advisory board. They invited their friends, and I invited other members of the business community. I pitched the idea for a program to raise money from Latino former patients and community members, and it started to inspire people. They wanted to be part of this.

I launched my first fundraising project in October of 2023 at my second gathering with members of the local business community. People kept saying, “I want to be part of Latinos in Philanthropy.” It just started snowballing. My goal was to raise $500,000. I gave myself until June of 2024 to reach that goal.

As of January 2024, I have raised just over $100,000, and I’m still continuing conversations with a few donors who can give $10,000 or more. A couple of people are looking to give $50,000 to $100,000. I wasn’t expecting that. My original idea had been to build a grateful-patient program for Latinos. I still plan to do that, but it’ll take me a little bit longer. Now, I’m concentrating on sitting down with business owners who can give at the major-gift level.

Somos El Poder gave me the tools to know who I should be cultivating as donors. It also helps to know that other organizations are doing what you’re doing. It reinforces that yes, we are on the right path, and it’s okay to do what we’re doing. Somos El Poder helped me tune into the Latina in me.

For testimonies from three other members of Somos El Poder, read the full article.

Need to Know

– The inflation-adjusted rate by which researchers project philanthropy will grow, according to a new report.

The fundraising outlook in a new report from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and consulting firm CCS Fundraising is a stark contrast from the negative news in last year’s backward-looking “Giving USA” report, says Peter Hoskow, principal at CCS. “I think fundraisers should use this as an optimistic tool and gear their plans, their goal setting, and their resourcing outlook according to a promising view that overall philanthropy will increase — and pretty handsomely.”

The “Philanthropy Outlook 2024-2025” bases its projections on anticipated growth in personal income, above-average growth in the previous years’ S&P 500, and average growth in net worth. Historically, those indicators are strong predictors of giving, says Jon Bergdoll, statistician for the report. He says the report’s projections feel more straightforward after several unpredictable years that included tax changes to charitable giving, the pandemic, and surges in inflation.

“Nice and boring economically is the look right now,” he says, noting that the more normal data makes it “a little easier” to make projections, “versus these wild, once-in-a-generation things.”

Individual giving is expected to increase by 2.6 percent in 2024 and 3.4 percent in 2025, when adjusted for inflation. While the amount individuals give is predicted to rise, the researchers anticipate that it will fall as a share of overall giving. Individual giving is projected to fall to 63.1 percent of overall giving in 2024 and to 62.8 percent in 2025 — down from 64 percent in 2022, the most recent year for which Giving USA has shared data.

Despite the forecast, it’s important to remember that individuals make up the largest share of the giving pie, says Anna Pruitt, project manager for the report.

“Even though we’re seeing this longer-term trend of individual giving not growing quite as quickly as the other sources of giving, it’s still by far the majority,” she says. Estate giving — which the report predicts will account for 8.4 percent of giving in 2024 — comes from individuals, she says, so if you combine that with the specifically labeled individual giving, “it represents more than 70 percent of the giving.”

Giving by foundations is expected to grow by 10.3 percent in 2024 and 5.3 percent in 2025. Hoskow advises nonprofits to evaluate their grant-seeking strategies to make sure they’re being effective during this time when such big growth is expected.

Pruitt and Bergdoll remind nonprofits that these are predictions, and unexpected changes — like a recession or amended tax laws impacting charitable giving — could affect how giving will unfold during the next two years.

For findings from two other reports that suggest a positive fundraising outlook — including a spot check on donor confidence — read the full article.

Plus …

• Fundraising and Machine Learning. While artificial intelligence often gets all the press these days, a subset of A.I. — machine learning — got a little love at last week’s Imagine Nonprofit Conference, sponsored by Amazon Web Services, my colleague Rasheeda Childress reports.

  The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts uses machine learning — a process where computers analyze a lot of data for patterns — to cull its database of “more than 5 million records,” says Sarah Wilber, vice president of strategic initiatives. The program has been tasked to find: “who is most likely to give a gift of $15,000 or higher in the next 36 months.” The responses have given gift officers better prospects.

  “The very first run yielded 1,800 potential new prospects from our database, and 1,100 of them were names we had never looked at before,” Wilber said. “These were people that were sitting in our database that we had never thought to contact.”

  The Kennedy Center has been pairing the discovered prospects with gift officers to tap into the potential donors. Wilber says the machine learning program gives updated lists monthly with an “85 percent accurate rate of what the file yields.” Using the system, Wilber hopes to achieve sustainable fundraising revenue from a “diversified pipeline.” (Background: Wilber discussed the beginnings of the program in our data story last year.)

Gift of the Week

Eugenia and Michael Brin, the parents of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, gave $27.2 million to the University of Maryland at College Park through the Brin Family Foundation to enhance programs in the university’s math department.

Of the total, $25 million will endow the Brin Mathematics Research Center, which the couple established with a $4.75 million gift in 2021. An additional $2 million will create a new endowed chair in mathematics, and $200,000 will be used to test the Brin Maryland Mathematics Camp summer program for high-school students from the state.

The couple both taught at the university for years. Michael Brin is a professor emeritus of mathematics. Eugenia Brin is a retired research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

For other notable gifts this week, read my colleague Maria Di Mento’s Gifts Roundup column. To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly and has data going back to 2000.

Advice and Opinion

What Do Donor Revolts Mean for Fundraising? Nonprofits may face a new set of demands over naming rights and other issues.

MacKenzie Scott, Stop Ignoring Small Nonprofits Like the One I Founded at Age 13 (Opinion) Ninety-two percent of organizations — including mine — have budgets of less than $1 million and know what their communities need most. But Scott and others make it impossible for us to get needed funds.

What We’re Reading

Arts organizations around the country are struggling to draw the same number of season ticket-holders that they had before the pandemic. In Pittsburgh, some arts groups are rethinking what subscriptions look like. The Pittsburgh Opera, for example, recently rolled out the Opus Pass, which provides subscribers unlimited access to the opera for $20 per month. Opus Pass holders can secure best-available, non-premium seats for as many performances as they’d like. The opera predicts that those who have been season ticket-holders in the past will continue to choose that model, but it hopes that the Opus Pass will attract new audiences interested in lower-priced opera tickets. To date, pass-holders have contributed $10,000 in ticket revenue. While it’s too early to tell if these changes will attract new audiences, researchers at the consulting firm JCA Arts Marketing have found that more flexible plans that allow subscribers to purchase discounted tickets to a handful of events — rather than sign up for a whole season — are generally more popular. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)