BR!CK Award/Grants Alumni Call Minutes

Topic: Bringing in the Bills: How to be a Successful Fundraiser Guest Speaker: Susan Davies, Senior Director of Capital Requests, American Cancer Society

Date: August 21, 2007

1. Introduction: Sue Davies

-Has raised 28 million dollars throughout a 19 year career
-Works in the area of institutional funding
-Has worked with the Lymphatic Research Foundation, the NYC Board of Health, and in on the Board of Directors for the All-Stars Program

2. 11 Great Take-Away Point

1. Be Firm. In doing so, people may have more confidence in you and your cause.

2. Become incorporated as a 501(c)3. There are tons of advantages to having this for your organization, or having an incorporated sponsor.

3. Stay organized. It is greatly beneficial to have a budget for the year and your projects. It will help to legitimize your work to potential donors.

4. Look for connections. Find out of any one you know (parents, neighbors, etc.) have a connection in the corporate world.

5. Don’t be discouraged. Keep in mind that you will likely hear “no” more often than you will hear potential donors say “yes.” Just figure out how to better approach them next time.

6. Avoid the government – at first. At earlier stages in the development of your organization, avoid appealing to the government for money. Keep in mind that government money is highly politicized and often not distributed by merit.

7. Remember to count products donations at tax time. Make sure that item donations are not over-valued when seeking tax deductions.

8. Ask for money again – later. Don’t press for a greater donation on the spot; rather, ask for another donation again later in the same year.

9. Be passionate. People will respond better to someone who knows a lot about their organization and are excited about it.

10. Reach out to people. Don’t hesitate to contact as many people as you can, no matter who they are.

11. Have a good reason that appeals to who you are approaching. Know WHY you’re asking this specific corporation or organization for money for THIS project, NOW. You have to make that connection.

3. Sue’s story (Transcribed from an interview)

I didn’t start out as a fundraiser, I worked with developmentally challenged adults, and I spent most of my time working on the program side of things in the beginning. I loved being a part of helping people in the ways that they needed to be helped. I did that until the 1990’s, when it became more and more clear that a lot of programs that had been created by the government were going to be cut by Reagan. It became clear to me that if you didn’t have enough money, you weren’t going to be able to help anybody, and it became clear to me that the government was not the place to get that money. From that point on, I learned how to fundraise and became a fundraiser. It’s a really important skill if you’re going to be in the nonprofit world. What was clear to me in the 90’s is even more clear to me now: If we are going to create successful programs to help people, the government is not going to provide the kind of funding necessary. If we want to improve the world, it is up to us and the people who support our cause to fundraise.

The American people gave 250 billion dollars last year. The people in this country are extraordinarily generous, more generous than anywhere in the world, and we certainly have a more developed philanthropic sector than anywhere else in the world. People gave to a lot of different organizations, and if you break that money down, it is 75% individually given, with about 12% coming from foundations, 5% is corporate giving. So the thing to take away from that is that if you are building a strategic fundraising plan for an organization, you want to have a mix of foundations, individuals, corporations, and of course government funding if it is available. However, most of the money is in individual hands, so you need to have an approach to fundraising that approaches people.

The All-Stars developed through a very tiny organization. I think for me it is the best model of a funding process and plan that might be applicable to some of the organizations that you guys work for. The All-Stars Project was founded by young people in the community who were responding to the need for a quality program for inner-city youth. It started as a talent show network where young people would produce and star in talent shows in their neighborhoods. There are not very many youth programs for inner-city children, and those that are around are geared towards either the top 10% of kids who are going to go on to be accepted to Ivy League Schools, or geared towards the bottom 10% who are at-risk, so there’s a huge 80% gap in the middle, and all of the All-Stars programs are provided for those kids. The All-Stars approach believes that these kids are not in an environment where they are able to grow and develop, and this type of environment is certainly not provided for them in their schools. In NYC, something like 50-60% of kids drop out and don’t graduate from high school, and so it’s clear that this whole system is failing the young people.

George Bush introduced this policy of No Child Left Behind, which basically takes children who are spending 6 or 7 hours a day not learning, and adds more hours of doing the exact same thing. We think that there’s a problem with this model, and that these children need environments where they can be creative and motivated to learn. We need to give these kids cosmopolitan experiences where they can go beyond the limitations of their environment. A large study shows that the achievement gap between inner-city kids and middle class children has to do with the kind of activities that are available to them. For instance, middle class children often have the opportunity to go to the opera, to go to a museum, to talk about current events at the dinner table etc., while inner-city children often do not have these opportunities.

The All-Stars Program strives to give them these opportunities. In particular, performing enables the children to develop, it’s a growth process, so performing is key. The talent show network reaches about 10,000 inner-city kids a year now, and has expanded to places like Newark, Boston, Chicago etc. We have a new program called Kids on Stage where we try to show young people that theater can be used to articulate and talk about the world, and that it’s not just a place for entertainment.

We made a decision that one of the reasons that the programs from the 60s failed is that they relied exclusively on the government’s money, and we need to build new, outside of the box programs, which receive funding from people who want to fund these projects. Basically to do that, we went out on the streets, and I developed a door-to-door operation, and said to people “This is what we’re doing, and you should be a part of this program targeting the crisis of the inner-city youth right now”. And people, wanted to give money to that, and we learned how to ask people for $100, $200, $300, more. After certain periods of time, we went out in the snow, and rain, and about ten years ago we switched this to a phone operation because we had accumulated about 15,000 donors at that point, and we learned to call them over the phone and ask for money. You can reach many more people over the telephone than you can knocking on doors. We built that up so that now we have a very strong fundraising operation, and our budget is growing every year.

We’ve got three performance theaters and a center for these kids in New York, and in the next 3-5 years, we hope to be building centers like this in Newark and in Chicago. We built a very strong base of individual givers, and then we went to corporate America and we leveraged our way into the corporate world through the individuals we had already met. It turns out that we met some people who had access to corporations and foundations. We began to do foundation work about 6 or 7 years ago because I kept pushing it. Foundations have a particular perspective on how they think things have got to be done. And we’ve always thought “Who’s going to tell us what to do?” But we’ve realized that these kids create these programs and that the people who are funding us are going to recognize that.

Sometimes you try to fit your organization into a box of what the people want to fund, and that’s not good for the organization. It pulls you down a path that you might not want to go down, and you’re just following the dollars. So that’s my fundraising perspective, but that’s not how most fundraising organizations are built, and we haven’t gone the traditional route. Sometimes we say “No, we can’t take money from this place because they haven’t done it the right way”.

4. Q&A

Q: What do you recommend to young people when they approach individuals for funding?
A:
-Be firm!
-You need to have a plan that’s well thought out ahead of time
-It’s advantageous to be incorporated as a 501 c 3 or have one as your sponsor

Q: Is there a sort of check list of assets or materials that a fund-seeker should have when they approach a donor?
A:
-Show that you’re fiscally sound by presenting your budget for the year and for the project
-Articulate verbally, and in writing, what you’ve done so far, what you hope to do, and what the money would specifically help to accomplish
-Know WHY you’re asking this specific corporation/individual/organization/foundation for money for THIS project, NOW. You have to make that connection.

Q: Do you have any advice for any of the people on the call who are considering going to corporations?
A:
-Look to parents who may have connections into the corporate world
-Keep in mind that it takes a long time to get a “yes,” and you will probably receive a lot of “no’s”
-Learn to tell the difference between a “no” and a “not yet”
-Use these situations to help yourself improve: ask, “what could I do better next time?”

Q: Is there a specific situation or set of causes that you believe should approach the government for funding? Or do you think that in most cases it’s just too bureaucratic?
A:
-Remember that government money is very political, and not always distributed by merit
-Even if you spend a lot of time writing a proposal, you might get a “no”
-She DOES NOT recommend going to the government for money at this stage in development

Q: When you go to a corporation and get products, how do you report that value in terms of social benefit or retail value?
A:
-This is a bad gray area, which the IRS and government are looking into
-A lot of people “over-value” things, and take deductions that are too large
-The value should be reported as what the reasonable retail value would be

Q: Is it ever okay, and if so, how, to ask potential donors for more money (to donate larger amounts)?
A:
-At this point it’s probably better to ask for money again in the same year, rather than ask for more money on the spot. For instance, if they donate $500 in November, contact the donor again in April, May or June.

5. Conclusion and Last Comments

-Have fun with what you do
-Be passionate about it!
-Use your sincerity
-Reach out to people, and they will respond