Philanthropy Forecast: Same Stuff, Different Year

More than 600 nonprofit volunteers, board members and staff attended The Rome Group’s 2010 Philanthropic Landscape report at Washington University‘s Edison Theatre last month. (Click here to listen to the audio or view the slides.) It’s the nonprofit event of the summer in St. Louis. You could look around the auditorium and it was a who’s who of nonprofit and charities in our town.

There were two significant findings for nonprofit communicators. The Rome Group’s annual survey found that 17 percent of grant makers are willing to fund marketing/communications to raise awareness/funds. the other was that 21 percent of grant makers said nonprofits should market more aggressively.

Amy Rome summarized her presentation with three items:

Nonprofits are competing in a broader universe: Giving to international causes continues to increase. That takes into account the substantial gifts made by the Gates Foundation. But nonprofits must continue to improve their collective ability to effectively tell their stories.

Individuals are where the action is: The St. Louis community is having a difficult time shifting its focus from large corporations to individual giving. Corporate philanthropy once kept the community’s nonprofit organizations adequately funded. Those corporations are gone. Engagement of individual donors is now the name of the game and marketing and communications play a significant role in that task.

It could be a lot worse: The nonprofit community is eternally optimistic. But approximately 40 percent of local nonprofits only have two to three months of cash or reserves. When you’re struggling to keep the doors open, marketing and communications take a back seat. When that happens, the end is near.

Donor Survey Suggests Increasing Marketing To Raise Awareness, Attract New Donors

The donors have spoken and they affirmed the role of marketing and communications in fundraising during the economic downturn.

The Rome Group (TRG) hosted its seventh annual conference on local and national philanthropic trends on July 23 at Washington University in St. Louis. This year’s presentation was entitled, “Shifting Opportunities… Creative Responses.” The Gateway Center for Giving also assisted with the conference and the survey.

A random sample of donors were asked, in their opinion, what should nonprofits be doing this year in response to the economic crisis? Fifty percent said to increase overall marketing efforts to raise awareness and attract new donors. The highest response (64 percent) was to “reduce expenses as long as there is no reduction in services to clients.”

TRG is a well-respected organization in St. Louis and the region. (If you’re looking for a job in the non-profit sector in this area, I highly recommend subscribing to the e-mail alerts for job openings.) The slides and notes from Amy Rome’s keynote presentation, which is copyrighted, are available in a PDF, which is about 3.1 MB. Mary McMurtrey, the executive director of the Gateway Center for Giving, also made a presentation.

There’s great information and insight in the content for anyone in the non-profit and charitable sectors. Here’s a couple of key take-away items:

• Giving by individuals accounts for 75 percent of all dollars donated. Corporate and foundation giving accounts for less than 20 percent of all donations.
• A recent Johns Hopkins University study of nonprofits found that 83 percent say they are experiencing some level of fiscal stress and almost 40 percent categorize that stress as severe or very severe. According to the study, organizations with revenues between $500,000 and $3 million were particularly hard hit. The study also said the current level of fiscal stress is lower than after Sept. 11, 2001.
• Finding new ways to communicate an organization’s impact continues to be a challenge.

The chorus from the for-profit sector is telling businesses to market and communicate with existing and new customers. The same should be true for the nonprofit sector when it comes to fundraising. As many organizations begin building budgets for 2010, they could use information from this survey to bolster requests for additional resources for marketing and communications, especially for fundraising.