Fundraising

Grant Panels Talk About The Best Ideas

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A couple weeks ago the Ohio State Arts Council streamed the deliberations of one of their grant panels. We had submitted an application for a new project so I decided to listen in.

The review started around 8 am and our application didn’t get addressed until around 3 pm, but by 10 am I had a pretty good idea that our application was going to fall short of the mark.

Even though I had run the application past the institutional grants person, there was a lot of silly omissions I could see we had made. By which I mean, we had the data or had envisioned activities as part of our discussions about the project—but we didn’t include it in the grant application. It was one of those cases of being so close to a project you were filling in the blanks and making leaps with your mind.

The problem is, the grant panel didn’t have the benefit of that knowledge or being mind readers. When our turn came, I took notes and now we will do better in the future.

Part of the intent of this post is to encourage people to listen into these deliberations, if available, to help you avoid the mistakes I made and just help improve your grant applications in general.

My other motivation was to encourage people to listen to these deliberations just so you can find out what colleagues in other locales are doing. I heard some really great ideas from the comfort of my office chair.

To some extent this is even more valuable than reading arts related blogs because grant review proceedings bring the details of diverse arts projects to one forum. Then you have people critique the idea, raising questions about things applicants possibly failed to consider, including whether they have been realistic about anticipating the resources and time that will be required.

Of course, you hear comments about what makes an application and an idea exciting to the grant panelists as well.

The one project that really caught my attention was the Highland Square neighborhood of Akron, Ohio’s proposal for their 3rd annual Porch Rokr and Art in the Square Festival.

They have over 100 performers appearing on the porches and front lawns of people throughout the community. You can see pictures from last October’s Festival on their Facebook page.

It appears they have a central area where visual and craft artists can sell their work as well.

This is the sort of event that strengthens ties and cultivates pride in a community

Info You Can Use: Evidence vs. Emotion In Fundraising

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This week Marginal Revolution blog linked to a study addressing the claim of many donors that they are motivated to give by the effectiveness of the charity.

The researchers worked with the charity, Freedom from Hunger, to send out two nearly identical letters.

In the first experimental wave, the control group received an emotional appeal focused on a specific beneficiary, along with a narrative explaining how FFH ultimately helped the individual. The treatment group received a similar emotional appeal (trimmed by one paragraph), with an added paragraph about scientific research on FFH’s impact. The second wave was identical in design, except that the treatment group narrative included more specifics on the research, and briefly discussed randomized trials and their value as impact assessment tools.

They found that adding the scientific data didn’t have an impact on whether someone donated and how much they donated in the full sample. However, the full sample includes previous donors as well as those who had never donated before.

There was a significant difference when they looked at just those who had previously made a donation. (I have inserted a paragraph break to the original text to provide easier reading)

We find that presenting positive information about charitable effectiveness increases the likelihood of giving to a major U.S. charity for large prior donors, but turned off small prior donors. This heterogeneity is important, we believe, and is consistent with a model in which large donors (holding all else equal, including income and wealth) are more driven by altruism and small donors more driven by warm glow motives.

Altruistic donors, we posit, are more driven by the actual impact of their donation, and thus information to reinforce or enhance perceived impacts will drive higher donations. On the other hand, for warm glow donors, information on impacts may actually deter giving by distracting the letter recipient from the emotionally powerful messages that typically trigger warm glow and instead put forward a more deliberative, analytical appeal which simply does not work for such individuals.

Now whether the results for a large national human services charity will be consistent for a smaller, regional cultural charity, is uncertain. The fact that larger donors may be motivated by evidence of effectiveness and smaller donors by emotional appeal and turned off by effectiveness data is definitely something to think about.

Ride With The Valkyries

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Last week I was thinking about alternative category names for giving levels because our current names lean heavily toward classical music while that is only a small portion of our programming.

As I got to thinking about it, I wondered if anyone had thought about changing the names of their giving levels from season to season both as a way to do some A/B testing on what types of category names might inspire people to give more and to appeal to a younger generation of donors.

People who are used to giving through Kickstarter with all the exciting images and rewards at different support levels might not be motivated by a static list of giving levels like: Donor, Supporter and Benefactor.

Category titles that changed every year and aligned with the season might be more engaging. If you were going to give $450, would you increase it to $500 to be listed in a category employing Henry V’s “We Few, We Happy Few, We Band of Brothers” as a giving level? Or the aforementioned “Riding With the Valkyries”?

Unless you were being tongue in cheek, you would probably want to stay away from a The Merchant of Venice “Pound of Flesh” as a category. Though “As You Like It” might be a good category for a giving level that garners many perks.

If you are clever about it, you might actually have people opening their donor solicitation letter to see what names you came up with as eagerly as they flip through the season brochure to see what shows are being offered.

While there is no guarantee they will give, they will at least be a little more engaged with the process.

Info You Can Use: Save The Charity, Save Your Company

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I loved this story on Non Profit Quarterly about a Maine restaurant which actually revived its business when it started holding all you can eat fundraisers for charities.

…the eatery thought of the weekly all-you-can-eat nights with suggested donations flowing to charity as a way to attract new customers. “It worked almost immediately and it revitalized the business,” Benedict said. “We would have gone out of business if we didn’t change the way we did business. Giving back is the first thing we did, and it worked.” She says that a total of $635,000 has been raised since 2009 for local charity organizations and individuals.

It is great to hear that a business saved itself by helping charities in the community. It could be a model for other communities and businesses.

However, the restaurant hit a snag when the state attorney general started to investigate whether it was licensed as a charitable solicitor.

My first reaction was disappointment because the restaurant was doing such good work, but the truth is that there is a lot of fraud and deception perpetuated by companies acting as charitable solicitors. So unfortunately, despite an abundance of good intentions, companies need to be careful about providing assistance to charities in a similar manner.

The Council of Non-Profits has a link to the first chapter of a book about the licensing required for charitable solicitation by 40 states. The chapter provides a good introduction to the issues involved and resources for finding out more about the requirements in your state. I was able to go right to the pertinent sections of my state code and find who is exempt from filing with a couple mouse clicks. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear the restaurant would be exempt in my state.)