Making her passion her profession

Posted on December 8, 2017 by Abby Rolland

Taylor Whitaker with her Outstanding Young Adult award. — Taylor Whitaker, B.A. ’15, with her Outstanding Young Adult award.

At the recent Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Indiana Chapter’s Annual Indiana Philanthropy Awards, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy alumna Taylor Whitaker, B.A. ’15, won the Outstanding Young Adult award, a prestigious honor for young fundraisers.

Currently, Whitaker serves as the Leadership Annual Giving Officer at Butler University, and she has worked in fundraising since graduation. How did she come to the fundraising profession and what has she learned from it?

“I transferred from Butler to IUPUI intending to major in law. At that time, I was nannying for Lisa Maxwell-Frieden, who works in higher education fundraising,” Whitaker said. “She said, ‘You should look into the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. They have a great program and I think you might like nonprofit.’ I’ve always had a passion for serving people and after taking a class with Dr. Kathi Badertscher, I knew I needed to major in philanthropic studies.”

In one of her classes with Dr. Badertscher, Whitaker went on a field trip to the Eiteljorg Museum, leading her to realize that the Eiteljorg was where she wanted to pursue an internship. Despite not having earned enough credit hours in philanthropic studies to qualify for an internship, Dr. Tyrone Freeman, director of undergraduate programs, approved Whitaker to take the internship due to her previous educational background and coursework at Butler.

“I loved interning at the museum; I worked as a development assistant. Some of my jobs included helping with one of their largest exhibitions (the Ansel Adams exhibit) as well as helping with the 25th anniversary gala,” Whitaker said. “Even after finishing, I stay engaged. I serve on their young professionals board Agave as the fundraising chair and help with different volunteering opportunities there as well. Both the CEO/President and the Vice President for Advancement came to see me receive the AFP award.”

Even after transferring, Whitaker successfully graduated on time with a double major in philanthropic studies and philosophy and received a job offer soon after.

“I worked at Sycamore School for two years as their Advancement and Alumni Coordinator,” she said. “I worked on their capital campaign, event management, the annual fund, letter solicitation, pledge reconciliation, and engagement with alumni.”

A few months ago, she realized that she wanted to grow more and work in higher education, which led to her current position at Butler University.

“I work with annual fund donors up to $10,000. I follow up with annual donors as well as others who may have lost contact with the school. We want to make them feel special and part of the community,” she said.

The emphasis on relationships was something that Whitaker learned through her internship and classes.

“Whether it was the history class, ethics class, or donor relations class, all of my classes taught me how important it was to build and keep relationships,” she said. “I’m using that emphasis on relationships at Butler now. Forming lasting relationships is what builds your pipeline.”

The significance Whitaker places on relationship building is something that makes her stand out. Maxwell-Frieden, who introduced Whitaker to the school in the first place, said she nominated Taylor for the Outstanding Young Adult award because “even as a student, her dedication to the work of philanthropy was evident.”

“Taylor is as dedicated to learning the proper processes and procedures as she is to developing true and meaningful relationships with donors,” Maxwell-Frieden said. “This is rare in a seasoned fundraiser and is almost unheard of in a young fundraiser. She has been a dedicated volunteer as well as a dedicated employee to the institutions where she has served.”

For Whitaker, the awards ceremony itself provided a welcoming place to meet fellow professionals and learn from them. One of these professionals was the late Andre Lacy, who received the Lifetime Achievement award.

“It was great to meet him and his speech was so inspiring,” Whitaker said. “He said, ‘we (he and his late wife Julia) always believed that we left an organization better than when we started with it,’ which is a great motto to live by. Overall, it was an amazing evening.”

Sadly, Lacy passed away unexpectedly just two weeks after the ceremony.

After receiving the impressive award, Whitaker plans to continue her fundraising, philanthropy, and nonprofit management education.

“I completed the graduate certificate in nonprofit management at IUPUI and may return to complete the Master’s in Public Affairs program,” she said. “Or, I may attend Butler for an MBA. Any experience in higher education is good experience because you learn from the people who are in the program and the professors who teach in it.”

Whitaker plans to stay involved with the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy as well. She will be mentoring a current student in the bachelor’s program in the spring.

“Anything I can do to help the school get more students into its programs and get more people into the field,” she said. “If there’s a way I can help, I will because they helped me.”

Her advice for current students?

“Keep an open mind for any opportunities. Don’t get caught up on certain organizations you want to intern or work for. I made multiple connections from my internship at the Eiteljorg Museum who helped me get to where I am today. Any organization you work for provides unique opportunities for where you might be going. You never know what you could learn from the people at an organization and what they could learn from you.”

Abby Rolland is the blog content coordinator for the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

Fundraising 101: Tell your story

Posted on December 6, 2017 by Anne Brock

By Mark Wingfield

Mark Wingfield is associate pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, and holds the Executive Certificate in Religious Fundraising (ECRF) designation* from Lake Institute on Faith & Giving. He is a former journalist who is active in the nonprofit sector, having helped start four nonprofits and currently serving on the boards of several others.

There is no sure-fire way to raise money.

Despite what you may hear from consultants or experts or those who have had one-off successes in fundraising, context and timing make for an uneven playing field.

Sure, there are some techniques and practices that work better than others and that have stood the test of time—or stood the test of a period of time. But the thing we all need to be reminded of is that what worked for me may not work for you and what worked for you 10 years ago may not work for you today.

Recently I organized a GoFundMe page for a nonprofit on whose board I serve. Many people have great success with this type of crowdsourcing. I put together a compelling case, had good photos and videos and links to third-party validation of our cause—and raised less than $2,000. What seems to work for everyone else didn’t work for us, and it wasn’t for lack of effort or for lack of a good cause.

But the mere creation of the GoFundMe campaign sparked the interest of a major donor, who committed offline the entire $50,000 goal.

We weren’t seeking a major donor, but a major donor found us anyway. Unexpected results from an unexpected place. The purpose of this campaign, I thought, was to reel in a bunch of new small donors who could be cultivated into repeat donors in the days ahead. But that’s not what happened.

By the measure I had set for success, this campaign was a complete flop. But by the measure of meeting the needs of the nonprofit, the campaign sparked a success.

Why, though? Because we told our story and identified our need. That’s Fundraising 101: Make a compelling case. Tell your story. Explain the need. How the need gets met will always be secondary to telling the story.

In the Christian tradition, we often quote Jesus, who said, “You have not because you ask not.” And anyone who’s ever done fundraising knows that while there’s obvious truth to this statement, there also are times when you ask loudly and still have not.

What’s the difference between success and failure, between the times when we ask and receive and the times when we ask and do not receive? That’s hard to say. Sometimes we just don’t know.

Several years ago, I produced a beautiful, full-color brochure explaining all the good that happens through giving to our church budget. It told our story succinctly and was illustrated with plenty of visuals. It was a beautiful piece. We mailed them into every member home. We had stacks of them at every entrance to the sanctuary for several weeks.

Not long after, a team of lay leaders met to brainstorm ways to increase giving in the church. Someone said, “What we need is a nice brochure that explains all the good that happens through giving to the church.” Everyone quickly agreed. The staff member in the meeting explained that we already had such a piece. The lay leaders around the table didn’t believe him. They had no memory of such a piece. Even after he identified the piece and all its content, only one person in the room remembered seeing it.

What had happened? Upon investigation, the stacks of brochures outside the sanctuary had simply been overlooked. And of all the people around the table, most were married males who didn’t routinely open or even see the mail at their homes. We had a compelling story to tell, but those who needed to hear it missed it entirely. The very solution the team of laypeople proposed to tell our story had passed them by already.

On several occasions, I’ve heard Rick Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif., tell stories about the early days of his church’s growth. The success of his “seeker-friendly” approach has inspired replication nationwide. But he’s always quick to urge pastors not to take his successful model and drop it in their context unchanged. Yes, there are some transferable ideas, but context matters.

And there’s one other key thing, he says: We only see the things his church did that worked. For every idea that worked, there might have been 12 or 15 that didn’t. The lesson: It takes perseverance and variation.

That seems to be true in fundraising as well. One size doesn’t fit all, and what works for me may not work for you. The important thing is to keep trying. Keep telling the story.

*The Executive Certificate in Religious Fundraising (ECRF) is a four-day intensive course that provides the research, tools, and customized training to meet the growing needs of leaders in religious communities and fundraisers of faith-based organizations.

Studying the landscape of religious giving

Posted on December 4, 2017 by Abby Rolland

For over 60 years, Giving USA Foundation has tracked and published data and trends about charitable giving through its publication Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy, which is researched and written by the IU Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.

This year, the foundation, the school, and Lake Institute on Faith & Giving took a deeper dive into the study of charitable giving to religious organizations in the Giving USA Special Report on Giving to Religion.

Ph.D. candidate and United Methodist minister Thad Austin spoke about the importance of analyzing and the methodological approach to studying charitable giving to religious organizations, the key findings of the report, and the impact of the findings for religious organizations.

In order to understand religious giving in the U.S., Rev. Austin first explained the importance of analyzing the methodological approach used to estimate the amount given to religion.

“It’s the hardest nonprofit subsector to measure. Most religious institutions are not required to file Form 990 with the IRS, which makes it difficult to measure religious giving,” he said. “In addition, the way that Giving USA defines giving to religion is very narrow. It primarily only includes congregations, denominations, missionary societies, and TV and radio ministries. There are many nonprofit organizations that are explicitly faith-based, such as World Vision and The Salvation Army, whose giving numbers are included in the human services subsector.

“Even though giving to religion represents the single largest subsector of all the nonprofit subsectors at 32 percent of total annual charitable giving, there is a lot of giving to faith-affiliated organizations that is happening in other subsectors.”

Both of these issues are included in the first part of the report.

“That part of the report is a call to say there’s a better way to measure giving to religion,” Rev. Austin said.

In order to address those methodological issues, Lilly Endowment gave a $1.67 million grant to Lake Institute on Faith & Giving to fund an in-depth national study.

“Regardless of religious affiliation, where do charitable donations to religion go? We’ll establish that baseline first,” Rev. Austin explained. “Then, we’ll proceed to the next step. We want a more nuanced understanding of the economic practices of faith communities. How do these congregations talk about money, what words do they use, how do they receive money?”

To establish this baseline and how congregations talk about money and giving, Lake Institute on Faith & Giving will study, survey, and speak to around 5,000 religious congregations in the upcoming years.

“The main question is, ‘does faith affiliation matter for philanthropy and charitable giving,’ ” Rev. Austin said of the findings published in Giving to Religion. “The resounding answer is ‘yes, it does.’ People of faith are more generous and they’re more likely to be generous. They not only give more than unaffiliated people to religious causes but also to non-religious organizations. ”

On a popular topic today—millennials and giving—Rev. Austin indicated that a recent report by Patrick Rooney, Mark Ottoni-Wilhelm, and X. Wang found that people who are religious among the younger generations are giving at a similar rate as earlier generations did at the same point in their lives.

“The problem is that drastically fewer people within this generational cohort are making donations,” Rev. Austin said. “From the giving to religion standpoint, it’s not the millennial part that’s an issue, it’s the faith affiliation of those millennials. If you’re able to capture a younger person’s imagination, spirit, and faith, they may give on par with other generations at that same stage in life.”

Rev. Austin hopes the takeaway that people of faith are significantly more charitable and generous with their financial donations than the general population will provide some ease for religious practitioners to be able to initiate conversations with their congregations around the topic of money.

“I hope they feel the freedom and confidence to enter into a conversation that’s already taking place within and among their members,” he said. “Then, I hope people of faith will find ways to better engage with unaffiliated millennials and other unaffiliated generations. It gets back to the question of ‘does faith affiliation matter for philanthropy?’ The answer is yes, and philanthropy and faith-based organizations need to find ways to better engage with people.”

Giving circles growing in popularity among diverse groups

Posted on November 30, 2017 by Andrea Pactor

Andrea Pactor is the associate director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute. In this post, she explores what giving circles are, who comprises them, and how they democratize philanthropy.

A new study, The Landscape of Giving Circles/Collective Giving Groups in the U.S., found about 1,600 giving circles in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and online.

What is a giving circle?

Giving circles and collective giving groups are “highly flexible, democratic, do-it-yourself vehicles for giving,” according to the new report by the Collective Giving Research Group. They represent grassroots efforts to strengthen communities. As example, Impact 100 Pensacola Bay Area has allocated more than $8 million in grants of $100,000 or more to nonprofits in their region since 2004. Now with more than 1,000 members, this giving circle awarded more than $1 million earlier this year.

The new study, the first in 10 years on the scope and scale of giving circles, documents the exponential growth of this form of philanthropic engagement. Notably,

The number of giving circles has tripled in the last 10 years with about half starting in 2010 or later.
Giving circles resonate with more women than men. The study found that women comprise more than half of the membership in about 70 percent of all groups (a reason for the Women’s Philanthropy Institute’s interest in this mode of giving).

New developments since 2007 demonstrates the power of the movement.

The giving circle model is attracting a more diverse range of donors by race/ethnicity/sexual identity and by income. Men-only, LGBTQ, and specific identity-based groups are populating the landscape. At the same time, the entry level, or participation fee, is more varied and the average amount given by individual participants is decreasing, potentially eliminating barriers to entry for more people. As example, the normal participation fee for one women’s giving circle is $2,000 per year. This year, the group is experimenting with a pop-up giving circle in which participants will contribute $500 for this unique event. By reducing the cost to participate, the goal is to engage more women who may wish to “test drive” the giving model.
A significant development is the emergence of networks of giving circles such as Amplifier, the Women’s Collective Giving Network, and the Community Investment Network.

Why do giving circles/collective giving groups matter?

This form of giving is a valuable contribution to the philanthropic landscape.

Giving circles are often the first portal for individuals to be engaged in an organized way in philanthropy.
The grassroots aspect of the giving circle model and the democratic way in which they operate—one person, one vote in charitable decision-making—ensure that each voice counts.
The donor education component should not be underestimated. Giving circle members learn about pressing community issues, develop deeper understanding about how their communities work (most funding stays in the local community), learn about grantmaking, and engage in communal conversations about values.
By joining together and making collective grants, individual donors can leverage their giving.
They provide a safe space for powerful conversations about philanthropy.

According to the report, giving circles are “often described as a way of democratizing philanthropy.” In an era when gifts from mega donors such as Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan dominate the headlines, giving circles remind us that everyone can be a philanthropist.

***

The Landscape of Giving Circles/Collective Giving in the U.S. is the first of a three-part series of reports on giving circles today. The second part will examine the impact of participation in giving circles on donor giving and civic engagement. The final part will study the relationship between giving circles and their host organizations.

The Collective Giving Research Group includes Jessica Bearman of Bearman Consulting, Julia Carboni, Ph.D., of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, Angela Eikenberry, Ph.D., of the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and Jason Franklin of the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy at Grand Valley State University. Follow them on Twitter: @jbearwoman, @jlcarboni, @aeikenberry, @fundingchange.

The research was completed with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, via the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, and from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

By Andrea Pactor, associate director of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute. Follow WPI on Twitter @WPIinsights. The views in this post are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official positions or policies of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

Choosing less, giving more

Posted on November 28, 2017 by Anne Brock

By Rev. Mary Ann Moman

Mary Ann is currently Development Officer for the United Methodist Foundation of Indiana. She is also an associate pastor at St. Mark’s UMC in Carmel, IN.

Greg McKeown, in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, makes the argument for a systematic discipline that helps us to separate what is absolutely essential in our lives and then to eliminate everything that is not.

His reasoning for doing this is to increase our capacity to make the highest possible contribution to the things that we value most. McKeown is not arguing that Essentialism is one more thing to add to our list. He argues that it is a completely different way to live our lives.

We value the freedom we have to make choices. We can make choices because we have resources: time, money, connections. Our challenge is to make choices that give life. We can choose less in order to give more. Our task is not to get more done, but to get the right things done.

There are myriad ways to spend our time and our money. What criteria do you have for making the most impact with your resources of time and money?

McKeown challenges his readers to define the three criteria by which they will choose from many good things. I found this process to be very helpful.

If a request comes to me, it must meet all three of the criteria I have set for my decision-making. Two out of three is not enough. We must fight the fear of saying “no” in order to give in ways that make a significant contribution. This is the disciplined pursuit of less.

This is what I have learned from practicing the disciplined pursuit of less:

Creating my list of three criteria has taken longer than I expected. I wanted to add a fourth and then a fifth. Choosing three helped me be clear about what I wanted to accomplish.
Anne Lamott once said: “No” is a complete sentence. When I say no I often feel the need to provide an explanation for my refusal. I’m learning that “no” is enough.
As McKeown says setting boundaries is freeing. Even though I could spend a lot more time each week working, I might not be as productive as when I have time for rest, renewal, and time with family and friends.
Staying in the present moment is crucial. It is important for me to not let the future get in the way of living in the present. I can be distracted by what has to be done tomorrow and not do what needs to be done now.
Practicing what is essential in my life is good stewardship. I am able to make a greater impact on the things that matter most to me.

The busy life is not necessarily a productive life. What are the essentials in your life?