A Guide to Giving
Way back in 1997, it was hard for a small nonprofit with a limited budget to get attention. The Internet wasn’t the fundraising powerhouse it is today, and large-scale mailings were cost prohibitive.
This was especially a concern in Massachusetts. Despite some wealthy regions, it was scoring as one of the lowest giving states in the country, according to IRS data.
Fifty-one percent of the state’s philanthropic donations were coming from the top two income groups, representing 250,000 families out of 3 million. Something needed to be done to boost the numbers.
And so in November 1996 an idea was born to create a catalog featuring small but worthy nonprofits in need of attention. “It seemed so obvious that I thought it probably had been done before, but it hadn’t,” says George McCully, president of the Catalogue for Philanthropy, which recently published its 10th anniversary edition. “We thought, ‘We can reach that many people,’ and the best time to do it is the last 45 calendar days of the year.”
The first edition was published as a project of the Ellis L. Phillips Foundation. This past holiday season circulation was 55,000, down from 80,000 in each of the last three years. Over 10 years, circ has averaged 100,000, but has been pared down thanks to the Internet coming to the fore and smaller charities creating their own online presences.
Once a charity is listed in the book, its profile goes up on the Catalogue for Philanthropy’s Web site (www.cfp-ma.org) permanently; some 800 organizations are posted there now.
The catalog arrives in homes the weekend before Thanksgiving. All monies raised go directly to the charities. Tracking the response is far from easy, McCully laments. “It’s difficult. We’re now on our ninth ‘foolproof’ method, and nothing works.”
The first year all donations were handled through the catalog, so a lot of data was available. But the process was unwieldy, and many potential donors questioned why they couldn’t just donate to their organization of choice directly.
“We had to ask ourselves, are we more interested in data or putting people together with charities?” McCully says. “We decided the latter.”
The problem then, of course, was that they lost control of the data. And while many small charities may do good work, they’re not very good at data keeping, since volunteers often have to open mail and answer phones. They may not know about the catalog, so it’s hard to tell what prompted a gift.
McCully does know that the book raises more each year than it costs to produce. And there’s a lot of positive evidence: The largest single gift ever was a $10 million donation to help build the Constellation Center, a performing arts facility in Cambridge. There have been a number of six-figure gifts, and some people still choose to give through the catalog.
A common pattern among these high-level donors, according to McCully, is that they’ll give a smaller gift initially and then see how they’re treated. Some may come in at $200 and then five years later be giving in the hundreds of thousands.
“Every catalog-receiving family is potentially a major donor,” he notes.
