Blueprint Fundraising

Corporate philanthopy moves towards sponsorship

I spent the last two days at the Western Sponsorship Congress in Calgary. It was an excellent event and my mind is bubbling with new ideas. I was very impressed with the conference — a rarity for me and professional development events!

Delegates included both “properties” with sponsorships to sell (nonprofits, venues, sports teams, etc.) and sponsors. This was one of my favourite aspects of the event — different than most philanthropy or fundraising conferences where almost everyone is from the same side of the transaction. Sponsors were there to network, share information and improve their own practices in building successful sponsorship programs.

I think that those of you working in corporate fundraising will already know this instinctively but everything I heard confirmed that there is a clear trend away from corporate philanthropy towards sponsorship.

Last year, an IEG report documented that a large percentage of North American corporations are switching money away from philanthropy to sponsorship. There is a feeling that the return is better with sponsorships and that companies (especially public ones) have an obligation to shareholders to see tangible ROI for every dollar spent.

In June Charity Village reported on a COMPAS Inc. survey finding that only 27% of Canadian corporate executives felt that for-profit organizations have an obligation to contribute to “the less fortunate.” When asked why Canadian companies don’t give more to charity, 42% said firms are already heavily taxed and don’t have the ability to give more; 36% agreed that it was improper for companies to give away money that belongs to shareholders; and 20% said charities don’t undergo enough scrutiny and oversight to justify giving more.

However you might feel about these sentiments the reality is that we can’t rely on compassion or a sense of obligation for corporate dollars.

In one of the sessions I attended RBC Foundation described the recognition associated with their largest “donation” made in Alberta to date ($2 million to the Reach! health care campaign, to be paid over 10 years). What was striking to the audience was the amount of recognition given — including naming the program and a physical space and logos on everything — for this donation. It wasn’t technically a sponsorship but extensive recognition was clearly key to getting the donation.

There was quite a bit of push back from the audience, asking the RBC representative how this can be considered a philanthropic donation when RBC gets so much recognition? The frustration was clear — nonprofits feel pushed by corporate partners to give benefits plus tax receipts and confused about whether to take the sponsorship or philanthropic approach. The response from RBC: you have to do both. It has to fit with their community-oriented objectives and it also has to give them lots of ways to trumpet their involvement. From a tax-receipting perspective, she said that the recognition had no clear business value (that could be defined) and so it qualifies as a donation. I think most people would agree that there is a real business value to this kind of association with a nonprofit cause. But it is a challenge to put a dollar figure on it.

I have lots more to share from the Congress… a few of the coming topics: sponsorship vs advertising, investing in activation and identifying your assets.

Blog Action Day: Green your development office

Today is Blog Action Day — a day when thousands of blogs (more than 16,000) and readers (approximately 12,700,000 and counting) all talk about the same topic. This year’s topic is the environment. In honour of the day, I thought I would share some suggestions on making your development office a little greener.

- Encourage the use of public transportation by providing monthly transit passes for your employees. Encourage cycling by providing secure bike parking somewhere inside your office. If your employees need a car at work, join The Company Car (or another car-sharing organization).

- Allow your employees to tele-commute. I think this is feasible, at least on a part-time basis, for many people who work in fundraising.

- Get a “duplexing” printer so that you can automatically print on both sides of paper. Don’t send single-sided letters to donors — it’s wasteful.

- Get rid of the water cooler and start drinking tap water. (Set up an alternative spot for office gossip.)

- If you live in Metro Vancouver, order your office supplies from Frogfile, which specializes in environmentally-friendly office supplies. (I love their Harbor/100 paper made from 100% post-consumer waste, processed chlorine-free, FSC-certified and produced using biomass energy!)

- Provide fresh, local, organic fruit, treats and coffee for your development team with a weekly delivery from Small Potatoes Urban Delivery.

- No matter what sector you work in, tell your supporters what your organization is doing to improve environmental practices. Donors of all sorts — whether they give to the arts, health care, or social housing — want to know that you are progressive in this way.

- Want some more ideas? Check out “50 Quick, Painless Ways You Can Help the Environment Today” from the Zen Habits blog.

And, for your enjoyment, here’s a photo of a clever World Wildlife Fund smog awareness campaign in China. The balloon says: Drive one day less and see how much carbon monoxide you’ll keep out of the air we breathe.

How to get 10,000 new fundraising ideas in 2 days

AFP Vancouver is offering First Course on November 8 and 9 at Simon Fraser University in Surrey. This is an intense two-day overview of fundraising, perfect for people who have less than three years experience in the field.

I’m happy to be leading the Major Gifts module again. That’s where we talk about how to cultivate major gifts and we practice asking. (In a completely fun and non-intimidating manner and not in front of the whole class, I promise. It really is fun!)

Register here before October 31 to get early bird rates of $325 for AFP members and $375 for non-members.

Canadian penny now worth $47,680!

Here’s a story for those of you who talk about every “cent” making a difference show images of Canadian currency on fundraising materials…

Spotted on Boing Boing:

A campaign to raise funds for cash-strapped Canadian cities has been contemptuously sabotaged by the federal government, who are demanding thousands of dollars in royalties for use of the “copyrighted” image of a Canadian penny and the phrase “one cent.”

OneCentNow is a campaign by the City of Toronto to get the federal government to return one cent of the national Goods and Services Tax to Toronto, which is struggling in the wake of decades of federal cuts in their budget-transfers.

Now the federal corporation that mints Canada’s currency has sent the City of Toronto a bill for more than $47,000 for the use of the words “one cent” and the picture of a penny in the campaign’s logo in a citywide public education effort.

The Royal Canadian Mint, a corporation of the federal government, has now demanded that the City of Toronto pay $47,680 for the public education campaign. Included in this amount is a request for $10,000 for the use of the words “one cent” in the campaign website address (www.onecentnow.ca) and the campaign email address (onecentnow@toronto.ca), and an additional $10,000 for the use of the words “one cent” in the campaign phone number (416-ONECENT). The remaining $27,680 has been assessed against the City for the use of the image of the Canadian penny in printed materials such as pins and posters. (The Mint has come to this amount by taking the total number of materials printed divided by the approximate population of Toronto, and then using a percentage of that number to arrive at a dollar figure.) Link to the full story.

OMG! How ridiculous. Happy Thanksgiving, Canadian readers. Be thankful that you haven’t (yet) received a bill from the Canadian Mint for flagrant abuse of their copyright.

Tip: Simplfy collaborative writing with Google Docs

It’s time start working on the annual Christmas appeal. You’re pulling the lists together and writing the fundraising letter. Five different people need to review the letter and each sends it back to you with their comments and changes. You send a new version back to them. They send more comments. Everyone gets frustrated with the process, losing track of which version of the document is the latest.

Google Docs to the rescue!

The video below explains how it works. With Google Docs, your document, spreadsheet or presentation lives online. You invite people to access it (with different levels from read-only to full editing abilities). They make changes (which you can see). They make comments. They see what other people have revised and said. There is only ever one version of the letter. You can even get an RSS feed of the changes people are making.

I’m going to start using this with clients. I’ll need to convince them to get Google accounts but I don’t think that will be difficult. Proposals, letters, reports… It’s going to make life easier any time collaboration is required.

There are some limitations to be aware of, particularly when it comes to formatting. Google Docs doesn’t have the sophisticated formatting abilities of Word and doesn’t have a “Page Layout” view option (where you can see how the document looks on the page). To make the final document pretty you will need to bring back into Word. That’s a pain, but the real value of Google Docs is in the collaboration and sharing possibilities.

Quotation: Teach them to long…

If you want to build a ship,
don’t herd people together to collect wood
And don’t assign them tasks and work
but rather, teach them to long for the
endless immensity of the sea.

– Antoine de Saint Exupéry
I absolutely love this quote. It’s so pertinent to fundraising. How many of us focus on the how-to details and forget to feed a passion for social change in the people sympathetic our causes?

Spotted on the Gift Hub blog. Photo by wili hybrid.

Required reading: Vital Signs 2007

If you live in Metro Vancouver (I like that so much better than GVRD!), you will want to check out Vital Signs 2007, a new report from the Vancouver Foundation.

Vital Signs is the second annual survey of how well the region is doing in many areas of importance to nonprofit organizations — housing, health, arts and culture, environment, transportation, work, education, the gap between rich and poor… In addition to being required reading for understanding community issues, you are very likely to find statistics and information to use in your communications and fundraising campaigns.

In the midst of looking at Vital Signs, I noticed that the Vancouver Foundation has a brand new website — looks great and includes video, grantee profiles and a new logo. Very nice!