Fresh Research, a NonProfit Times Podcast: Recent Episodes
The NonProfit Times
“Employees are the most important thing to the success of our business so if allocating resources there is going to make a difference in achieving our mission and achieving our goals, we’re going to allocate resources there,” Tara Fitzpatrick-Navarro, CEO of the United States Tennis Association Mid-Atlantic Section (USTA-MAS), said. Last year, the USTA-MAS hired a… Continue reading Episode 50: Best Nonprofits To Work For 2022
A woman builds a business empire and then goes on to give away millions of dollars to charity. It’s not an unusual story, at least not today — but if the woman was an African-American during the Jim Crow era? Madam C.J. Walker is considered America’s first self-made, female millionaire. We’ll learn more about her… Continue reading Episode 49: Dan David Prize Winner Tyrone Freeman
Endowments are a common form of giving to higher education, arts , and medical research organizations. William Foster, managing partner, and Darren Isom, partner, of The Bridgespan Group, analyzed the investment income of 56 nonprofits dedicated to social change. Between 2000 and 2013, only 5% of philanthropic gifts of $10 million or more were deployed… Continue reading Episode 48: Endowing Black-Led Nonprofits
An increase from 3 to 4 stars on Charity Navigator can be associated with a 6% rise in contributions. For smaller charities, the impact can be as much as 11%. That’s not too surprising but what about when ratings drop? According to new research, there’s no impact on contributions. “There seems to be this asymmetric… Continue reading Episode 47: Navigating the Notches
GivingTuesday in 2020 raised an estimated $2.47 billion both online and offline, which was up 25% from $1.97 billion in 2019. Almost 35 million people participated in 2020. What’s on tap for 2021? According to Woodrow Rosenbaum, that’s up to nonprofits. “We’ve been handed an opportunity. It’s not often that you have an industry that’s… Continue reading Bonus Episode: #GivingTuesday 2021
MacKenzie Scott’s billions of dollars in mega gifts and American donors’ response to the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) fueled the largest charities in the United States last year. The 2021 NPT 100 ranks the largest nonprofits in the U.S. that derive at least 10% of total revenue from public support. Colleges and universities are not included… Continue reading Episode 46: The 2021 NPT 100
Nonprofits have been pushing for a universal charitable deduction for years. The CARES Act created a temporary tax deduction for charitable gifts up to $300 for single or married filers in 2020. Congress extended that into 2021 and increased the deduction to $600 for married couples. Two professors at the University of Virginia proposed a… Continue reading Episode 45: The Charitable Tax Deduction & Civic Engagement
When the Nonprofit Revitalization Act passed in 2013, it was the first major overhaul of nonprofit regulations in New York State in 40 years. The legislation modernized rules around nonprofit boards and committees and, among other things, prohibited nonprofit officers from being present at meetings where their pay is discussed. In the years since, a… Continue reading Episode 44: Regulating CEO Pay
You finish up your shopping and the cashier asks, “Would you like to donate to a local charity?” Do you give? If you do, how much? Or maybe they ask you, would you like to round up your total to donate the difference? Those are some of the scenarios in a recent experiment. Results of… Continue reading Episode 43: Checking Out Charity
The American Cancer Society aims to raise $1 million exclusively through cryptocurrency. Its Cancer Crypto Fund will be renamed in honor of the first donor to contribute $250,000. Donations of at least $10,000 will appear on the Cancer Crypto Fund Wall of Honor. The Salvation Army launched a cryptocurrency option the week before Christmas and… Continue reading Episode 42: Bitcoin and the Future Of Fundraising
Research shows that multi-channel donors can be worth more than donors who give only online or only offline. But do nonprofits treat multi-channel donors like they’re worth two or three times more to their organization? A recent experiment looked at how nonprofits respond after a gift and the results could surprise you.
https://media.thenonprofittimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/16113436/Fresh-Research.E41.Multichannel-donors.mp3 Gabe Cooper, CEO of Phoenix-based Virtuous Software joins the program to talk about the study they embarked on with NextAfter Institute, titled, The State of Multichannel Donor Communications: How 119 Organizations Are Using Online and Offline Channels to Engage New Donors.
The report examines how charities responded to donations that were made both online and offline. Donations of $20 were made to 119 organizations in the spring of 2020. Communications were then tracked across email, direct mail, telephone and text messaging for four months, culminating with the final 57-page report.
“We seem to know intuitively that communicating with people on multiple channels works,” Cooper said. “The data over and over again in these studies suggests that communicating on multiple channels gets far higher engagement from donors and so the fact that we are not really mailing all our online donors or vice versa…that is a little bit shocking because it seems to be a pretty big disconnect from how we know donors behave,” he said.
“Only 3% of the organizations we gave to were actually doing multi-channel well, meaning, somebody came in on one channel, and then they started engaging with them on both in a meaningful way or even more channels,” Cooper said. “So, that was the big shocker for me was even though multichannel gives are worth 300% more LTV [lifetime value] than a typical single-channel donor, there’s just very few nonprofits that are doing this after a first gift.”
There were some other surprising findings — both good and bad — and several organizations were cited for being stellar in their communications, including Buckner International and Doctors Without Borders.
Donor-advised funds (DAF) have dominated philanthropy in any number of ways over the past decade, whether it’s increasing charitable contributions, boosting assets, or simply garnering attention within the public square.
https://thenonprofittimes.s3.amazonaws.com/fresh-research-podcast/FreshResearchEpisode40.mp3 That could be why it takes a super sized episode of Fresh Research tackle the topic. This episode diverges from the usual format; instead of one interview there are two interviews, each taking a side on the subject of DAFs and proposed reforms around charitable giving.
Professor Ray Madoff The first segment features Ray Madoff, co-founder and director of the Boston College Law School Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good. She’s part of the Initiative to Accelerate Charitable Giving, a coalition of philanthropists, nonprofits and foundations pushing charitable reforms, including new rules around donor-advised funds. Since this episode was recorded, Madoff released a new paper with UC-San Diego Professor James Andreoni titled, Impact of the Rise of Commercial Donor-Advised Funds on the Charitable Landscape, 1991-2019. Among the findings was that even though “more funds are flowing into, and growing in, private foundations and DAFs, there’s no evidence that charities have benefited from this trend.”
Howard Husock In the second segment, Howard Husock, senior executive fellow at The Philanthropy Roundtable and adjunct fellow at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), talks about some of the shortcomings of the reforms proposed by IACG around DAFs and foundations. AEI hosted a similar discussion between Madoff and Husock during a recent virtual panel. You can find the link to the YouTube video here.
Husock also touches on his recent paper for AEI, Appreciation in donor-advised funds: An analysis of major sponsors {48:55}. The report uses data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for the four largest commercial sponsors managing DAFs to get a sense of the magnitude of their asset appreciation over the past decade. During the discussion, Husock also notes a paper {51:56} by Dan Heist (“Understanding Donor-Advised Funds: How Grants Flow During Recessions,” with Danielle Vance-McMullen), which was the subject of a previous Fresh Research episode in 2019.