Volunteers are being drawn to youth and community

The Corporation for National and Community Service has released their annual survey of volunteerism in the U.S., showing a small drop in volunteer hours from 2005 to 2006. The broader context has been growth in volunteerism rates for a couple decades now; the data source is the Census Bureau's monthly surveying of about 60,000 households.

The report offers a variety of breakdowns on volunteerism which are interesting. For example when they compare 2006 to 1989 in terms of the different types of non-profits people are volunteering for, the big growth is for education/youth service groups (almost a doubled percentage of all volunteers now compared to then) and social or community service groups (a third more of all volunteers now than then). The recent losers of this particular sort of market share have been civic and professional groups, sports/hobby/arts groups, hospitals and health groups, and religious groups a little bit.

The report has a variety of rankings of the 50 states by volunteerism (hours, volunteers, rates of change, etc.) which shows generally that Midwesterners are volunteering at higher rates than any other part of the country. Utah is a huge outlier at the top end, I assume due to the Mormon theological emphasis on volunteering. But it would be interesting to see those breakdowns correlated with various demographics, e.g. are the states with older populations the ones with the highest volunteerism rates? And presumably various folks are busily crunching these new numbers to try to support or debunk the Charles Brooks theory about religious conservative folks volunteering more than any other group.

Donor cultivation conversation, part II

Albert Ruesga, proprietor of the excellent White Courtesy Telephone, posted a thoughtful response to Saturday's little rant here about donor-cultivation practices. (Today someone else has also left a comment which is specious, and anyway I don't debate with folks who aren't willing to put their names behind their ideas.) The subject seems worth some continuing examination as opposed to simply dueling comments.

Albert makes several good points, including that we should distinguish between opt-in and opt-out followup practices by organizations. Read his comment in full for more. I think though that our differing perspectives are more at a macro level.

It's probably worth noting that as a non-profit careerist I am reasonably well-versed in modern standards and practices of donor cultivation. At the Nature Conservancy in the late 1990s I had a stretch getting trained in it (attended some AFP conferences and trainings) and for a year I supervised a team of annual-fund staffers and major-gift officers. Then as executive director of a growing performing-arts organization I personally instituted the basics of professional donor management, under the expert guidance of a board vice-chair who had been an experienced successful director of development at a larger organization. I am certainly not as knowledgeable in that subject as Albert or his colleagues, but the point is simply that I do have hands-on familiarity with the theory and practice.

The sense I have today, which I did not have in 2002 or 1997, is that some core assumptions in the non-profit development field (reflected in that NonProfit Times essay) are rooted in a dated understanding of what donors know, want and expect of us. I'm quite sure that Albert is right that a majority of AFP members would agree with the article, and that is exactly my concern. It feels increasingly as if a rapid shift in donor tastes and donor behavior is underway right now and that donor-cultivation best practices are not keeping up.

For example: clearly anyone like me who regularly makes contributions to a variety of non-profits is interested in staying up to date on what those groups are doing. A decade or two ago the only practical way for that to happen was to receive periodic missives from those organizations, and any reasonable adult would accept continuing solicitation or cultivation as the overhead cost of thusly staying informed about the group's work. Today though, the cost in time and effort to seek that knowledge on our own is orders of magnitude lower, and we happily do that because we get to do it on our time and schedule. Put another way: two whole generations of American adults have grown up expecting a sort of control of their own time and information flow which is fundamentally different than was true for my peers or my parents.

Several other examples come to mind. Now of course I know that AFP conferences today are full of discussion of how to adapt donor-contact and -cultivation best practices to the online world; so are any number of well-written blogs, and so forth. The concern I have, or the button which that NonProfit Times columnist pushed I guess, is that discussing how to adapt the existing paradigm seems to really miss the forest for the trees as far as what charitably-minded Americans of today expect and will tolerate, and how they will respond.

Are we going to drive donors crazy online, too?

NonProfit Times recently ran an article on how non-profits deal with online small donors. A columnist donated $15 each online to 62 different groups and then kept track of how they responded. The conclusion offered as obvious -- and echoed in this leading philanthropy blog -- is that non-profits should respond to online donations just as intensively as they are now expected to respond to check-writing donors.

aarrrg...I don't think I'm the only charitable donor for whom that idea inspires clenched teeth and a desire to reach into the monitor to smack somebody upside the head.

Literally everyone I know who regularly donates to non-profits absolutely loathes the sort of fawning, repetitive cultivation contact that development pros institute. Follow-up phone calls are simply intolerable (I remain outraged that non-profits were exempted from the "Do Not Call" legislation and list); in my household we follow an ironclad rule now that any non-profit to which we have donated never again receives anything if they ever call us. Friends and family members who know that I'm a lifer in the sector are constantly asking me why making a donation has to result in so much blankety-blank mail and phone calls and invitations to the next fundraiser and so forth. The news that bulk-postage rates for non-profits are about to go up gets a big cheer from here, in the hope that it might make direct mail just a little bit less attractive.

At every place I've worked, when these concerns are voiced the staff and board members think that what annoys people is the visible costs: how many trees were consumed to print that newsletter, etc. Hence they always think that online culivation activity is all to the good in terms of donor goodwill.

That's increasingly wrong in my experience. What makes more and more charitably-minded people nuts is that non-profits spend so much time and energy pestering people who have already donated! That is the thing my friends and family members always lament to me. That is what makes them roll their eyes or swear never to "make that mistake (of donating) again!"

So when NonProfit Times columnist tut-tuts about the fact that 34 of 62 organizations responded to an online donation with nothing but simple acknowledgement of receipt, my reaction is to ask if I can have the list of 34 so I can move them to the top of my family's charitable-giving list. And I am quite certain that my reaction is far more common now than the reverse, and is growing. What people who invest in non-profits with their wallets want is for the organizations to do what they do -- not for them to behave like timeshare-condo salespeople on the excuse that it's for a good cause.

"Who Really Cares" review, part 2 of 2

Buried within Arthur C. Brooks' rambling rumination about philanthropy and politics in the U.S. are some points that are firmly rooted in meaningful data and which are worth thinking about.

(a) it's pretty clear now that tax deductibility is not a major factor in the ongoing boom of individual giving in this country. We know this because in 1986 the top federal income-tax rate was sharply cut, and in 2001 so was the inheritance tax; neither of those changes slowed down the rise in giving. About the non-rich this was predictable given that two-thirds of all taxpayers don't itemize and hence have never gotten any benefit from deducting charitable gifts. The surprise perhaps is that giving by the wealthy is also apparently not directly influenced by tax considerations. (Brooks also asserts that both wealthy and poor households donate higher fractions of their incomes than do middle-class ones, but unfortunately he doesn't provide specific data supporting that but just cites a different author's claim on it.)

(b) Brooks convincingly shows that religious people are more generous across the board: people of all faiths give more to non-religious causes than do people who aren't religious. [They also, naturally, give much more to churches and church-affiliated non-profits than do secular folks.] The pattern holds whether religious folks are politically liberal or conservative. The data supporting those statements is surveys, of which I am generally dubious as noted yesterday, but on this point there are too many surveys all pointing the same way to allow for reasonable doubt.

(c) Brooks also convincingly shows that in this country conservative voters are more generous than liberals. This conclusion is partly driven by surveys but also shows up in hard data, such as that the states which voted for John Kerry in 2004 mostly ranked below average in charitable giving per income dollar. (Meaning, obviously, that the states which went for Bush generally ranked higher in giving as a percentage of household incomes.) A more-sophisticated analysis of state data which found the same breakdown can be found here. And survey data consistently finds similar splits for non-monetary philanthropy such as volunteerism and giving blood.

However Brooks is much less persuasive in arguing that liberal households' lower philanthropy is driven heavily by political beliefs: that favoring income redistribution makes people less philanthropic. I certainly have no truck with the brainless cliche about how "a society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity," but the factual case for such an attitude being a cause of less giving is thin. The core causation seems simpler to understand: as Brooks himself points out, secular conservatives give a bit less than secular liberals while religious conservatives give more than religious liberals, but religious people of all political stripes give much more than do non-religious people.

If that is correct then it has troubling implications for non-profit fundraising going forward, because the percentage of Americans who are non-religious is now rapidly increasing. (Different surveys all identifying that trend can be read here, here and here.) Will it turn out that the steady increase in individual philanthropy that's occurred throughout my lifetime is unsustainable? Or can the non-profit sector in the 21st century convince secular citizens to participate in civic giving and volunteering as enthusiastically as their churchgoing 20th-century parents and grandparents did?

"Who Really Cares" review, part 1 of 2

A couple months ago I ordered a copy of Arthur C. Brooks' new book "Who Really Cares", which made a bit of a media splash. I said I'd read it and post a review. Finally finished it, took some time to ponder, and here we go.

This will require two posts, and today will be the actual book review: it's not a great piece of work. Nonetheless I'll suggest that everyone working in this sector should read it.

I should also confess up front to some empathy for Brooks’ worldview: like me he is a born-and-raised progressive now bewildered by the intellectual/philosophical decomposition of U.S. liberalism. But that issue is not particularly germane to the specific questions raised by his book, and certainly doesn’t grant Brooks any special exemptions from basic standards of logic and critical thinking. “Who Really Cares” falls well short of those standards in several ways.

The biggest logic problem I have is that Brooks treats survey data and behavioral data as equally significant. He keeps citing surveys (“57 percent of Americans said they volunteered”) as if they had the same significance as actual documented activity (e.g. how different states compare on the amount of charitable giving reported on tax returns). That’s just silly -- people aren’t always completely honest on surveys, and survey responses can be heavily influenced by how the question is phrased. The strongest use of survey data for analysis is when a variety of surveys all point the same way and Brooks at times seems to get that, but at a lot of points he just quotes a single survey as if it could prove some point or other all by itself.

Also Brooks frequently confuses correlation with causation, hardly an uncommon problem of course but he does it persistently. Another problem is that while Brooks says that he set out to just analyze and report the true facts about philanthropy in America not to “promote some broad-based political agenda”, that is obviously untrue. He goes off on extended tangential riffs about things like the welfare system and tax policy and other issues. On some issues I tend to agree with him on other things not, but that’s really not the point. Moreover his arguments on those subjects are no more compelling than are the cliches about charity which his book is ostensibly aimed at (that is, nobody who doesn’t already see economic politics his way is going to be persuaded by anything he’s written).

All of that tends to undermine his credibility about the immediate subject, charitable giving. So overall I’d have to say that this book, as a book, is kind of a mess. It doesn’t really deserve to be called a “study” of charitable giving in the U.S. -- “study” sounds like something empirical and coldly analytical, the scientific method at work. Brooks’ book is at least as much a philosophical essay or rumination; I didn’t personally find it to be a terribly coherent or persuasive one but of course your mileage may vary.

With all that said…mixed in there is a lot of interesting actual data about individual philanthropy in the U.S., and Brooks earns kudos for providing a full appendix listing and describing all his data sources. So over the weekend I’ll summarize what folks in the non-profit sector might want to think about, which can be extracted from the interesting and well-sourced facts buried within this flabby book.

Oprah's big giveaway

No doubt you read about Oprah's show yesterday, she gave every member of the audience $1,000 with instructions to donate it to the charity of their choice.

It's a fun idea, which she probably got from a movement she had previously talked about on her show that was started by an evangelical church in California. The minister one day in 2000 simply handed every member of the congregation $100 cash with instructions to use it for charity and then come back and relate what they decided on. They've published a couple of small books on it and taken it national, which given the sad history of such things has to make one ask whether it's some sort of scam...if so I'm not spotting it. The books are priced so cheaply that any profit there seems unlikely. If somebody can spot a catch, do speak up.