Updates: corporate giving, poetry, and another Smithsonian problem

Some updates today on past topics, in no particular order:

Say I bet you've heard the conventional wisdom about corporate charitable giving being on the decline. (Can't work in or read about this sector for more than two minutes without hearing it, really.) Or perhaps its more-specialized cousin, the one about how corporate funding for the arts is shifting to marketing budgets. Um, nope. Say how about we open nominations for a couple of new cliches to fret about, those two ceased being original or interesting back around the Carter administration.

Poetry seems to have just burst out all over within the last generation or so in the U.S., and Chicago has for some reason played a huge role in that. When I graduated from college in 1985 poetry appeared to have a smaller place in the national consciousness than competitive ballroom dancing or ultimate frisbee. Since then the poetry-slam phenomenon, created in Chicago by Marc Smith, has burst out all over the place; and I've written about the sudden creation of a large well-funded non-profit to promote classical poetry (big enough to fight over you might say) which is headquartered in Chicago. Now I read, in the Chicago Tribune, that the University of Pennsylvania two years ago started making readings of poetry available for free download to iPods, and last year the site had 8 million downloads!

And over at our misbegotten national museum, sigh...turns out that the Smithsonian has been charging for prints of photographs of iconic historical items like the Wright Brothers' plane, and citing copyright rights to justify the prices. A notable flaw being that the photographs are not in fact copyrighted, as Public.Resource.org points out, meaning that the museum has been collecting money in exchange for rights which it has never actually owned. The advocacy group applied a nice example of the radical democratization which the information age can enable: they simply downloaded all 6,288 photos from the Smithsonian and posted them for free elsewhere! Cheers to them both for the originality and the point. (And kudos to my favorite blogger Harold Henderson for the tip.)

The graying of the non-profit arts sector? On what planet?

A large and generally very smart foundation recently published a really silly report. The basic premise is that non-profit arts organizations are facing a crisis of failure to attract the younger generations of adults as artists, staff or supporters. Therefore, the foundation argues, the non-profit arts sector must adopt "a systemic approach to the challenge of generational succession in the areas of governance, membership, advocacy, [and] financial support."

Heh. Are they kidding? Well no they're not, alas; rather, they are offering conclusions that are wildly unsupported by the fairly trivial amount of actual data offered. Andrew Taylor with The Artful Manager, and especially some of the commenters to his post, nicely point out some glaring logic flaws in the above argument. Best comment: "In reality, younger people have perfectly fine values of their own -- as well as finely honed bullshit detectors -- and the real challenge is for the arts to genuinely mean something to younger people. To be worthy of them, I might even say."

I can't do any better than that on the logic so I'll throw in two cents on the facts: if there is a sector of the U.S. economy that is doing better now at attracting young people than the arts I haven't seen it. I've been working in the non-profit arts sector for several years now, just did some empirical research on it actually, and that trend is blindingly obvious. Theater, dance, music, visual arts, whatever.

Training talented kids for those fields is a booming business at all levels, the number of U.S. tax returns listing artist as a paid occupation doubled in one generation, the biggest current theatrical hit on the planet is minting money around the country based on its appeal to young women ("Wicked"), and so on. In my day job I deal with small to medium sized arts organizations, the number of which has been rising at a crazy rate, and it's long since become a surprise to meet an artistic director or music director as old as 35.

That report notes demographic predictions of the rising average age of the U.S. and claims that this is a danger sign for the arts unless the sector gets organized to meet "increasing competition" for the attention of "a shrinking pool of younger people." You know what, if the shrinking pool prediction turns out to be correct I'm going to predict that it will be other sectors scrambling to figure out how to become as attractive to young people as the arts provably are, rather than the reverse.

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.

U.S. foundation giving keeps surging, and changing

The Foundation Center, the best source of information on charitable foundations, has released its latest trend data. While the fact that foundation grantmaking continues to boom is hardly a surprise given various newspaper headlines the last few years, there are some changes underway which development directors and executive directors would be wise to think about.

The Center's data comes from the largest 1,100 foundations, representing about half of all foundation grant dollars awarded. Total grant dollars from those institutions are rising now at close to twice the rate of inflation: up about 6% in 2005 after a rise of 8% for 2004. (And the center predicts an even greater increase for 2006 thanks to various high-profile foundation gifts starting to turn into new grant dollars).

Those increases are in dollars awarded, though -- the total number of individual grants issued rose only half as much. So the average size of individual foundation grants is rising. At the top end, a record 308 individual grants were at least $5 million each in 2005.

The common accusation that foundations have limited attention spans is supported in some ways by this data. For example the largest grantmaking increases by subject area in 2005 were environmental and animal-related causes, two categories which had declined the previous three years.

Unrestricted grants rose by only 1% for 2005, meaning they declined as a fraction of all grant dollars. So that's one recurring gripe which is not yet being persuasive for many folks on the foundation side of the discussion (I'm one example of that, actually).

Kids today! They're volunteering, a lot

A comprehensive national study has concluded that volunteerism in the U.S. is booming, including an eye-popping doubling among teenagers compared to the late 1980s. The study also found that folks aged 45 to 64 are volunteering at higher rates than their parents did at the same age, as are senior citizens.

The study's authors think that this growth is driven by "social trends such as the rise of service and service-learning in the schools, higher education levels among adults, delayed child-bearing, and longer life expectancy." I wonder if another factor isn't some maturity in the non-profit sector in terms of how well we recruit and manage volunteers. That's one of the ways in which, in my current role as a foundation officer, I am often impressed with how much smarter young non-profit staffers seem now than my age group was at the same professional level a decade or two ago.

"Giving circles"

A new form of personal philanthropy which appears to be gaining steam in the U.S. is the "giving circle", in which groups of people gather once a month or so to pool small amounts into a single larger donation to a charity they've discussed and agreed on. So for example a dozen individuals or families each giving $20 might vote on a single charity each month that gets the whole $240.

All the examples being written about thus far in the media are groups of women, probably because that gives reporters and editors a chance to make smug analogies to sewing circles and book clubs, but there are all-male and mixed-gender examples too. Some of the amounts described are fairly impressive, like a Los Angeles giving circle that collects $5,000 per year per participant.

Some research has been done on this trend, see here and here. Though thus far it's not terribly rigorous, it does suggest that there are now thousands such groups and that most of them have been founded since the late 1990s. A couple of the big national foundations have financed those initial research and advocacy efforts.

Is this a good thing? Well...obviously the trend plugs into the concept of leverage: individuals who can each only afford $50/month can band together and feel like they're making a bigger impact. On balance people being recruited into giving circles seems likely to increase total charitable giving. And it certainly sounds like more fun to be philanthropic in that manner rather than just writing a check -- at least until serious disagreement arises, what's the over-under on that in months for a typical group? And I'm a big fan of donors behaving like investors, which the entire sector would be better for and which this concept would seem to encourage. So a tentative thumbs up from here, while acknowledging that we don't yet know much about the real-world long-term impacts of this concept.