Commentary

How I Make Choices for Year-End Gifts

In my family, we have a custom of sitting down toward the end of the year with a file folder that holds a miscellaneous collection of notes about causes and organizations that have caught our attention during the year. Our goal is to identify the ones that are candidates for year-end gifts and then fit our desire to contribute to a safer and healthier world into the realities of our household budget.

(I don’t want to sound grand in talking about this subject. My family’s charitable contributions mean a good deal to us, but measured by the larger scheme of things they are just in the range of typical gifts for families that contribute at all. Because of the work I do I spend more time than most people -- probably -- puzzling about the ins and outs of philanthropy. But I want to be clear that the thinking I’ve done is not connected to being a “major donor” by anyone’s lights.)

As the calendar reminded us that it was time to pull out the “year-end gift” folder once again, I was interested to read an online comment by Ken Ristine of Tacoma, posted to an email group that focuses on nonprofits and their work. “I really like to see strategic plan have a statement that formally articulates where the board of directors feels the strategic plan is going to take the organization and a plan for evaluating how the plan worked. Where did it hit the mark, where did it fall short or exceed expectations, and why? Such an approach sets the table for revisiting the strategic plan and integrating new knowledge. It's nothing more than a simple feedback loop.”

This comment got me to thinking about the standards my family might use in deciding on the organizations we would support. Once I started from that point of view, it seemed clear that such a process of internal self-evaluation should be something we should look for, and weigh seriously. Put differently: we should be asking ourselves how does the board test the organization's fulfillment of its mission.

If I don't believe in the mission, I have no business supporting the organization in the first place.

If I don't admire and respect the board (and other leadership) of the organization, I should think twice before entrusting them with my money.

But even an admirable and respectable board can be asleep at the switch.

For small-scale gifts -- the kind my family is able to make -- the implication is that we should look carefully at each organization's published materials for reports of how it goes about evaluating its own performance. Not the results (pace the 'outcomes' advocates), but the process of self-examination. If there isn’t evidence of serious attention to that challenge, it will be harder for us to reassure ourselves that the community support the organization receives is being wisely used.

If we could make big gifts, the kind that it is reasonable to ask organizations to do special work in the hope of receiving, this is the question I think we should ask: How do you routinely, regularly, and demandingly assure yourselves that you are doing the best you can to fulfill the mission your organization exists to serve?

As I think about it, answering this question seems much more appropriate than most of the issues raised in the various schemes for "accountability" that have been developed by observers of nonprofits’ work. More appropriate, and more respectful.

Supporting a nonprofit should be an expression of confidence in that organization’s ability to do something important on a scale that a single donor could not achieve alone. For donors the ideal is an organization that is effective and fully committed to that important work. While searching for that ideal, donors need to be careful not to make distracting demands on the organizations they support and not to substitute their judgment for the recipients’ when thinking about how to achieve the mission.

There are, after all, a huge number of choices among the organizations that are worthy of support. It should be up to the donor to find the one that best matches the vision of a better world that animates a charitable impulse.

Resources spent satisfying donors are resources that are being pulled away from the organization’s core work and used -- no matter how you slice it -- for something else. That outcome is just what a wise donor should want to avoid.