Too often in philanthropy today, grant makers and donors are happy to pay for blankets, but not for the shelves to store them until the winter storms. They willingly donate toward the stew, but refuse to cover the wages of the bookkeeper who writes the check for the dumplings.
Organizational overhead? Not my issue, they say. The costs of seeking, processing, and accounting for gifts? Let someone else take care of it.
That attitude poses a serious threat to organizations that depend on donations - and yet charities sometimes are complicit in encouraging it.
The desire to restrict the purposes of gifts to make an immediate, tangible difference may be understandable. But it is a mistake.
Most benefactors, if truth be told, would probably agree that organizations with no administrative costs are unlikely to be very effective. Yet many still insist that most - if not all - of their gifts go to "program" purposes.
Tussling over program priorities is an expected part of negotiations over gifts, grants, and contracts. But well-publicized excesses and outrageous misbehavior by a few nonprofit leaders in recent years have fueled an overly general condemnation of administrative and fund-raising costs.
In determining where to give their money, for example, many donors make use of on-line and other information services that purport to identify "efficient" nonprofit groups by presenting statistics about the percentage of donations that goes to operating, rather than program, costs. Yet such simplistic ratios can come from suspect sources of data - and may not even be comparable from one organization to the next because of differences in accounting practices. Donors who read those reports like sports statistics, hunting for the charity with the "best" ratio of one kind of expense to another, limit themselves, on very questionable grounds, to an arbitrary selection of recipients of their generosity. Compilers of official statistics, therefore, need to be more cautious about the way the results of their work may be feeding unreasonable expectations about the rewards of altruism.
Foundations exercise their clout in even more dangerous ways. They impose complicated administrative requirements designed to limit non-program costs and to ease identification of excess spending. Some foundations, astonishingly, declare in advance that they simply do not support administrative costs of any sort.
That attitude, as well as some donors' fixation with cost ratios, pushes to one side the role of the creators and managers of the charities that deliver public benefits. Such a posture ignores the importance of the existence - and survival - of organizations that can identify, craft, and deliver appropriate responses to ever-changing personal and community needs.
Charities themselves can sometimes play into this process. Endowed organizations, for example, often reassure donors of small amounts that their gift can be devoted entirely to the cause they name because all operating expenses have been paid by generous donors to the endowment. A similar pattern appears when sponsors underwrite the entire cost of an event, allowing the invitations to boast that "100 per cent of the ticket price will go toward announced charitable goals."
Pitches like those are all very well and good. Applying a little soft soap to ease the task of insuring the work of eleemosynary organizations is a well-established practice.
But eager fund seekers should be careful not to promise too much. They need to avoid fueling the irrational view that overhead is bad and program is good. Building and sustaining effective organizations to identify and meet community needs is as much a part of charity as serving soup to the needy.
If donating to a charitable cause can be described as generating a "warm glow" in the heart of the donor, those who limit the use of their gifts to program purposes are seeking no less than to appropriate 100 per cent of that warm glow for themselves. In other words, for their own personal satisfactions, they want to piggyback - dare I say "take a free ride" - on the generosity of others.
That attitude ignores the reality that the unmet needs of our fellow citizens and our communities do not show up in convenient small packages so they can be answered one bit at a time. Designing careful and compassionate responses to social problems, balancing competing claims, setting reasonable goals, keeping track of the money - and all the other functions that charities perform - are hard work. Donors who aren't willing to assume those tasks themselves should not be allowed to assume they will be done by some genie, some magic spell. They are real costs, imposed by real needs, and demanding real resources. Pretending otherwise is silly.
Being willing to see one's gift as a small drop in an ever-flowing stream of generosity that represents the community's response to sad, sharp, and continuing needs is a much more big-hearted view. But it requires sharing the credit with the others - donors, administrators, charity employees, and innovators - whose continuing commitment to the needs of people and communities is one source of warmth in a chilly world.
Putnam Barber, a regular contributor to these pages, is
president of The Evergreen State Society, in Seattle, which works
to strengthen nonprofit groups and civic organizations. The
society's World-Wide Web address is http://www.tess.org .
© 1999, The Chronicle of Philanthropy.