The Chronicle of Philanthropy

How Donors Can Keep a Lid on Charity Costs

By PUTNAM BARBER

Donors often claim to be concerned about the fund-raising costs of the charities they support. But by their actions, donors earn for themselves a good share of the blame.

Take the issue of unwanted mailings and other seemingly endless solicitations. Everyone has experienced some variation of fund-raising hell: You donate to a charity or attend one of its events, and then you start receiving a flood of newsletters, membership offers, and pleas for additional support -- not only from the organization you supported, but from others you've never heard of before. You may politely try to stop those solicitations by contacting the charities through letters, e-mails, and telephone calls, but they just keep coming -- a trash-can monument to inattention and waste.

It's no surprise why this happens. Keeping fund-raising costs low is part of the reason. Swapping or selling lists is a useful way to acquire new supporters or bring in some revenue, but it costs money to cull the lists to avoid duplication. What's more, there's plenty of solid evidence that people who don't respond to the first, the second, or even the sixth fund-raising appeal do, inexplicably, drop a check in the mail after multiple solicitations. So it's often worthwhile financially for a charity to keep pressing prospective donors.

Nonetheless, this pattern is an embarrassing waste. Everyone concerned with the efficiency of America's charities should be trying to think of ways to make sure it doesn't happen -- ever.

Donors, for their part, can discourage (if not eliminate) unwanted solicitations -- and help charities keep fund-raising costs down -- by adopting these habits:

* Take charge of your giving. Don't wait to be solicited, and don't respond to solicitations from people and organizations you don't know. Talk to your friends. Use the World-Wide Web and other research tools. Pick out the organizations that appeal most strongly: whose work meets the needs tugging most urgently at your heartstrings, whose missions match most closely your hopes for a better world.

* Write a few large checks (large defined, of course, in terms of your family's sense of what's proportionate). Processing many small checks means higher overhead costs. If you want to make more and smaller gifts, make them in cash to reduce record-keeping burdens for the organizations you support in this way.

* Be clear about expectations. Enclose a letter with your check to say what and when you expect to hear from the charity -- a newsletter, a reminder at some future date, a chance to attend local events. If you don't want your name to be sold or traded to other organizations, say so. I have started telling people that future donations from me depend on my name's being treated as absolutely confidential, and there is at least one Seattle organization that ignored that stricture and has lost any future support I might have given to its work. There are too many hard-working charities in the world; the ones that can't respect their donors' privacy and commitment deeply enough to honor such requests don't deserve a second thought.

* Respond at once to reminders. If you ask a charity to remind you to contribute again in a year, then respond immediately when it does. The truth, of course, is that my computer can be set up to let me know when it's time to send another check, thereby saving my favored causes the cost of keeping track of my name and my preferences about gifts. But if I'm not prepared to make those entries as part of my charitable routine, the least I can do is avoid provoking wasteful repetitive mailings by responding immediately, rather than waiting to be nudged several times.

* Think twice about attending special events. No matter how the occasion is structured, there are necessary out-of-pocket expenses that must be met whenever large numbers of people get together and enjoy one another's company, a good meal, and entertainment. Personally, I'd rather see those resources put directly to work on the cause itself. If the sponsors and other organizers aren't willing to do that, then there's room to question how they balance their commitment to good works with their eagerness for publicity and attention.

If more charities knew that more donors, even relatively small ones, were approaching their charitable giving with those sorts of habits, there would be more and more incentive to approach fund raising by focusing on building a reputation for outstanding service rather than the mechanics of large-scale appeals. And then there would be less and less chance that those mechanics would run amok, less and less chance that donors would find themselves trapped in the annoying varieties of fund-raising hell we see all too often.

Putnam Barber, a regular contributor to these pages, is president of the Evergreen State Society, in Seattle, which works to strengthen non-profit groups and civic organizations. His e-mail address is pbarber@eskimo.com.