Large Contributions Can Be Made Easier Than Most People Think

By Hazaiah Williams
SPECIAL TO THE OBSERVER

As The Sacramento OBSERVER launches a new column about the nonprofit industry, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to write a series of articles on philanthropy and volunteerism.

During my years of fundraising and marketing work for a variety of charitable organizations, many volunteers and professional fund-raisers have asked me the following question: "What is a major gift?"

Simply put, a major gift is a monetary donation that is significant for both the donor and the recipient nonprofit agency. A major gift must be well above the average contribution received by an organization in a given year.

Although most nonprofits define a major gift as a donation of between $500-$1,000, major gifts can be a small as $100 and as large as $10,000, $100,000, $1 million or more. Often, major gifts are annual gifts, but they also can be one-time gifts.

Major gifts are as individual as the people who give them and their relationships to the causes they support.

I use the term "relationship" because nearly everyone who makes a gift that is major to them does so because of a personal experience that is reflected in the mission of the charity they select to support.

Some people give to a college or university because while they were students, great professors changed the way they view the world.

An individual may make a major gift to a hospital because the institution's medical staff saved the life of a loved one. Others may give to programs working with homeless families because as children, their parents taught them that helping those in need was the right thing to do.

For most people, the image that comes to mind of the average major donor is a gray-haired, European American man who runs a large corporation. In reality, most major donors are women who, actually, control most of the wealth in the United States.

For generations, African Americans, Asian Americans and Latino Americans have made five, six and seven-figure major gifts to various organizations and causes ranging from religious institution and economic development nonprofits, to college scholarships and international development programs. (I will delve more into the subject of ethnic philanthropy in my upcoming article on the history of philanthropy in the African American community.)

Major donors are chiefly from the ranks of middle and upper-middle income wage earners - not the very rich.

According to the Internal Revenue Service, households with incomes of $1 million and up accounted for only 8 percent of all itemized contributions in 1995, and that statistic has changed little in the past several years.

Although organized philanthropy began in America (e.g., the work of community foundations in the United States has set an example for the growth of community foundations in Europe) and Americans give tens of billions of dollars to charity each year, we are not nearly as generous as we can afford to be. For instance, individual giving, as a percentage of net worth, has remained flat for 30 years.

Also, according to recent research conducted by the San Francisco-based Newtithing Group, headed by Claude Rosenberg (founder of Rosenberg Capital Management), Americans can easily give nearly double the $143 billion we gave in 1999 if we make donations based on our assets instead of our income.

Why don't Americans give as much as we should? Is it because those of us with homes and stock investments simply do not care about millions of other Americans who've lost their jobs in just the last few years? I don't think so.

Experience tells me that many Americans don't realize they have the wherewithall to make major gifts, and the fault for this lack of understanding lies not with potential donors but with the charitable organizations that seek their support.

For example, many studies have shown that "mainstream" nonprofits are much less likely to ask for contributions from those in ethnic communities because fund-raisers make incorrect assumptions about these individuals' ability and desire to give.

Misperceptions about the level of philanthropy among ethnic populations persist despite evidence to the contrary.

For example, a 1997 survey conducted by the University of Connecticut for the National Commission on Philanthropy and Civic Renewal indicated that 24 percent of European Americans said they had refused charitable requests in the past year as opposed to only 13 percent of African Americans and 14 percent of Latino Americans.

Furthermore, nonprofit must do a better job of explaining to the public that major giving is easier than they think. More potential donors need to know that charitable giving not only helps to solve important societal problems, but that the dollar-for-dollar tax deductions received by donors help them to help others essentially for free.

Given that individual donations account for nearly 80 percent of all philanthropy in the United States, a tremendous growth in major giving is needed if private nonprofits are to secure the diverse and long-term streams of contributed income they need to respond to complex socio-economic problems that are no longer being addressed solely by government agencies.