Fundraising Update

Welcome to Fundraising Update. This week, we look at whether you should change your year-end fundraising appeals because of the election. Plus, there’s more than $250 billion set aside for charity in donor-advised funds, according to a new report.

I’m Rasheeda Childress, senior editor for fundraising at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. If you have ideas, comments, or questions about this newsletter, please write me.

Fundraising Update will be taking a brief hiatus next week for Thanksgiving. We hope you have a great holiday, and we will return to your inbox December 4.

Thanks to our sponsor Kellogg School Center for Nonprofit Management for supporting Fundraising Update.

For many organizations, the largest giving campaigns take place at the end of the year. Whether nonprofits should call attention to the election results in their year-end fundraising appeals is a matter of what they say and how they say it, experts told my colleague Jie Jenny Zou.

“Going forward, use your best judgment on what is appropriate to say, given how politically divided all of the donors are,” says CJ Orr, CEO of the Orr Group, a nonprofit consultancy. “Just be careful on who your audience is and making sure not to offend half of your audience.”

For many organizations, wading into the elections doesn’t make sense. “If your mission or programs are not related to the political outcomes of the last week, do nothing different,” Orr says. “Stick to your plan.”

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Eric Schmelling, chief philanthropy officer of Rotary International, says the election hasn’t changed the organization’s year-end campaign.

“Rotary really prides itself on being a nonpolitical organization,” Schmelling says. “We work really hard to work with different groups. For example, with our polio eradication work, we’ve been very successful at maintaining our support with the U.S. Congress by working with both parties.”

However, “if your mission and/or program is affected, adjust your messaging accordingly,” Orr says.

For organizations that could be negatively affected, he recommends keeping it basic by explaining exactly how the incoming administration could impact their work using phrasing that is both “eloquent and appropriate.” In other words: “No need to name call or attack.”

To find out more about deciding whether to cite election results in year-end fundraising campaigns, read the rest of Jenny’s story.

— Amount of assets held in donor-advised funds in 2023

Total contributions to donor-advised funds dropped 21.7 percent in 2023, while grants made to charities from those funds declined 1.4 percent, according to a new report by the National Philanthropic Trust.

The 2024 DAF Report looked at the DAF landscape using data from the 2023 fiscal year. While contributions to and grants awarded from DAFs were both down, assets held within the funds grew 9.9 percent to $251.5 billion, according to the report, which I recently covered.

“While individual giving was down, DAF grant making remained steady,” a spokesperson for the National Philanthropic Trust told me via email. “DAF donors continue to be one of the most consistent funding sources for charities despite economic and financial market headwinds.”

While some fundraisers might look at the new data and think it’s an indication of a decline in the popularity of DAFs, that’s not what Danielle Vance-McMullen sees.

“I don’t think what we’re seeing is a cooling donor base,” says Vance-McMullen, one of the founders of the DAF Research Collaborative. “I think we’re seeing what we’ve seen historically in donor-advised funds: When the stock market is struggling, contributions to donor-advised funds decrease. Luckily, grants from donor-advised funds are relatively resilient.”

Critics of donor-advised funds point to the report data as evidence that wealthy donors are “warehousing” money in the funds to get tax breaks but not doling out the money to struggling charities.

Still, those struggling charities shouldn’t see the report’s findings as a reason to give up on DAFs, says Vance-McMullen, who notes they are historically reliable during giving season.

“In terms of giving season,” she says, “this report doesn’t give me any pause in terms of approaching those donor-advised funds for year-end gifts.”

For more on the DAF report, read my entire article.

Turning From the Resistance to Bridging? While some nonprofits have already said they will resist Trump administration policies that will negatively impact immigrants, reproductive rights, and the LGBTQ+ community, others hope to shore up funding for bridge building work, reports my colleague Drew Lindsay.

“What I’m hearing from a variety of funders is: ‘You all are right,’” says Eric Liu, CEO of Citizen University. “‘It can’t just be Resistance 2.0. It can’t just be electoral work that surges every four years. We’ve got to tend to the brokenness, the alienation, the resentment, and the mistrust.’”

Grant makers and donors outside the field are showing “curiosity and interest, a sense that there must be a new way or another way” to advance their issues, says Liz Vogel, interim director of New Pluralists, a funder collaborative. Some will step up to back organizations that face attack, but they will have to balance the short-term needs against the long-term benefits of work to bridge divides.

For more, read Drew’s entire piece.

Will and Calla Griffith gave $10 million to the Stevenson School to support its new Math, Science, and Engineering Center, and to establish the John Senuta Math Center.

Will Griffith is an executive at ICONIQ Capital, a San Francisco financial firm. He graduated from Stevenson School in 1989.

For other notable gifts this week — including a big one from MacKenzie Scott — read my colleague Maria Di Mento’s Gifts Roundup column. To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly and has data going back to 2000.

It’s Not Too Late to Get Ready for GivingTuesday. Veteran fundraisers recommend nonprofits set specific goals, enlist their volunteers, encourage donors to give early, and more.

A Climate Solution Hiding in Plain Sight (Opinion). Avengers actor Mark Ruffalo shares why he thinks climate justice isn’t just a theory — it’s one of the most effective ways to heal the warming planet and respond to climate deniers in the Trump administration.

Not All Groups Saw a Trump Bump. While some organizations saw a jump in giving after the election, others have not. Gothamist reported that Planned Parenthood of New York, which was already facing financial woes, has not seen the increases in gifts it saw after Trump’s 2016 election.

“We have not yet seen the kind of immediate post-election rage-giving that we did [when Trump was elected] in 2016 or after the fall of Roe v. Wade, but we do believe that our donors will step up to the plate,” Wendy Stark, CEO of the group, told the news outlet. “We will look in every direction for the answer to the challenges that we’re facing right now.”

Even among organizations that have seen a slight bump post-election, like the New York Abortion Access Fund, they are not sure how long, or if it will last. “We are holding on strong for now, or relatively strong, and we’re able to support folks,” says Chelsea Williams-Diggs, executive director of the fund. “But, again, the future is uncertain.” (Gothamist)