Cultivating Loyalty After a Disaster

Some charities that won new donors following the Asian tsunamis have found ways to hold on to them

By Caroline Preston

Addie Guttag knew very little about American Jewish World Service when she donated $10,000 to the organization in the wake of the Asian tsunamis.

But three years later, Ms. Guttag, who works as a management and fund-raising consultant, has become a board member of the charity, as well as a six-figure donor, thanks to the relationship the charity built with her following the catastrophe that struck at the end of 2004.

Holding onto donors like Ms. Guttag, who are inspired to give after disasters, has typically been difficult for charities.

But American Jewish World Service and a few other charities have achieved some success in securing additional gifts from people who supported tsunami relief efforts — and using that money to expand their organizations.

American Jewish World Service, for example, has won additional gifts from nearly 26 percent of the 35,657 people who gave to the group for the first time after the tsunamis. The year before the disaster, the organization had received money from about 4,890 people.

Today, the New York charity, which gives money to grass-roots groups overseas, has a budget of about $31-million, compared with $7.1-million in 2003.

Some other charities have also recorded gains in the number of donors:

• Doctors Without Borders, in New York, acquired 134,456 new donors in response to the waves. About 36.6 percent have made at least one additional gift since.
• Lutheran World Relief, in Baltimore, received gifts from 60,000 new donors after the tsunamis, five times the number of people to whom it had been sending direct mail. It has received additional contributions from 25 percent of those first-time donors.
• Mercy Corps, in Portland, Ore., won subsequent gifts from 46 percent of the 76,000 people who gave to the charity for the first time following the tsunamis. Before the catastrophe, the charity had about 40,000 donors.

‘Hyper-Speed’ Fund Raising

American Jewish World Service was a relatively little-known charity before the December 2004 tsunamis, although it was beginning to generate some buzz because of the high profile of its president, Ruth Messinger. She became the charity’s leader shortly after her failed 1997 bid to become mayor of New York.

The organization was just beginning to expand its fund-raising efforts when the tsunamis hit. Suddenly, a three-year plan that the charity had developed to expand the number of its supporters was “put on hyper-speed,” says Riva Silverman, director of development.

“We would have had to spend a lot of money and taken a lot of time to have 35,000 new people in our lives, and suddenly, here they were,” says Ms. Silverman, who joined the charity shortly after the tsunamis. Today, the charity has 14 people who work in development, compared with three full-time people before the tsunamis.

Within ten weeks, the group had raised nearly $12-million in response to the tsunamis, more than it had received in any single year to that date. Staff members at the charity attribute much of that response to the group’s listing in The New York Times and many donors’ desire to support tsunami relief through a Jewish organization, as well as the group’s consistent four-star ratings from Charity Navigator, a watchdog group, and experience working at the grass-roots level.

Charity officials saw the tsunamis as a chance to educate donors about other crises around the globe.

“We started trying to let them know what life is really like in the developing world,” says Ms. Messinger. “It’s a tsunami that gets coverage, but the fact that 100 million children under 14 are out of school almost never makes the newspaper.”

In its direct-mail appeals, e-mail messages, and conversations with donors, and through its Web site, the group drove home the idea that the scale of suffering after the tsunamis was not unique to India, Indonesia, or Sri Lanka. Appeals reminded supporters that the charity’s grantees fight “silent tsunamis,” such as malnutrition, disease, and poverty, all over the world every day.

Focusing on Development

The charity’s employees also say that their emphasis on accountability played a role in wooing repeat donors. The group developed a five-year plan to spend the money it raised, with the aim of providing not only immediate relief but also long-term assistance to help communities cope with the psychological and financial toll of the disaster.

“We knew right away that we had to help them understand the relationship between a disaster and long-term development,” says Phyllis Teicher Goldman, vice president for development and communications, who was hired by the charity two months before the tsunamis. “Disasters often happen in the places they do, and are real disasters, because the infrastructure doesn’t exist.”

Fund raisers devoted much of their time to educating people who contributed $1,000 or more about the charity’s work. Those efforts, in particular, have paid off: Forty-five percent of people who gave $1,000 or more have given again, compared with 25 percent who gave less than $1,000.

All donors who gave $1,000 or more after the tsunamis received a phone call thanking them for their gift. Today, the organization makes phone calls to everyone who gives $500 or more, and assigns staff members to work with donors who give at least $1,000.

That kind of relationship-building helped persuade Ms. Guttag to become a loyal supporter. American Jewish World Service was one of two charities to which Ms. Guttag, who has worked as a fund raiser at Gay Men’s Health Crisis and UJA Federation of New York, donated $10,000 after the tsunamis. The second was to a relief group that she declined to identify.

Her experience with the two charities was starkly different. Ms. Guttag received a handwritten note from Ms. Messinger, who followed up with a visit. The second charity followed up only with a flurry of direct mail. That group did not win another donation.

“If you can’t figure out how to get someone out of the direct-mail stream, that says something,” says Ms. Guttag. “It’s costly and ineffective, and that’s not how I want my money to be spent. I’m still getting direct mail from them, and I never open it.”

American Jewish World Service also provided major donors with opportunities to hear directly from people whose lives had been devastated by the waves. Grantees from three grass-roots groups in Sri Lanka have spoken to groups of donors in the United States, and a fourth grantee will participate in a similar event this year.

Many people who gave for the first time after the tsunamis were also invited to participate in events and trips the charity holds to educate people about other parts of the world. Margery Rosenberg, who donated about $600 after the tsunamis, received a postcard from American Jewish World Service two months later inviting her to attend an event on Uganda held at Ms. Messinger’s apartment.

Since then, Ms. Rosenberg’s relationship with the organization has deepened. She has participated in trips for donors arranged by the charity to Senegal and South Africa, and is planning to visit Uganda and Kenya this month. She has also attended talks by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and the former president Bill Clinton. Her gifts to the charity now total about $22,000.

Ms. Rosenberg says she is grateful for how the charity has allowed her to learn about the rest of the world and by the group’s attention to detail. In one such gesture, a staff member who will be leading the trip to Uganda sent the participants a recent New York Times article that described the relationship between food scarcity and HIV in that country.

“With another organization, you give $100, and they want $200, and you give $200 and they want $500,” says Ms. Rosenberg, who is retired from a career at IBM. “With AJWS, I feel that I’m not just giving money away. They pull you in in the most positive way to continue to learn about what they’re doing.”

How Money Was Used

Other organizations that have succeeded in winning repeat gifts say that donors appreciated the follow-up efforts made to explain how their money was used.

Fran Troxler, director for mission advancement at Lutheran World Relief, says that shortly after the tsunamis, charity officials announced they would take 10 years to spend the $20.4-million raised.

Ms. Troxler says she focused first on informing donors about how their money was being spent, rather than immediately asking people to make additional gifts. It wasn’t until the summer of 2005, she says, that her group sent a second appeal to people who gave for the first time after the tsunamis.

That solicitation, in the form of a direct-mail appeal asking for gifts to the charity’s work relieving hunger in Niger, won gifts from 3.5 percent of contributors.

“I didn’t go back with an ‘ask’ right away,” says Ms. Troxler. “I felt it was more important to tell people how we were using the gifts that we’d received.”

Lutheran World Relief also experimented with new online tools for communicating to its donors. Three days after the tsunamis hit, the group created a Web site, Wave of Giving, designed to keep donors updated about the charity’s work in tsunami-ravaged areas. The site, which is still being updated, includes a photo essay, a field journal written by a staff member in Asia, and other features.

The Baltimore charity also benefited from some unusual fund-raising opportunities. One donor promised $10,000 about 18 months after the disaster and said he would match donations from people who had given for the first time in response to the tsunamis.

Lutheran World Relief used the gift for a telemarketing event — the first in its history — that reached out to people who had not contributed since the tsunamis. About 4 percent gave through the event, which netted $50,000.

In addition, the charity held two conference calls designed to give donors who contributed $5,000 or more a chance to speak with charity officials who’d visited tsunami-devastated areas.

Jeremy Barnicle, managing director of marketing and communications at Mercy Corps, says his charity also benefited by informing donors about how their money was used. Six months after the 2004 disaster, Mercy Corps published an “accountability report,” detailing the group’s “community-driven” approach to rebuilding areas destroyed by the waves and telling donors how their money had been spent.

Since then, it has released two subsequent accountability reports, and this year has revamped its annual report to put more emphasis on accountability.

“We found that donors were very appreciative of having that more formal report back,” says Mr. Barnicle.

Halting Fund Raising

Officials at Doctors Without Borders say their fund raising has been aided by the charity’s decision to stop accepting gifts that were restricted to tsunami relief. The group, which provides relief after a crisis and not long-term development aid, stopped collecting gifts for tsunami-devastated areas after it believed it had raised enough to meet immediate needs.

Donors continue to tell charity officials that they were impressed by the group’s decision. Just before Christmas, the charity received $80,000 from a group of high-school students in Florida, who said they chose the organization in part because of the announcement after the tsunamis.

A 2007 study conducted for the Canadian branch of the charity, meanwhile, found that more than 22 percent of people said they felt greater loyalty to the charity because of the announcement. The Canadian group has received additional gifts from more than 30 percent of people who made their first gifts after the tsunamis.

That emphasis on communicating how money was spent — and educating donors about other causes their dollars could support — proved key to helping turn an impulse decision to give to diaster relief into a more sustained interest in international causes.

“The emotional giving is what got me in the door,” says Ms. Guttag, the American Jewish World Service trustee. “But in the long run, you get a lot more pleasure out of giving when you know why you’re doing it. There are a lot of needs that don’t show up in the newspapers.”