Recession strategy: Avoid emergency solicitations

“We are seeing organizations, whose income projections are the product of happier times, panic by ramping up the number of hard-ask e-mails, to the exclusion of almost everything else,” says Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a Takoma Park, Md., online fund-raising consulting company. “Not only is that unlikely to work,” he says, “it is likely to antagonize people who are sympathetic to your situation.”

That said, it is not inappropriate to focus on the financial crisis in solicitations, to relay how the economy is affecting a nonprofit organization’s charitable work and its clients, says Bruce McClintock, president of Marts & Lundy, a fund-raising consulting company in Lyndhurst, N.J.

For example, he notes, many colleges and universities have long sought gifts to their annual funds, which generally pay for operating expenses, by telling donors that such unrestricted gifts “mean a lot.” But now, Mr. McClintock adds, “it is tough to relate to an unrestricted gift when people are hurting so badly.”

Instead, he says, the institution would do better to seek contributions that help the growing number of students having a hard time covering their tuition and other educational costs because of the economy.

“Bring the economy home to the people,” Mr. McClintock says. “You cannot rely on the same messages you’ve been sending out for five years.”

— Holly Hall and Paula Wasley