The 2014 Michigan Fundraising Climate Survey

Respondents to the 2014 Survey offered a generally positive view of Michigan’s recent fundraising climate with significant, though not universal, optimism about the present and near term future. 

Background:

Beginning in 2012, our firm has annually invited a sample of Michigan nonprofit organization leaders to take a brief online survey in order to help us all to better understand the fundraising performance of, and fundraising climate facing, our state’s organizations. 

I recently posted a piece that compared national ratios for contributions by source from the new edition of Giving USA to those from the 2014 annual Michigan Fundraising Climate Survey.  Since then, some people have expressed interest in what else we might have found through our survey.

Some Selected Findings:

A majority said their groups’ 2013 fundraising results had improved in comparison to 2012.  On the 2014 survey, 55.8% of respondents reported that their organizations’ 2013 fundraising results were “Much Better” or “Somewhat Better” than their organization’s 2012 results.  This is a modest increase over last year’s survey when 51.8% of respondents characterized their organizations’ 2012 fundraising results that way in comparison to 2011. 

A significant proportion of those surveyed, however, did not meet their 2013 fundraising goals.  Nearly 40% of respondents said that their organizations did not meet their 2013 fundraising goals.  This is a slight deterioration over last year when 37.3% of respondents said their organization did not meet its 2012 fundraising goal.

Those surveyed were generally upbeat about early 2014 fundraising conditions in their area.  On the this year’s survey, 5% of respondents described current fundraising conditions in their area as “Excellent” while 68.33% characterized their local fundraising climate as “Good.” While not a ringing endorsement of current fundraising conditions, this is nonetheless the third year in a row that the proportion of respondents giving positive ratings to their local fundraising climate increased.

A significant proportion of respondents -- but still less than a majority -- were optimistic about overall Michigan fundraising conditions.  This included 11.48% responding that they expected the Michigan fundraising climate to be “Much Better“ and 38.07% expecting conditions to be “Somewhat Better.”  This is a modest increase over last year when 10.8% expected 2013 fundraising conditions to be “Much Better” and 32.5% “Somewhat Better” than in 2012.  In both years, however, a significant number expected fundraising conditions to remain “About the Same” with 37.0% giving that response in 2014 and 48.2% in 2013.   

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Michael J. Montgomery is a philanthropy consultant with his own firm, Montgomery Consulting of Huntington Woods, MI.  He is also an adjunct faculty member teaching nonprofit management classes at Oakland University and, previously, at Lawrence Technological University.

THINKING ABOUT INDIVIDUAL DONORS

A new edition of Giving USA is out covering giving during 2013.  It reports that living Individual Donors made 72% of all US contributions with another 8% of total US giving taking the form of Bequests.  Do the math and you find that Individual Donors, living and dead have yet again made 80% of all US contributions.  No big surprise there.  When bequests are added to individual giving, the resulting figure has hovered within a percent or two of 80% for a long time. 

Repetition, however, can give a notion greater impact.  As a result, the new edition of Giving USA may even more firmly fix the “80% of all giving come from individuals” truism in some minds and that would not be a good thing.   While I’m not concerned when fundraisers say that, I do become concerned when fundraising managers propose to allocate their organizations’ limited fundraising resources based on that truism.

Let me be clear; we have no reason to believe that the Giving USA figures are inaccurate at the national level or when all types of nonprofits are included in the analysis.  Our own work suggests, however, that the actual giving ratio is likely to be very different at the generally secular groups where readers of this posting are most likely to work.

Since 2013, our Michigan Fundraising Climate Survey has included a question on giving by donor type. Because we wanted to give the members of Michigan’s professional fundraising community benchmark figures with which to inform their efforts, we narrowed our data gathering to the types of organizations that are most likely to employ professional fundraising staff.  To do that, we excluded religious congregations, K-8 parochial schools, public schools w/out district-level foundations, and very small organizations.

With the more focused dataset described above, we observed a substantially different pattern of giving.  Our data showed individual giving to be significantly less, and corporate giving to be a good deal more, important than implied by the Giving USA figures.  In the section below, figures are contrasted to the Giving USA figures for the same year below.

2014 (giving during 2013):

Individual Donors – 57% of all giving in our data vs. 72% in Giving USA data

Bequests – 7% of all giving in our data vs. 8% in Giving USA data.

Corporations – 21% of all giving in our data vs. 5% in Giving USA data.

Foundations – 15% of all giving in our data vs. 15% in Giving USA

2013 (giving during 2012)

Individual Donors – 58% of all giving in our data vs. 73% in Giving USA data

Bequests – 6% of all giving in our data vs. 7% in Giving USA data.

Corporations – 21% of all giving in our data vs. 6% in Giving USA data.

Foundations – 15% of all giving in our data vs. 14% in Giving USA

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*Michigan Fundraising Climate Survey 2014 & 2013, Montgomery Consulting.  These are corrected figures.  Responses of “other” were examined and – based on their specific content – reallocated to the other categories.

**Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2012 & *Giving USA: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2013, both © Giving USA Foundation and researched and written at The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.