by Fred Tolleson

Created on: July 20, 2008

Non-Profits should focus their fundraising efforts on individuals because they give 75% of all the money in the billions available each year. Foundations only give 25%, but they generate a lot of publicity for their gifts, hence they are better known for their efforts.

We gave medical aid and treated handicapped children. We appealed to a broad band of sources to cover an enormous drain on our resources. We typically lost on each child being helped because the insurance companies involved were already tapped out by the time we had taken in the child, or their payment for services schedules were 30-40% less than the bill presented by the doctors and medical facilities.

To go directly to the heart of this articles subject, we found that foundations had plenty of resources, but were committed to serving a limited range of clientele. If they served a broader range of clientele, they limited their giving to fewer non-profits, generally staying with a group of recipients they had donated to for years. If your application had an enormous amount of appeal, most of the time they gave you a grant that required you to generate a like amount of funding to match their grant. If you were able to get by these initial barriers and still be in business 5-6 years later they would consider you for more generous giving in a better set of circumstance. It did not seem to matter to the foundations if the group they were steadily donating to had a good or poor reputation in their communities, they still got the lions share of the available foundation dollars.

It was not unusual to find a foundation focused tightly in your exact field that would not accept applications for funds from you due to the above conditions favoring long term relations with non-profits they were familiar with.

Focusing your efforts on individuals and carrying on a high profile public relations campaign was often the only way we could keep the doors open. This meant that our Board of Directors were constantly seen and heard throughout the community. Since most of these persons were professionals, it required a huge commitment of time away from their primary income producer.

With the advent of the Internet, things changed somewhat. It is now possible to build a list of givers who are from around the world, thereby spreading your base of support and increasing your annual income from donations. And on occasion, using this medium, we would get inquiries from foreign foundations and individuals which often paid off with very nice donations. Care and feeding of the list of donors and constantly seeking others was the best part of staff time concerned with keeping our doors open.

In more recent times there had been a huge expansion in social and other dollars available from all sorts of charitable sources. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations are a huge addition to the bucks available. When Warren Buffet adds his many billions to this pile, we may see some changing in attitudes. In the meantimee, I would advise any non-profit to stick to seeking funding from individuals as opposed to foundations.

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