Leading Freedom (and Fundraising) Forward

No one could argue with the stunning success of the major-gift component of the campaign either, as it brought in 37 seven-figure contributions and four eight-
figure ones. Many donors gave the largest gifts they ever gave to the ACLU, and in some cases, the largest gifts they ever gave to any charity. Folks whose largest gift ever had been $10,000 or $50,000 suddenly were writing checks in the millions.

So what happened?

All of which begs two questions.

1. Why weren't these people giving more money before the LFF campaign?

2. How did the ACLU inspire them to give at these levels now?

Although the campaign did put some new names on the ACLU giving radar, bringing in new, lower-level donors wasn't a priority — that's left to the organization's robust general fundraising program. LFF was designed to encourage gifts of no less than $10,000 from its most loyal existing members. There was no hard-and-fast giving level that dictated just who among the 
550,000 members would be approached. More important were frequency of giving, length of membership, how the member became involved with the ACLU — elements that are more indicative of loyalty and capacity for giving than size of previous gifts is.

The extensive research that went into the process unearthed a few uncomfortable, yet undeniable, truths: There was a disconnect between donors' passion for the ACLU and their giving habits, and that was because the ACLU was suffering from an inferiority complex that undermined its confidence in asking for larger gifts.

"If you ask our donors what was the most important organization to them, they would say the ACLU," McKay says. "And yet their philanthropy didn't match their passion. They were giving six- and seven-figure gifts to the arts and their alma maters. We just didn't see ourselves that way, and we had to raise our sights before we could ask our donors to raise theirs."