Facing a declining donor base 20 years in the making, UJC/The Jewish Federations of North America is reframing its brand and the way its community of member federations works together.

By Abny Santicola

Advice From the Corner Office

Misha Galperin, executive vice president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, shared the following advice for other nonprofits grappling with whether to focus more on dollars or donors: “One needs to have a long-term view. There are short-term problems and issues to be overcome always, and there is the immediacy of the moment and the pressure to give out money right away. But if you’re running an organization that you think is here for the long haul — and we’ve been here for the long haul and we expect to be here for a long time — you need to be thinking beyond the horizon of the next year or the next five years.”

“[And] in purely business terms, there are three considerations that argue in favor of building your donor base, even if you don’t have an immediate financial return on investment. One part of what is happening in the world is much of the wealth transfer from generation to generation, and certainly studies show that a very significant percentage of planned gifts and bequests, etc., come from people who are small givers over a long period of time. So even though they are small givers, they will pay off in the end in terms of their contributions, so it pays to have more people from among whom big gifts can come in the form of planned gifts.

“Number two, you know, we’ve actually done some studies and we’ve looked to see how long it takes and whether you can predict smaller givers becoming larger givers, and we see that on average actually, more than 50 percent of the people who recently became our major donors went from an initial gift of $235 or less to gifts over $10,000 in the space of 15 years. So you can actually see the curve, and you can see how that happens. And so I think that that pays.

“Three, these days, and it’s an often repeated reference, but the whole sort of Obama experience shows that you can actually do quite well by raising a significant number of gifts in smaller amounts. And in this economic environment in particular, a lot more people seem more willing to give even though the average giving is down on a per-person basis. So I think all of these considerations are important.”

In the late 1980s, United Jewish Communities/The Jewish Federations of North America had more than 800,000 donors. By 2009, that number had dwindled to fewer than 500,000. A steady, 20-year decline in donor numbers is a sure indication that something is wrong — something much deeper and long-term than the down economy that has been decimating donor bases across the nonprofit sector since last year.

UJC/The Jewish Federations of North America, an umbrella organization that represents 157 local Jewish federations and 400 independent communities across North America, is focused on strengthening the Jewish community worldwide by protecting and enhancing the well-being of Jews through core values of repairing the world, charity, social justice and learning. The umbrella organization boasts an annual budget of $30.34 million, and independent federations have collective annual revenues of $3 billion from annual campaigns, endowments and foundations that are used to fund social-service and education needs, from aiding the Jewish needy to adult education. Federation funds, which are funneled through UJC/The Jewish Federations of North America, also go toward assisting Jews in Israel and overseas.

In researching the attrition happening in its donor ranks, the organization found a key cause to be donors moving out of federations they had donated to but then not connecting with federations in their new locales. Sharing information and best practices among the federations historically happened on an ad hoc basis, at best. So, if a donor moved from one city to another and staff at that federation knew someone in the federation area the individual moved to, that person would let it know of the move. Otherwise, poof … the donor was gone.

"Sometimes they would send spreadsheets back and forth and say, 'Here are the 10 people that we found when we did our National Change of Address filter,' or, 'We were just informed by our donor that they moved; here is their information,'" says Adam Smolyar, senior vice president of strategic marketing and communications for UJC/The Jewish Federations of North America, who joined the organization about a year ago. "So they would do sharing. But when you have 157 federations and everybody is incredibly busy and focused on fundraising, obviously that's going to slip through the cracks."

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