Friends,
A couple of weeks ago my wife told me that a colleague of hers (they're university professors) wanted to start a small, local fundraising effort among faculty and students to provide relief to a student who recently lost everything in a fire. He circulated an email asking for $25 or $30 donations, or whatever people could afford. Another professor (an ordained minister) wrote back to him and suggested that he should try to run the fund through the university's development office so that contributions would be tax deductible.
It's amazing that we've become so inured to people's personal hardships and accustomed to bureaucratic systems for handling our philanthropic activities that we assume we have to adhere to formal constructs just to get money to people in need. Thankfully, in this case, sanity prevailed and they proceeded with their small collection effort.
In an interesting article in February on one of the Chronicle of Higher Education's blogs, Face Value, an alumnus from Williams College is advocating for the college to permit alumni to fund requests from students and student groups directly on-line and to have personal interactions with them. The donor feels, "the College wants to control the money. It does not trust students to ask for reasonable things. It does not trust alumni to refrain from funding unreasonable requests. It worries that student awkwardness will harm its relationships with alumni donors.”
I believe that we are just seeing the tip of the iceberg here. It has been hard enough for nonprofits to accept that their major donors want accountability and the opportunity to designate where their dollars go and how they are spent. Now lower-level gifts (which are in decline because of the economy) may become even harder to generate for general unrestricted operating support. Being able to give on-line has brought a new level of immediacy to philanthropy for younger people, and institutions are going to have to be creative in their approach rather than refuse gifts from motivated donors who want some ownership of the projects they help to fund.
Talk to you soon!
Bob
