Designating Donations
Every funding campaign for undesignated dollars seeks to explain (preferably with emotion, creativity, and a sense of urgency) to would-be donors what their gifts would help accomplish.
Nonprofits like Heifer International have built very successful online and offline giving programs around the idea of allowing donors to “purchase” items, like a cow, sheep, or llama. Those donations actually are just unrestricted gifts. The animal designation is a tool to help would-be donors make philanthropic decisions, along with better understanding the organization’s mission.
The Heifer fine print explains that the gift designation is merely symbolic:
Gifts made through this catalog represent a gift to the entire mission. To help the most number of families move toward self-reliance, Heifer does not use its limited resources to track gift animals from donation to distribution. We use your gifts where they can do the most good by pooling them with the gifts of others to help transform entire communities. And, because you are helping Heifer fight hunger and poverty, your gift is tax deductible.
Now the premise of donor designations has been embraced by the Hillary Clinton campaign. The campaign’s newest fundraising adventure, called MyPA, allows donors to select how their contributions will be spent for the upcoming Pennsylvania primary, with options for television airtime, online ads, radio airtime, signs, vans, or door hangers. As I pen this, you’re out of luck if you’re a van fan: that category, which had a $25,000 goal, is “sold out.”
I learned of this new tactic in an email from the campaign:
We need yard signs to show our campaign’s strength. We need vans to get Pennsylvania voters to the polls on April 22. We need ads on the air and online to compete against the Obama campaign. And starting today, you can decide just how your contributions will help us win Pennsylvania. MyPA, our new online effort dedicated to winning the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, allows you to designate exactly where you want your money to go.
Most college or university sites provide “by the numbers” type of information to explain how unrestricted dollars are spent. Here are examples from Dartmouth, Macalester, and Stanford. Oberlin does a great job of illustrating gifts in action and how your gift helps students.
While many colleges and universities allow donors to give to many different funds online via shopping carts or gift browsers-University of Washington, UC Berkeley, Ohio State, and the University of Iowa are all examples that come to mind-I’ve not seen any create a seemingly artificial designation interface like these for what I assume are indeed unrestricted gifts.
I’d guess that such designations could create problems with donor intent. Are you aware of schools that employ similar interfaces as Heifer International and HillaryClinton.com to jumpstart their unrestricted donations?
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