A recent ACLU campaign beefed up its major gifts and planned giving

2 Important Takeaways  From the ACLU’s Leading  Freedom Forward Campaign

1. You have to have a very crisp idea of what it is you’re trying to accomplish and be able to really boil that down in a very clear way.

Once you get donors hooked on that, then [your case for support] is very easy to describe, especially if you can  talk about it programmatically. We talk about a red state strategy for political donors. We talk about how civil liberties are in the most danger in certain areas with certain governors. For donors who want to see the impact on big populations, we talk about Florida and Texas. If their interest is in racial justice, we point to New Mexico and Arizona.

2. You have to remain tenacious.

If you’re a reluctant fundraiser, then you’re a reluctant CEO. Unless you’re enthusiastic about the program and about bringing money to build it, then [running an organization] is not the right fit. I know great program people who I would never suggest become CEOs because they don’t want to raise money. People need to own that and understand what it means for their career choices.

There are always disappointments, where people don’t come through the way you expect, where you work very hard and it withers on the vine or they give you some token amount. Go back — especially if they give you something. It’s a beginning, and you have to appreciate that whatever they are able to give, it’s more than you had before.

— Anthony Romero, executive director, ACLU

In 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union was up against it. Its membership had hit the 550,000 mark, yet its major-gifts strategy was anemic at best and planned giving wasn't exactly a priority. And despite the fact that it was on the front lines of what some feel was the greatest civil-liberties crisis in the United States since World War II, the highly visible and aggressive organization was operating under an internal inferiority complex that was undermining its ability to raise a sustainable source of income.

Anthony Romero, the ACLU's executive director and — by his own design — chief fundraising officer, was struggling with an endowment-building campaign that was missing its mark. So there was no great cry of despair when Director of Institutional Advancement and Special Projects Donna McKay suggested the organization close it out.

But before Romero could exhale, McKay was greasing the wheels for the next campaign, which promised to be bigger, bolder, more comprehensive and — yes — probably more exhausting than the  last one.

"George Bush was in the White House, and John Ashcroft was our attorney general," McKay says. "We [felt we] were in the midst of one of the greatest civil-liberties crises in the country's history, a crisis of epic proportions, a crisis that is still going on today.

"It's not a time to be putting money away for tomorrow," she says, explaining a possible reason for the organization's difficulty in raising endowment monies.

Soon after, the Leading Freedom Forward (LFF) campaign was launched. With an unusual dual focus of increasing both major and planned gifts, it raised $407 million over the past five years, surpassing its original goal of $250 million. The campaign launched in January 2005 with the goal of raising $100 million in cash gifts and $150 million in planned giving. When it closed in mid-September, it had brought in more than $150 million in cash gifts and more than $250 million in planned  giving.

Romero and McKay agree that part of the campaign's success can be attributed to the fact that it was born from very specific program needs — needs that were made clear in response to a challenge from a donor.

"I was asked by a donor to reflect on a challenge that if they were to give a significant sum of money, a one-time gift, what would be the legacy that would be left behind in terms of building a program — not in terms of an endowment, but in terms of a sustainable civil-liberties program," Romero says.

He took that question to his development staff, which created a map of where the ACLU's staff members where situated across its 53 affiliates around the United States. Then they overlaid that against a map of hot spots of civil-liberties challenges — "where there are the biggest issues around immigration, racial issues, where the death penalty is still in effect, where there are LGBT battles being fought," he says. The overlap — or lack thereof — was both disturbing and enlightening.

"My gut said that we would be strong on the coasts, but I didn't know how things were in the middle of the country," he adds. "It became clear that our staff resources were not where our program needs were. I pitched the idea [of bolstering the  smaller affiliates] to the donor, who turned us down. But it was such a great idea that we decided to do it anyway."

Clear-cut goals

That exercise was the germ of the ACLU's Strategic Affiliate Initiative, which is one part of the three-part Leading Freedom Forward campaign. In addition to beefing up the ACLU affiliates in these threatened areas of the country, LFF was designed to further bolster the East and West Coast affiliates and pump up the ACLU's program of cutting-edge legal and legislative  services.

"A major goal of the campaign was to substantially increase the ACLU's grassroots presence and effectiveness across the country by significantly increasing the programmatic and institutional capacity of its state affiliates," says Laurie Beacham, director of media relations for the ACLU. "The Strategic Affiliate Initiative, the centerpiece of the campaign, was based on a strategic decision to invest in states where civil liberties were most under assault and where opportunities outweighed the local resources — Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Montana, Mississippi, Michigan, eastern Missouri, Tennessee and Arizona.

"Smaller affiliates located mainly in the South and in the country's heartland were bolstered by increased resources from the campaign," she adds. "That enabled them to hire full-time attorneys, launch new advocacy programs, and expand communications and public-education initiatives."

With a very clear roster of goals that was created from the start in partnership with the ACLU's affiliate support department, thoughts turned to financing the initiatives. Romero and McKay saw this massive undertaking as an opportunity to turn the organization's development strategy on its head.

The ACLU's membership, though large and loyal, was aging (average donor age was 63). McKay says the organization's major-gifts program was "unevolved," and there was really no strategy in place to significantly increase planned giving. There also wasn't a lot of outreach to younger donors. So while the membership had recently doubled in size to 550,000, it was stagnating as far as long-term funding was concerned.

"We just knew that our ability to grow would depend on our ability to grow our major-gifts and planned-giving programs," McKay explains. "It's unusual to find a campaign that has both increased planned giving and outright cash as its goal, but we had an aging file so planned giving was most important to us.

"By adding a planned-giving element to the campaign, we allowed more people to participate that could not have otherwise," she says. "Many members want to give a major contribution but can't leave an outright gift. But they can leave a legacy gift."

The campaign was bolstered by a matching-gift challenge by philanthropist Robert Wilson, who committed to giving a cash gift of 10 percent of every planned-giving pledge up to $100,000. (The cap was on individual gifts, not the overall funds raised.)

As a result, the Wilson Legacy Challenge raised $217 million in planned gifts and $6 million in matching funds from Wilson.

Prior to the challenge, which Wilson kept open for four years of the LFF campaign's five-year run, the ACLU was bringing in $17 million a year in bequest intentions. Afterward, McKay says, that number shot up to more than $50 million annually under the guidance of Director of Planned Giving Mohammad Zaidi, who developed an aggressive marketing campaign to reach all ACLU members.

The challenge, Romero says, gave ACLU fundraisers an easy way to talk about planned giving and more people an easy opportunity to support the organization.

"Our donors and staff and board and lay leaders had immediate incentive to review their wills because [the challenge] would mean money now," he says. "Then once you're in their wills, you can ensure the continuity of those revenues."

Other goals to be met

While planned giving was a major component of fundraising for the LFF campaign, it wasn't the only one. The ACLU also set out to engage its next generation of supporters, focusing on younger and multigenerational donors, and to inspire longtime donors to dig deeper and give larger "stretch" gifts.

On the first count, McKay says, 40 percent to 45 percent of donors who made contributions of $10,000 or more were younger than 50, including an anonymous donor in his 20s who gave $250,000. Plus, donations were coming in from the children and grandchildren of longtime supporters.

"One of my favorite civil-liberties heroes, Ellie Friedman, made it her mission to enlist her entire clan," McKay says of the campaign's multigenerational appeal, explaining that Friedman recruited her children, nieces and nephews ages 19-29, as well as many other family members across the generations and country, to support the campaign.

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."

Having relied on a large base of lower-level donors secured through traditional membership strategies since its inception 90 years ago, the ACLU never quite got around to developing a major-gifts mentality.

"This was a place that was afraid to ask many of our donors for $10 million or $12 million," Romero says. "We thought we would get laughed at or would offend people."

Adds McKay, "It wasn't that long ago when $5,000 was considered to be a major gift to the ACLU."

So what changed? Leadership. Romero took over in 2001 and hired McKay, who immediately saw the need to restructure the development department and fortify its major-gifts strategy.

As a shocking example of just how lacking the major-gift mind-set was at ACLU, Romero tells the story of hearing about philanthropist Leon Levy at a party soon after he started at the ACLU. Romero didn't know the Oppenheimer Funds founder but wrote down his name on a cocktail napkin, which he passed on to McKay.

"We did some research and found out that the good news was that he's worth a couple of billion dollars," Romero says. "The bad news was that he'd been a member since the '70s, he always renewed his membership on the first notice — and we'd never talked to him."

Within 24 hours, Romero was face to face with Levy, who greeted him by saying, "Took you long enough, didn't it?"

"I said, 'I'm here to make up for lost time,'" Romero says.

Four or five meetings later, Levy committed to giving a million  dollars to the ACLU. Before that, Romero says, he was giving about $100 a year.

Other keys to success

LFF is a great example of collaboration and pure major-gifts fundraising. Large ACLU affiliates across the county got on board right away and rallied to secure gifts from their local donor bases. Smaller affiliates did what they could, and the smallest ones were able to just sit back and reap the benefits. The campaign was  created to build up their staffs and resources, after all.

The northern California affiliate, for example, raised  $25 million. Washington State followed with $10 million, and San Diego came in with $4 million. The numbers are even more impressive when you consider that much of the money raised by the large affiliates was meant to be distributed to smaller ones that existed in states where the need for ACLU representation far outweighed the support they were receiving from local donors.

(Even outside of this particular campaign, the ACLU's long-standing resource-sharing strategy provides for support for all affiliates regardless of their individual ability to raise funds. Contributions to the national organization are shared with local affiliates. This spirit of cooperation between the national office and affiliates was key to the success of the campaign, McKay says, because the structure encourages camaraderie and eliminates competition.)

The LFF campaign was decidedly low-tech and focused on tried-and-true major-gifts fundraising strategy. Development staff members stayed offline and out of the mail, relying instead on "shoe leather," phone calls and face-to-face meetings. State affiliate executive directors and volunteers from across the country met with donors at dinners and parties, on flights, at the theater and other social events. They spent a whole lot of time on the road, did a whole lot of talking and took a whole lot of inspiration from their leader.

Romero believes successful fundraising comes from the top and a nonprofit's CEO also needs to be its chief fundraiser. According to McKay, Romero was involved in securing all of the top gifts of the campaign, and his persistence was an inspiration to his team. For example, she tells how the staff created a T-shirt for him when he finally nailed a more than $10 million gift after courting a prospect for more than four years. The shirt was emblazoned with the words "Anthony's Tenacity Tour" and, in true rock concert fashion, listed all of the places Romero had met with the donor before closing the gift.

"I know our donors care about making a difference. I'm not a reluctant fundraiser because I can see the difference we've made in America because of the money we've raised and the people we've convinced to support us," Romero says.

But tenacity aside, Romero believes the leader of a nonprofit organization must have unwavering belief in and passion for the cause, and that passion has to trickle down through the staff to donors. That, he feels, was the key to the ACLU overcoming its inferiority complex and, subsequently, the lapse between its supporters' passion for the organization and their giving habits.

As a result, the ACLU has become very good at highlighting its successes and tailoring its messages to donors' interests. Whether it be immigration issues, race issues or issues surrounding the LGBT community that a donor is interested in … the ACLU is fighting that battle somewhere in the country and can use that to reach the donor on a deeply personal level.

Another surprising part of LFF's success is that even though it began while President Bush II was in office, gifts continued to roll in even after the change in leadership to a president who said he would make civil rights a priority in his administration. And they continued to come even as the economy spiraled downward.

McKay and Romero attribute that to the fact that the ACLU successfully communicated the notion that no matter who's in the White House or what's happening on  the national front, there will always be state-level threats to civil liberties.

"Part of it is about having people understand that the ACLU is a permanent fixture on the American political landscape," Romero says. "If the ACLU went down tomorrow, we would have to build a new one the day after tomorrow. The ACLU can never shutter its doors."

Goals met — and then some

Monies raised aside, the LFF campaign touched the ACLU at its core, starting with the relationship between the executive director, development and program staffs.

"Part of what is remarkable here is that we've engineered a culture shift in the place," Romero explains. "At a lot of nonprofits, the development staff are the stepchildren. The Strategic Affiliate Initiative began in a conversation with the development and affiliate staffs, which shows how seriously we take the development staff. Program people are the experts, but they have to partner with the development staff."

LFF also solidified the focus on major-gifts strategies and left the ACLU with programs that will sustain it well into the future. And it changed the way the organization sees itself and the way donors see it.

"That's transformative. That's an important, lasting legacy," McKay says. "Now donors see us differently. Their philanthropy matches their passion. We had to believe in ourselves before we could ask donors to believe in us at that level.

"This campaign raised all boats," she adds. "Every affiliate in the country and the national office is stronger because of the campaign. We have so much to build on now. It's very exciting." FS