Filling the Void

By Abny Santicola

Advice for Dealing With Economic Ups and Downs

The Food Bank For New York City has seen its share of financial ups and downs. One of the most recent “downs” came in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“Every time there is a natural or man-made disaster anywhere in the country or around the world, we as charities already know that we have to brace ourselves for a decrease in funds coming in for the organization,” Food Bank For New York City President and CEO Lucy Cabrera says, recommending that organizations take the following steps to ride out economic downturns.

1. Plan for a rainy day.
“The organization has to be running as cost effectively and as efficiently as possible during the very good times to get ready for the down times. As long as you have that good infrastructure and system in place, you’ll be able to support the organization and the mission of the organization during those down times.”

2. Follow mission, not money.
“We plan first on where we want to see programmatic growth, and we stick to it. If there is a funder that comes to us and wants to fund a special project and [is] asking if we would be the recipient of that and plan the program, we just don’t do it unless it’s already been part of our plan in the first place. And if that’s the case, then we have a strategy for the fundraising of that particular program.

“Because usually funding for special programs will last perhaps for the one year, and then you’re not able to sustain them for future years and much less during a time of dire economic situation like we’re experiencing today. So really stick to the mission.”

3. Plan, plan, plan — but be flexible.
“Flexibility is extremely important. And having the security in the leadership, and funding and money in the bank for that rainy day, will allow you to be flexible.”

4. Hire the best and brightest.
“The success of an organization — especially a not-for-profit organization — lies in the people who work in the organization and the leadership. Always hire the very best that you can get for your resources. The food bank would not be what it is today if it were not for all of the leaders and workers of the food bank and their dedication to the mission. They’re motivated by the mission and by the people that they serve, but they also motivate each other.”

The bottom line for how to approach the current crisis: Don’t pull back on building visibility and fundraising. To do so would be a disservice to your mission and the people you serve, Cabrera says.

In fall of 2008, the 25-year-old Food Bank For New York City was facing a crisis. A quickly souring economy was a double-edged sword — making for an increased need among people requiring food assistance, and decreased donations of both food and money from businesses and individuals feeling the pinch.

Plus, the economic crisis hit during the organization’s most critical fundraising season, from October to December. In December, food donations were down 25 percent from the previous year and direct-mail donations were off by 14 percent.

Food Bank For New York City provides more than 50 million pounds of food annually to more than 1,000 food-assistance programs throughout Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. The organization experienced a 40 percent decrease in total food donations in the third quarter of 2008, while a Marist Poll commissioned by the organization and released in December showed that 48 percent of all New York City residents reported having difficulty affording food and 2 million people in New York City who had never before accessed emergency food services worried about needing food assistance in 2009.

For most of 2008, Food Bank For New York City had been in talks with the Robin Hood Foundation about how to get additional food into its system. Robin Hood, which supports innovative, poverty-fighting organizations in New York City, is a longtime partner and funder of Food Bank For New York City. The result of those talks: The foundation approved a $1 million matching-challenge grant to the food bank, which an anonymous donor through Robin Hood then matched again. The grant was restricted to the purchase of food to be distributed to soup kitchens and food pantries throughout New York City, translating into an additional 15 million meals.

Robin Hood gave Food Bank For New York City one year from Dec. 1, 2008, to raise the $1 million for the challenge. It took the organization just one month to hit that mark.

How it did it
Research is key to Food Bank For New York City’s success in attracting attention to its mission. When Senior Vice President of External Relations Gregory Boroff arrived at the organization in February 2002, it was trying to determine what its niche, the essence of its brand, would be. Inspired by Food Bank For New York City President and CEO Lucy Cabrera, it decided to focus on research.

“Lucy has a Ph.D. in research, and she felt very strongly that it was important not just to talk about hunger in an intangible way, but to really have concrete numbers backing it up,” Boroff says, adding that research reveals the dramatic face of hunger in the city and helps make a case for funding.

For example, in conjunction with the announcement of the Robin Hood challenge grant in mid-December, Food Bank For New York City went public with its report “NYC Hunger Experience 2008 Update: Food Poverty Soars as Recession Hits Home.” The report revealed that over the last five years, the number of New York City residents having trouble affording food rose to nearly 4 million (one in two residents — double the number reported by the organization in 2003, the first year it tracked those numbers). Such stats, Boroff says, activate government officials, corporations and the public to help those struggling to feed themselves.

They also make a potent combination when mixed with Food Bank For New York City’s efficiency and scope. The fact that 96 cents of every dollar goes directly to programs and services is something that separates it from many other organizations — and Food Bank For New York City isn’t shy about making that statistic known, along with the fact that it provides more than 300,000 free, nutritious meals every day. The key, Boroff says, is to let donors know that giving to the organization gets them the biggest bang for their donated buck.

Embracing integration
Getting research results out to donors and changemakers is the job of Food Bank For New York City’s external relations department, which integrates communications, marketing and fundraising. Boroff, the inaugural leader of the external relations department, says Cabrera told him early on that she wanted the department to be “external relations” rather than “development” because there needed to be a strong, collaborative relationship between the three disciplines.

That integration allows Food Bank For New York City to do a full assault when it comes to getting the word out about fundraising efforts and inspiring people to give. The government relations, policy and research team; the communications team; and the fundraising team sit down throughout the year and talk about messaging in light of what the organization’s research is showing. Together, they determine how they’re going to pitch the media and donors to turn research findings into contributions.

For the Robin Hood matching-gift challenge, for example, the external relations department contacted news sources like The Associated Press, which publicized the challenge through its wire service. The story was picked up and disseminated via other news sources like Crain’s New York Business and The New York Observer. Boroff’s department also enlisted the organization’s two celebrity board members, actor Stanley Tucci and chef/author Mario Batali, for radio and TV appearances.

“We had corporations and foundations we never worked with before who were actually calling us because they read something in Crain’s or they saw something on one of the morning shows,” Boroff says. “L.W. Robbins Associates, our direct-mail provider, seamlessly integrated this messaging into Food Bank For New York City’s holiday mailing directly to donors. So it was just a really … perfect textbook model of communications and marketing coming together with fundraising to accomplish a goal.

“I’ve worked in nonprofits where development’s on one floor, and communication and marketing is on another floor, and they never really speak except maybe when it’s time to create the invitation for a dinner. I never understood it,” he adds.

Food Bank For New York City’s agency relations department also works in collaboration with the external relations department to bring back firsthand stories from Community Kitchen of West Harlem (a soup kitchen and food pantry owned and run by the organization) and other agencies that the food bank provides with food. In addition, it encourages staff members to volunteer at its network of soup kitchens and food pantries so they can see the mission firsthand.

Web assault
Naturally, the Web plays a vital role in publicity of Food Bank For New York City’s mission and dissemination of information on hunger issues. The organization employs one full-time staff member to focus on its online presence, which includes maintaining its Web site, e-mail communications, social-networking sites and Google ads.

Food Bank For New York City is in the process of expanding its social-networking and Web 2.0 presence to cultivate relationships with new and existing supporters in the forums where they already are engaged and that provide a personalized, interactive environment to connect to the organization.

The organization created a Facebook Causes page about a year ago, initially reaching out to existing supporters and asking them to raise awareness by joining and inviting others to join. The Causes application provides a way to donate, but Food Bank For New York City’s page doesn’t focus on fundraising. Instead, it serves as a community-building space where the food bank provides updates on the hunger-relief community and information on ways to get involved.

After a few months, Facebook users began coming to the Food Bank For New York City Causes page on their own. It recently passed the 1,000-member mark and has raised more than $1,600 to date.

“It’s 1,000 people who really care about [Food Bank For New York City],” Boroff says. “They proactively chose to become part of [our] family, and we’re promoting our campaigns there.”

He adds that the Food Bank For New York City also is on the verge of launching a formal blog that will include messages from Cabrera, as well as input from every area of the organization’s staff — whether it be people at the warehouse, those on the front lines at Community Kitchen, those in external relations or those in research.

“Each person will be able to have a voice on this blog if they’d like to,” he says. “It’s a whole new world.”

Food Bank For New York City also has been posting videos to YouTube and other video-sharing sites for almost a year now. Its most popular video on YouTube — a speech from its 2008 gala in which model Helena Christensen discusses the Food Bank For New York City’s warehouse and volunteering — has received more than 11,000 views and prompted the organization to launch a more formal Food Bank For New York City YouTube Channel.

The organization also posts event listings on its Facebook page, as well as sites including Going.com, Eventful.com and CharityHappenings.org, and it recently launched a Twitter profile in conjunction with a Tyson Foods campaign.

The Twitter profile has only been promoted through a three-line item in a sidebar in one of Food Bank For New York City’s e-newsletters, a link on Tyson’s blog and a few Tweets from Tyson. Yet, it already has almost 250 followers.

Unlike advertisements in print publications that have limited, predetermined shelf lives, social networks and Web 2.0 tools exist on an ongoing basis online, providing an extended network of information that people can be directed to by friends or happen upon while they’re surfing the Web. And promotions can go viral in just seconds. For example, a Tweet takes roughly five seconds to write.

Web site wisdom
Food Bank For New York City’s Web site does an amazing job demonstrating the scope of its mission. Its many educational elements — including links to general hunger information, recently released research and hunger news, and its Food Bank Bytes box, which features a rotation of special news items like Charity Navigator’s recent four-star rating of the organization and firsthand accounts of how hunger is affecting NYC residents — offer visitors a crash course in hunger issues in New York. It’s all designed to lead to informed donations.

“For someone that’s just kind of feeling things out, it’s an educational process to a donation,” Boroff says. “That again goes back to the integration. We don’t have our Web site being handled by someone in the communications department that’s not working on a daily basis with our fundraising team.

“We’re actually sitting around a table and talking about things like tribute gifts and what information is on the Web site that will speak to individuals, corporations and foundations, and how we are getting them to act on a gift at that precise moment,” he explains. “And even after someone gives a gift, we talk about how we can now turn them into an annual donor. For example, while many new donors responded to the Robin Hood grant, we ask how we can cultivate them to become annual … supporters going forward.

“By bringing them in to a certain path of cultivation, which of course starts immediately with the thank-you and recognizing exactly why they’re giving to the organization and what vehicle they gave through — online or through the mail — we’re hoping to get them into the system,” he says.

A holistic view of donors
In 2007, Food Bank For New York City acquired the organization FoodChange, which, according to foodbanknyc.org, now enables it to work more effectively to meet the needs of the millions of New Yorkers who are struggling to put food on the table and to advance the organizations’ mutual missions to end hunger.

Half of the Food Bank For New York City’s funding comes from government grants, and half comes from fundraising. Of the half from fundraising, 63 percent comes from corporations and foundations, and 37 percent comes from individuals and events. Boroff says individual and corporate giving are the organization’s fastest-growing areas, largely because the food bank perceives the line between the two as transparent.

“Individuals make up corporations, and corporations are made up of individuals. While it sounds so trite, it’s really so fundamental to fundraising,” he says.
Boroff and his staff try to sit down on a regular basis with high-value donors to find out how else they might be able to work together.

“They might have given their own personal money, but they also work at a corporation that they might be able to get involved in some way — it might be through volunteering or through a workplace-giving program, or a traditional or virtual food drive,” he explains. “On the other side, you’ve got corporations. Many organizations just take the check, write a thank-you note and do a check presentation with a photo. They simply put that photo in their newsletter, and they’re done. But I want to sit down and talk.”

What he talks about with corporate donors are resources they have that the organization could use — billboards, printers, photographers, designers or even partnerships where the organization plays a role in the company’s national conference, as well as other programs.

Food Bank For New York City also works hard to keep major donors in the loop. For years, the organization has been holding “Breakfast With Lucy” events where major donors are invited to attend breakfast presentations by Cabrera to ask questions and learn about what’s happening on the ground.

“Rather than set up eight or 10 separate meetings for Lucy with individual donors and 10 more separate meetings with corporate partners, we segment these breakfasts. We’ll do one targeted to individuals, one targeted to foundations and one targeted to corporations,” Boroff says, adding that the events put donors at ease and offer like-minded individuals the chance to network.

“They hear what other corporations are talking about, such as how they’re accomplishing trying to work with nonprofits or with hunger organizations. What might be some of the trends?” Boroff says. “So it’s had added benefit that way.”

The meetings also serve as another fundraising avenue. When Robin Hood announced its matching gift, Food Bank For New York City held a breakfast where partners could hear about the details of the challenge grant and recent hunger research. Boroff says the meeting resulted in one donor writing a $35,000 check on the spot.

“The donor told us that she wasn’t planning on doing that. She figured she’d go home and see what she was going to do, but [was planning on] nothing near that amount,” he says. “But she was so inspired.”

Looking ahead
This year, Food Bank For New York City projects it will distribute 60 million pounds of food throughout its network of 1,000 agencies. Cabrera says that’s about $75 million worth of food.

Despite the enormity of its mission, the organization doesn’t lose sight of the finer details. While doling out food to the hungry is its main goal, it also is concerned with what’s in the food that it’s providing. Nutrition education and childhood nutrition programs are cornerstones of its mission.

“Nutrition is a big component of our programs,” Cabrera says. “Twenty-plus years ago it was just about how much food you could get in the door to get out to these different programs. Now it’s about how much healthy food you can get in the door to give to the programs, because we are very concerned that the meals that they receive are balanced, healthy meals, especially at soup kitchens where clients might be having just one meal a day. That meal has to be a very balanced, nutritious meal.”

One of Food Bank For New York City’s major programs this year involves training public school teachers in high-poverty areas to teach nutrition education to children from preschool through second grade. The food bank provides the curriculum and materials, including pots, pans and food, and the teachers teach the children about healthy eating.

The organization also has Kids Cafe and backpack programs where it teaches children in after-school programs healthy eating and nutrition.

“In our Open Market Backpack Program for kids, we also provide the food so that on Friday the kids get to shop for themselves. They learn how to read the nutritional content on the labels, and they make their own selections so that they can take that food home with them for the weekend,” Cabrera says. “We do the same thing with CookShop for Adults and elderly programs, and we have a teenage program called EATWISE, where we train teenagers to teach nutrition education and healthy eating to other teenagers.”

The organization also offers training to volunteers and managers of soup kitchens and food pantries in food safety and nutrition education, and monitors them once a year for quality-control standards and appropriate food distribution and food safety.

Cabrera says Food Bank For New York City has revised its strategic plan to adjust to the economic climate and is not planning for any growth or new programs this year — a trend she says likely will continue into the next fiscal year.

The organization’s focus now is on making its existing programs more robust. After acquiring FoodChange in 2007, it came up with a five-year strategic plan for taking over that organization’s programs. Now only two years into the strategic plan, Cabrera says, it already has accomplished the goals set out in the five-year plan … and then some.

Now, she says, she wants to focus on increasing the standards of those programs and assuring their sustainability.

The organization will continue its programs that provide nutritious food to its member agencies, as well as other initiatives such as programs that help the working poor access help through the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and its Earned Income Tax Credit program, where it provides free tax-return assistance to low-income New Yorkers — a program that is recognized by the IRS as the largest in the country.

Cabrera says though times are tough and funding is tight, the organization will continue to push the word out about hunger to government agencies and individuals. So far, her strategy seems to be a success. While many organizations saw a decrease in funds raised last year, the Food Bank For New York City raised $8.16 million, plus the additional $3 million in restricted funds received from the Robin Hood challenge grant — up from the $7.92 million it raised in 2007.

“During the economic downturn, nonprofits tend to cut back on the outreach part of their business, whether it’s outreach to the community they serve or outreach to funders,” Cabrera says. “This is not a time to cut back, because if you cut back on building the visibility about the issues that you deal with and about your organization, its mission and so forth, then … you’re not putting a face on your organization. So when times are good again, no one is going to know you or remember you.

“It’s during these times,” she says, “that you have to be out there so that the public knows there is this problem, this is our mission, and this is what we do to help people in need during this time.” FS

Abny Santicola is managing editor of FS. Reach her at asanticola@napco.com

Food Bank For New York City

39 Broadway
New York, NY 10006

Phone: 212.566.7855
Web: foodbanknyc.org

Annual operating budget (2007): $31.2 million

Amount raised in calendar year 2007: $7.92 million

Amount raised in calendar year 2008: $8.163 million plus an additional $3 million in restricted funds received from a Robin Hood Foundation challenge grant for the purchase of food.

About: Founded in 1983 (originally as Food for Survival) to address the growing needs of people seeking emergency food assistance in New York City.

Honors: Received four consecutive four-star ratings from Charity Navigator (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008). Is the first organization to receive two Hero Awards from Robin Hood Foundation (1992 and 2008).

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