Donors Applying More Restrictions to Their Gifts
Donors Applying More Restrictions to Their Gifts
Increasingly, Americans are asking that their donations to relief organizations be used to respond to specific disasters, the Baltimore Sun reports.
In the days after Hurricane Katrina battered the Gulf Coast two weeks ago, America's Second Harvest, the United Way of America, and many other charities established special relief funds with the understanding that they would use 100 percent of the donations they received for Katrina-related recovery efforts. And while the American Red Cross routinely encourages people to contribute to its national disaster relief fund, roughly 90 percent of the $500 million in donations it has collected since the hurricane struck have been designated by donors for Katrina relief and recovery efforts.
The trend toward donor-designated contributions — a trend that seems to have accelerated since 9/11 — has not gone unnoticed. Two days into its Katrina-related fundraising efforts, Catholic Charities took a different tack and changed the name of its fund from "Katrina Hurricane Relief" to "2005 Hurricane Relief," despite the fact that, in 2004, the individual funds the organization established for each of the four hurricanes — Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne — that struck Florida failed to generate the level of contributions it had hope to raise for relief and recovery efforts.
According to Eugene Tempel, executive director of the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, charities have learned that people will respond to individual disasters in a dramatic way. "And they know that donors today want to restrict their gifts to a specific cause....That has been an increasing phenomenon for the last fifteen years."
Barret, Greg.
“Charity Donations Soar, With Strings.”
Baltimore Sun
9/10/05.
Primary Subject: Philanthropy and Voluntarism
Secondary Subject(s): Hurricane Relief
Location(s): Alabama, Gulf Coast, Louisiana, Mississippi, National, United States
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