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The ENGAGE Podcast

Subscribe to The ENGAGE Podcast to hear experts from across the social good community share best practices, tips and must-know trends that will help organizations increase their impact. Formerly called The sgENGAGE Podcast.
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Now displaying: August, 2018
Aug 30, 2018

How well do you really know your donors? Do you know what differences exist between your donors that live in different parts of the world? Do you know what cultural characteristics influence how much your donors give and how they choose to give? 

Today’s guest is Mark Phillips, the Managing Director of Bluefrog Fundraising. His work involves doing deep dives into the motivations of donors to better help charities understand their donors wants and needs. He does this by conducting extensive interviews with donors in different parts of the world. Listen to the episode to hear about how these conversations can inform and improve charity organizations. You’ll hear about how Mark got started with this kind of research, which countries he’s conducting interview in, and how charities have changed their behavior thanks to Mark’s research. 

Topics Discussed in This Episode: 

  • How Mark got started on the path of trying to understand donors on a deeper level
  • How the research interviews Mark does differ from ordinary research and surveys
  • Which countries Mark is doing research in
  • Cultural characteristics about giving in different countries
  • Moments during Mark’s research where he’s learned something surprising
  • How charities have changed their behavior based on Mark’s research 

Resources: 

Mark Phillips

Queer Ideas

Bluefrog Fundraising

 

“One of the very lucky things in my career was I worked for people who had a focus on what donors needed and what donors wanted.”

 

“Some organizations, their most valuable donors they are not giving because they’re receiving postal appeals that are not appropriate to the way they want to support the organization. And that is not a rare occurrence.”

 

“Because donors weren’t seeing their money making a difference, people were assuming that these organizations were incompetent.”

Aug 17, 2018

Most people are aware of the differences between public charities and private foundations. However, donor advised funds, or DAFs, are often not understood as well. Donor advised funds have been around for many years, but they have changed and evolved significantly over the years, and many nonprofit organizations and fundraisers could benefit from a greater understanding of how donor advised funds work and what their pros and cons are. 

Today’s guest is Brian Mittendorf, the chair of the accounting department at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business. Brian joins the episode to help explain how donor advised funds work, what controversies surround the practice of using donor advised funds, and where this segment of charitable giving is headed in the future. Listen to the episode to hear what Brian has to say about why donors choose to use DAFs, what a commercial DAF is, and how the new tax laws affect donor advised funds. 

Topics Discussed in This Episode: 

  • The basics of donor advised funds
  • What made DAFs popular
  • How donor advised fund sponsor organizations’ work
  • Why donors choose donor advised funds
  • Where commercial DAFs got started and how they work
  • The type of control DAF donors have over what happens to the funds they donate
  • What happens to the money donated to a DAF and how it’s disbursed
  • Questions over whether donor advised funds need more regulation
  • Controversies around donor advised funds
  • How the new tax law has incentivized giving through donor advised funds
  • How DAFs handle non-cash donations, like stock
  • The future of donor advised funds and how regulations, or a lack of regulations, will affect that future 

Resources: 

Brian Mittendorf

Brian on Twitter

 

“Most individuals probably don’t have the resources to set up an entire private foundation, but if you think of them as the resources as a bunch of individuals being pooled together, then it’s going to be worthwhile.” 

“There’s not one person who’s really rich, but if we pool together a lot of different people with the same mission in mind, we can achieve a lot. Kind of what a private foundation could have.” 

“If I want to talk about a broad controversy, it’s that donor advised funds are typically used as vehicles that are really convenient for donors, and people who are concerned with them are concerned that they’re focusing more on donors than they are on the mission.”

Aug 2, 2018

Men and women both give to charity, but they tend to give differently. In order to engage with donors more effectively, it’s important to understand how gender affects giving. The role that women play in philanthropy is not as well understood as it could be; however, new research is changing that. 

Today’s guests help explain and contextualize the latest research into women’s philanthropy. Andrea Pactor of the Women's Philanthropy Institute and Kathleen Loehr of Kathleen Loehr & Associates join the podcast today to discuss women and philanthropic giving. Listen to the episode to hear what they have to say about the importance of understanding women’s philanthropy, the goals of the Women's Philanthropy Institute, and some of the differences between men’s and women’s motivations for giving. 

Topics Discussed in This Episode: 

  • How the Women’s Philanthropy Institute got started, and what they’re doing now
  • Why the type of research the Women’s Philanthropy Institute is doing is so important
  • Research findings about gender and giving
  • How to better engage women in discussions about giving
  • The differences between men’s and women’s motivations for giving
  • The differences between the types of charities that men and women prefer to support
  • How retirement affects women’s philanthropy 

Resources: 

Research that grows women’s philanthropy

How Women & Men Give Around Retirement

Andrea Pactor

Kathleen Loehr

 

“The Women’s Philanthropy Institute is the only organization in the world in a research and academic institution that focuses solely on this topic of the role of gender in philanthropy.” – Andrea Pactor

 

“We now have some substantive data points that look at this intergenerational transmission of generosity – it probably won’t come as a too much of a surprise that moms are a critical piece of all of that.” – Andrea Pactor

 

“Part of the research that is really clear is that women are often giving more than men and they’re very influential in the household giving, and we miss that when we go and do meetings, if you will, with just the male in the household.” – Kathleen Loehr

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