Linking Fundraising Options.

Jewish groups tie Web and radio

The $5,000 raised online by the Jewish Federation in San Francisco during a Super Sunday phone-a-thon doesn't sound like much. Especially when the total for the radiothon reached $1.7 million. Radio lister were pushed to the Web site by the on-air conversation.

However, that figure brings smiles to the organization because a potential exists for the online amount to grow.

Called the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Mann and Sonoma Counties, the organization serves as a model for a Web project for the United Jewish Communities (UJC) called Fed Web.

The Web portal allows the 189 member organizations, called federations, to get an off-the-shelf, template-designed site. The portal allows a present site to either use the entire central site or select parts of the central applications and add them to the existing local site.

Many federations struggle with catching up to the latest technology. Some maintain sites while others can not. Even those that operate sites battle upgrading costs and the need to stay current.

That frustration led the national office to identify a group of federations to serve as beta communities to develop the portal. The four selected communities were in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Tidewater, Va.

The San Francisco federation's $22 million campaigns make it one of the top five. While it has previously worked with other federations, the online effort is new.

"The Fed Web will be important to reach new donors," said Suzan Burns, associate director of marketing for the San Francisco organization. "Any federation that doesn't have its own ecommerce will benefit from the central portal."

Each federation site can be customized within the given template so the site can also feature local content. Local administrators can load material as well as use some syndicated copy.

"They can grab and post national material, but also have a local calendar -- all they need is a PC (personal computer) with a Net server," said Gail Hyman, vice president of public affairs for the United Jewish Communities in New York City.

Fed Web creates a network of sites independent of needing "hard wiring maintenance that is usual," according to JoAnn Abraham, director of communication projects and the Fed Web portal. "You can simply use a word processor. You don't need the knowledge of coding."

Member federations without the budget to hire a Web master or keep up with those salary demands can assign someone already on staff to simply handle the work. "All they will need is a dedicated staff person to learn how to post material like with a community newsletter," Hyman said.

Fed Web emerges as more than just a combined fundraising approach, Hyman explained. The Jewish community relies on increased information from areas like the Israeli component, Washington, D.C., events, as well as local education programs.

"A new ability of sharing means we're going to be that much richer," Hyman said. "Information will come not just from us to local federations, but will flow from them to the central office as well."

Abraham recommended that news events from the various constituencies appear on the home page to attract viewers and provide a centralized theme. Local happenings and donations will follow by using a simple menu bar on the side.

Fundraising will become part of the picture. "There's some data to support the idea that more funds come with online fundraising than offline," said Hyman. "But we would like to see if it's true."

Hyman believes the most effective fundraising comes from direct contact. The Web's potential comes from the ability of people to discover a relationship with the federation from new information they see on the site.

"Hopefully we'll get some people who see the site and find us who couldn't come another way," she said.

Collecting the money

Management of online funds will flow through a central bank after which the funds proceed back to the local federation bank account. The UJC will outsource the accounting with a vendor yet to be selected.

While dollars will come in from around the country, individual coding from each location determines the origin. This allows centralized accounting to make sure the dollars end up in the right place.

Abraham said that donors can decide where their gifts will end up. On the donation page, donors see a list of federations, along with the chance to designate a gift for a special event, such as honoring a wedding.

Abraham said that UJC plans to list the necessary privacy and usage statements to inform consumers about security and the safety of using credit cards. "There are certain secure sockets with more than one safeguard to stop people from breaking into the system."

UJC will also list the total amount donated, less bank transaction fees that will go to the specified location. "We will have no transition fee between the central and local federation besides the bank transaction," she said.

Many federations didn't start collecting funds because they didn't know how to deal with the process, Abraham said. "We'll do it for them initially and each federation will see transaction reports."

Nonprofits interested in handling a centralized or combined approach to fundraising should face the issue of clearly putting information on the donation page, said Bob Carter, president of Ketchum, Inc. in Pittsburgh, an institutional fundraising counsel.

"Clearly state that the dollars will go where they are designated," he said. "The local works on trust, because it's hard to monitor the accounting. But it helps when the central agency produces weekly or monthly feedback reports."

Nonprofits should offer preferences of where to donate such as with the Fed Web concept, said Carter. Donors like to have more control of where they give, he said, especially since families lay scattered across the nation and may want to give to a relative's federation.

Some fundraisers fault the concept of the charity mall because the national approach ignores a regional giving. "The concept has to be sold to the donor on a regional basis so you need the support of the local member organization to make any national effort work," Carter said. "We're a generation away from people being comfortable with online giving, but distance giving is on the horizon."

Going national helps the UJC take advantage of the economies of scale not available to a single, local federation, according to Hyman. "We're going to the market as a large system so we can talk to vendors at the top tier level."

Been there, done that

Other examples of combined fundraising occurred when the UJC set up the National Direct Marketing Center in 1998. While it didn't make use of the Internet, the combined approach raised more than $850,000 from low-level donors and reached more than 4,000 new donors in one year.

"In a way the Fed Web will replace the NDMC as we enter the Web atmosphere," Hyman said.

One possible vendor to handle the accounting for the UJC is EHL Consulting, a Philadelphia-based fundraising specialist that deals with Jewish institutions. Its service, called jewishshare.com, acts as an approach for Jewish agencies to accept contributions online in a secure way, said Robert I. Evans, managing director of EHL.

The service means that organizations with a site can open themselves up to financial transactions, such as event registrations. The organization can even place items from gift shops on the site for a 24/7 availability.

"All organizations need is a site and a Net banking account to handle the major cards online," said Evans.

Nonprofits should notice the statistics of the shopping online audience, he suggested. "People who shop online are upscale demographics who may be the same potential members the Jewish organization tries to reach."

Evans conducted a series of focus groups in Westchester County, N.Y., to discover the extent of acceptance of online contributions. The basic question revolved around reaching out to people via the Web. Evans reported that 43 of 45 respondents would consider online contributions. Most were critical of the center for not being more proactive before.

"Of 3,000 synagogues, as many as 2,000 have sites of varying quality," he said. "Ultimately 25 percent of their giving will be online even though it's less than 2 percent today."

The Jewish Federation of Las Vegas could be called proactive. Besides being one of the beta communities for the Fed Web project, this fast growing Jewish community seeks to reach out to 75,000 Jewish people in southern Nevada who are presently unaffiliated.

"Through the Web we hope to reach those people," said Beth Miller, marketing director for the federation. "We're building a state-of the-art portal with a fraction of the cost because of the help from the central office."

Las Vegas doesn't have a set percentage of expected goals for fundraising but believes the approach will help event registration and ease the workload as the community grows.

San Francisco's site has been soliciting online contributions for the past year and will use certain portions of Fed Web for the content of the worldwide information.

"We won't be using the fundraising part right now because our present campaign is doing well," Burns said. "We think there is a long way to go before people are comfortable with online annual gifts but we notice younger adults use the Net more than the rest of the community."

Burns finds that one part of e-commerce comes from consumers who pay for reservations online with credit cards. The San Francisco federation now doesn't need to send out paper invitations for speaker events because it notifies people online.

The new Fed Web might cut costs of needing a Web master for some federations, according to Burns. But her organization maintains several sub sites so it requires the skills of a master. However, the use of the Fed Web frees up time for the master.

The UJC plans to charge federations a subscriber fee, yet wants to keep costs low enough to invite any federation that desires access. Rates range from $250 a month for small federations to $2,000 for the largest. Size is determined by a combinations of campaigns dollar amounts and the number of people in the community.

"We anticipate, over time, the subscribers will allow us to break even," Hyman said. "As we get the level up to a certain point, we will be able to lower the rates."

Online fundraising approaches are changing the way organizations contact people, explained EHL's Evans. "Organizations must accumulate email addresses like they captured mail addresses," he said.

"Then they can contact constituents electronically in a cheaper and faster fashion than the standard mail," Hyman said.

A synagogue conceivably could send an appeal over the Web where people respond by hitting the right button and gifts immediately go to the organization.

"It won't replace direct mail although the process supplements it," he said. "This speeds up payments and cuts down expenses." The Web means an opportunity for an organization to get to its people faster, according to Burns. "Going online will benefit everyone," said Burns. "The central approach helps federations that just don't have the budget to do it on their own."

Tom Pope is a New York City- based journalist who writes about management issues.