By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Richard Fruchter has a vision for the Puget Sound’s Jewish community.
“We want people to move to Seattle because they think it’s a fabulous Jewish community,” said the CEO and president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle. “Not, ‘Incidentally, we moved here and it is, but that’s why we’re moving here. Because our kids will be better educated. Because we have vital organizations. Camping is growing. Synagogue membership is growing, and everybody feels like this is a very robust place to live Jewishly.’”
To get to that place, Federation officials could see that the way they supported local Jewish organizations would need to change. But they saw as well that the way they raised the money they allocate would need to change.
“We became aware that through national studies, through research that we did here, through talking to donors, that the next generation of philanthropists really were changing the way they…wanted to give their money,” Fruchter said. “They really wanted to follow their money and see where it made an impact, and find a return on their investment. We wanted to be responsive to that.”
When the Federation kicks off its annual community campaign next month, donors will be presented with a form that asks them to do more than fill out an amount of how much money they want to give. They will also be given a long list of options — in four umbrella areas with several sub-options.
The four impact areas, as they are being called, are:
• “Helping our community in need,” with sub-areas that help alleviate poverty, help seniors, and improve the Jewish community’s response to mental health needs.
• “Experiencing Judaism — birth to grade 12” has four sub-areas that include programs for early childhood, teens and Jewish camps.
• “Building Jewish community — post-grade 12” covers Jewish-identity–building programs, young adult programming and adult education. Most cultural programs, including JTNews, would fall into this area.
• “Strengthening global Jewry” focuses on poverty-alleviating programs in Israel and the former Soviet bloc as well as for the elderly in the former Soviet Union.
Donors will be able to decide on as many of the impact areas or sub-areas that speak to them.
“They can actually choose what really moves them,” said Federation board chair Shelley Bensussen.
A fifth option, the Sustaining Community Fund, acts much like the previous unrestricted campaign model.
“The more money that goes into the Sustaining Community Fund, the more opportunity we have to be able to flow that through the model, and fill in wherever we find some of the needs that haven’t raised enough money,” Fruchter said.
In the first year, specific goals — both Fruchter and Bensussen cited a 25 percent increase in the number of kids sent to Jewish camps over three years as an example — will be set for donors to reach. After the first campaign is complete, they will then receive reports on how their donations were used.
“We’re hoping that we’ll tell people, after these programs are in play, that ‘Your donation did this, you met your goal,’” Bensussen said.
On the allocations end of this new equation, Fruchter said he hopes to expand the Federation’s volunteer base with the creation of committees to deliberate over each of the 13 new sub-areas.
Federation officials acknowledge it wasn’t a matter of if the Federation would have to come up with a new way to raise money for the programs it funds. It was a matter of when.
“The old model of the Federation, where we once a year ask people to make one donation to our organization and then we decide where [the money] goes, is broken,” Robin Boehler, the chair of the Federation’s fundraising arm, the Center for Jewish Philanthropy, told a group of supporters at an event in late July. “So we had to decide on something new.”
Community campaigns over the past several years have been stagnant or come up short of their goals. Though economic turmoil can be blamed for some of the shortfalls, Federation officials recognized that the unrestricted giving model felt antiquated, in particular when reaching out to the families of some of the Federation’s largest, most faithful donors who had died in recent years.
“We haven’t done a good enough job in reengaging their children and that next generation,” Fruchter said. “We’re hoping that this will give them an opportunity to say, ‘You know what? It’s not my dad or mom’s Federation anymore, they’re trying something new. Let’s give it a shot.”
The big question, then, is will it work?
“I haven’t talked to one person, not one donor, who has said, ‘I don’t like what you’re doing, we’re not going to give,’” Fruchter said. “Everybody’s very intrigued to see how it’s going to work out.”
Brian Schultz, a part of the younger generation the Federation is trying to reach and a longtime Federation donor and volunteer himself, said he agrees there needed to be changes. But he believes this model doesn’t go far enough.
“By leveraging technology in interesting ways, I think there’s an opportunity to really build a different kind of relationship with their donors, particularly using social networking,” Schultz said. “I think the new model is compatible with that. I don’t think it quite gets all the way there.”
Still, “I hope they succeed,” he said. “I really want them to.”
Defining success — aside from the easy metric of raising more money — can’t be determined holistically until Federation officials see the grant proposals from the agencies it funds. They believe the interest is high enough that they will raise more money, but they admit the risk involved with this new model.
“The first year, we have no idea how money’s going to come in. None at all,” Boehler said at the July event. “When I say we’re taking a risk, we’re not kidding. We have no clue how people will earmark their funds.”
Fruchter said making a transition piecemeal would not have the same impact.
“[We] felt that just half-heartedly going in, saying we’re going to try this and see how it works and maybe in a year or two we’ll move over, it wasn’t going to make the change in the community that we really wanted,” he said.
Federations in Portland and San Francisco are both embarking upon allocations models similar to Seattle’s, but not currently adopting a donor choice option.
“There really isn’t a good example out there for what we’re doing,” Fruchter said. “We looked at United Ways, we looked at Federations, we looked at nonprofits, we looked at foundations. And then we ended up designing a program, taking into account what some of their experiences have been.”
Scott Kaufman, CEO of the Jewish Federation of GreaterMetro Detroit, called the traditional allocations model in an article for the JTA news service “the lifeblood of the community” and expressed doubts about different models providing the same impact.
At the same time, similar agencies will watch closely to see if Seattle’s Federation can make this model work.
“We’re on the cutting edge of the Jewish Federations, which is wonderful,” said Bensussen, the Federation’s board chair. “Hopefully we will have such success that the other federations will follow us.”