This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.
Author Archives: Guest Author
Imagining Relational Infrastructures
The newly passed infrastructure package—valued at $1.2 trillion over eight years, $579 billion of which is new spending—marks a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fix things: from dilapidated bridges to our water delivery systems. But this investment has a much wider focus than just fixing up the infrastructure we already have. Built into the bill that recently passed Congress is a great deal of flexibility about how its funds are spent, so that projects can adapt to different circumstances and needs, and evolve over time as those contexts also change. That flexibility allows us the opportunity to ask much larger questions, far beyond the identification of potholes. We have a rare opportunity to consider new kinds of infrastructure altogether and to expand our understanding of what our infrastructure is.
At its most fundamental, our infrastructure consists of the essential systems and facilities needed for the day-to-day functioning of communal life, typically built and maintained through tax dollars and government investment. So, what should we consider essential?
Transportation, communication, and utility networks clearly require maintenance and improvement, but infrastructures aren’t always new bridges, roads, pipes, and wires.
If infrastructure is imagined only as “big concrete” projects, large corporations and developers will profit the most from pending infrastructure investments. Why should it be common sense that they are the only winners—especially since many of these infrastructures have only generated a debt of harm and dispossession for Black and Indigenous people?
We think communities are essential infrastructures. Infrastructures can be relational; they can be about improving the ways in which communities work and play together to improve quality of public life. We think new infrastructures can be co-designed, built, and managed by communities. Infrastructure can even be rules and or procedures for how things go together. And those who work as cultural, spatial, technological mixologists may offer some practical suggestions for realignments with enormous impacts relative to their cost. If we suppose that even 35% of the funding from the bill had to land in the hands of communities, here are some suggestions to nourish an imagination about community and family infrastructures.
Transportation Innovation—The Switch
A realigned transportation infrastructure can better support communities. Culture is addicted to technosolutionist thinking, but more important than the newness or succession of technologies is the coexistent relationship between emergent and incumbent technologies. The US is proposing a technology change to electric or automated vehicles. But more important than a technology change is the shift away from individually owned cars of any sort.
If individually owned cars are used in lieu of transit they will create unprecedented congestion. If every seat in transit is inflated to the size of a car, the smart car is stuck in a dumb traffic jam. Emissions, sprawl, and vehicle miles traveled will increase. You will travel longer to accomplish more far-flung errands in something like a slow network of horizontal elevators. And there is still no source of revenue to repair existing roadways.
But instead of another new technology like flying cars, real innovation may be a richer relationship between technologies. Just a slight rewiring of relationships vastly changes potentials. Mixtures of high-capacity transit and low-capacity cars, bikes, and pedestrians create a productive chemistry that gets cars off the road and reduces emissions, sprawl, and vehicle miles traveled.
A switch—a physical spatial volume for these exchanges can consolidate busy itineraries that require owning multiple cars. The mixture of different vehicles provides another kind of convenience and safety. And while infrastructure has often been an instrument of segregation, switching can address inequality, racial discrimination, and disability by penetrating areas that have often been denied mobility. A robust, diverse, job-rich hub can generate revenues to support infrastructure maintenance and development. The neighborhood switch within walking or biking distance from every home offers a number of programs to serve households. Acting as an antidote to the germ of the car, this shifted relationship even has the capacity to dissolve lanes of traffic, parking lots, and garages. And in mobility narratives, not speed and autonomy but entanglement would be the new desire.
Land Hold Organs as Infrastructure—Land Trusts
Alternative land holding organs like community land trusts and agrarian trusts offer another community infrastructure. Community land trusts—invented in Albany, Georgia during the civil rights movement and now spreading around the world—make communities more affordable and less susceptible to gentrification by holding land in common and only selling the buildings on top of the land. Given that stability, it is also easier to build relationships related to proximity, adjacency, sequencing, programming, and position of buildings and community members—the heavy relationships of community economies rather than the financial abstractions of real estate economies. And these are the very networks of care, maintenance, and kinship that communities also want to build as alternatives to monoculture policing or as a means of delivering reparations.
Just as community land trusts can reaggregate urban land, agrarian trusts are a way to reaggregate farmland—land of retiring farmers in the greying agriculture industry that is exhausted from monoculture crops and resource extraction. Trusts can save landowners from bankruptcy and collect land for regenerative agriculture, renewable energy uses, and reparations for Black and Indigenous people.
New Relational Platforms—Public Kitchen
The benefit of redirecting funds and realigning networks to serve community is perhaps even more clear at an intimate scale. Returning to essentials, we argue that kitchens are essential infrastructure. Consider just this one component of the community economies mentioned above and the way in which its position and disposition rewires so many relationships. If kitchens were public and accessible, like schools and libraries, how would that change social life?
The development of public kitchens could model completely new arrangements of communities. They would change how many families access a fundamental aspect of our daily lives, eating, and food. They can create the conditions for communities to find new ways to organize themselves, to build new relationships with their food, to develop new social and economic habits, and to increase the social and shared dimensions of their everyday lives. And they could do so in ways that are dignified and even fun. We see public kitchen as an infrastructure of togetherness. And the communities building the public kitchen also experience the financial benefits of doing the development.
The real power of relational infrastructures like transportation switches or alternative land holding organs and public kitchens is the way that they can make something from almost nothing in a way that benefits many. They do not always require steel or concrete. Even a modest investment can generate new physical arrangements in space and create compounding decommodified values in a community economy. It is not magic. It is what happens in organizations that are alive. It is no different from planting one seed and getting ten.
But these heavy values are sometimes invisible in a world that privileges the mathematical accounting of capital values. Sometimes the real effort is getting existing financial structures out of the way of this productivity. This is the “infrastructure of well-being” that Katya F. Smyth and Xavier de Souza Briggs have outlined in their practice and writings. And this is investment that has a chance of redressing the harm that infrastructure itself has done in communities of color.
How can culture support the narratives and popular practices that build relational infrastructures with these redoubling values? It is in the very nature of these communities’ infrastructures to multiply and generate alliances and additional forms of support. There are designers, organizers, and cultural institutions who have already rehearsed and prototyped them. All it would take is a network of pilot projects, using a small fraction of funds in the pipeline to demonstrate this alternative infrastructure imaginary.
This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.
The Final Steps To Take That Will Help You Become A Great Nonprofit Storyteller
In part three of this series on how to become a great nonprofit storyteller, I talk about the practical skills you need to tell an effective story. Read parts one and two.
In part one of this series, I talked about figuring out your goals and objectives, developing your brand and tone, and choosing your audience. In part two, I touched on the storytelling elements that will inspire your audience and encourage them to take a desired action.
In this post, I’m going to talk about what you need to do next: how to finalize and deliver your story.
Edit your story.
Once you create your story, you need to edit it.
When you think of editing, you likely think about checking for grammatical errors and typos—which is an important part of this process! However, you should be reading your story—in your head and aloud—for other things.
For example, are there any details that you find are slowing down the pace? If so, consider cutting those. Are there holes in the story where you need to find examples of how you’re carrying out your mission? If so, go back and add them to the story.
When you read the story aloud, ask your coworkers and maybe even some volunteers to listen to it and provide feedback. Then ask them if the story would inspire them to take actions that help you reach your short and long-term goals.
Determine the best medium through which to tell your story.
Now is the time to figure out how to package your story for your audience. There are several ways you can tell it. Which medium will you use?
You can choose from:
- Written media: email, social media, website, blog posts, newspapers, etc.
- Visual media: photographs, videos, etc.
- Auditory media: podcasts, radio, live events, etc.
When determining the medium through which you’ll share your story, take into consideration where and how your audience consumes content. Then base your decision on that.
Do they want a written appeal in the mail? Do they prefer video content? Do they send your emails to spam?
And remember: You can repackage the story to work for more than one medium!
Decide when to share your story.
You want to share the right message at the right time. In order to do that, look at your story and ask yourself questions like:
- Does this story make sense to tell at a certain time of year (end-of-year giving season, etc.)?
- Is there a timely aspect to this story? Does it need to be shared on a certain holiday or awareness day?
- Is this story evergreen? Can I share it throughout the year?
Once you have a timeline, build it into your overall communications and marketing plan so everyone is on the same page and can help you prepare to share the story.
Measure how successful your story is.
Measuring how your audience responds to your story will help you know which ones are landing with your audience and which ones you might need to restructure in order to meet your goals.
What you measure will depend on your goals. For example, you might look at:
- Engagement. Look at your email open rates, social media interactions, and other data points. Did your engagement rate improve?
- Donations. If the desired action you want your audience to take is to donate to your mission, track the number of donations you receive.
- Event ticket purchases. Do you want to sell tickets to an upcoming event? If so, track the number of tickets you sell.
- Volunteer sign ups. If the desired action you want your audience to take is to sign up to volunteer for your nonprofit, track the number of new volunteers you add to your database.
When measuring the success of your story, think about if it’s helping you serve both your short and long-term goals. If you don’t think the stories are moving you toward your goals, go back to the beginning and develop a new way of telling your stories.
I hope these posts will help you develop the best stories possible and motivate your audience to work with you and move your mission forward.
The post The Final Steps To Take That Will Help You Become A Great Nonprofit Storyteller appeared first on Bloomerang.
This article originally appeared in Bloomerang. See the original article here.
Do You Inform Donors Of These 2 Giving Opportunities?
Part of the job of being a true philanthropy facilitator is showing donors how they might benefit from being a little more generous. “Philanthropy” – aka “love of humanity” – works best when everyone wins – your organization, the donor and the community. Towards this end, why not be prepared to inform donors of giving opportunities of which they may not be aware?
Today I want to look at two ways to promote philanthropy that are too-little used by the lion’s share of charities:
- Current tax incentives.
- IRA distributions.
When you remind donors of these opportunities, especially at year-end, they’ll often end up giving more than they would otherwise have considered. This results in more money for your mission, more satisfied donors, and more solutions to the world’s most pressing problems!
Win. Win. Win.
Let’s review these two giving opportunities of which your donors may not be aware.
1. Current Tax Incentives
In 2020 the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act introduced some new temporary tax benefits. The good news is the COVID Relief Act passed in December 2020 extended these benefits – and even increased one – through 2021. And the Charitable Giving Coalition is lobbying to make these benefits permanent. What are they?
- The $300 universal charitable deduction for non-itemizers is extended through 2021.
- For 2021 the same $300 “above-the-line” deduction is doubled to $600 for joint filers.
- The temporary AGI limit increase from 60% to 100% on itemized charitable deductions for cash gifts is extended for 2021.
In all other years, donors who made significant gifts could only deduct up to 60% of AGI. This year there’s no cap and donors can deduct up to 100% of AGI for 2020. The gifts must be cash, not stocks or property.
This is an opportunity for major gift and capital campaign donors to get a larger deduction by making their full payment this year rather than spreading their gift out over several years. Any excess contributions available can be carried forward for the next five years, subject to the 60% AGI limit previously in place. Why not do your donors a solid by letting them know?
What donors don’t know, they won’t take advantage of – and that will be to everyone’s detriment. While I always recommend you let donors know you are not in the business of offering professional legal or financial advice, and they should consult with their own advisors, this doesn’t mean you can’t inform people about changes in the law. For example, last year I was delighted to receive an email from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco including information informing supporters about new tax deduction benefits made possible through the CARES Act.
It’s the bare minimum to tack “this gift is tax deductible to the extent provided by law” onto the end of your appeal or bottom of your donation landing page. Donors perceive this as relatively meaningless ‘fine print.’ Mildly reassuring, but certainly not persuasive. Most readers won’t really understand what it means. You can do better.
Remember this: Fundraising is a value-for-value exchange. The donor gives you something of value, usually money and/or time. You return something of value, usually an intangible “feel good.” While it’s true the main motivations for giving have to do with meeting a donor’s needs for connection, community, self-esteem, fulfillment of a moral or religious obligation, or just feeling pure joy, sometimes the donor will be further incentivized by gaining a tax deduction.
In coming at fundraising from a place of abundance, not scarcity, it’s not your job (or most productive strategy) to make judgments about what should/should not motivate people to give. Rather, your job is to encourage would-be donors and help them give as much as they can comfortably contribute. Whatever your own feelings about what tax deductions should exist, put those on the shelf. For that matter, put your personal feelings about what other benefits the donor should receive from contributing on the shelf as well.
The charitable deduction encourages Americans to give more to charity than they otherwise would. In some respect, it normalizes the attitude people with income have a responsibility towards those in need. Use it wisely in your promotional materials and conversations with donors to encourage more thoughtful and passionate philanthropy.
2. IRA Distributions
In all other years IRA owners age 70.5 or older could gift no more than $100,000 annually from an IRA to charity, tax-free. Couples could each transfer this amount, for a total of $200,000. The gift, known as a ‘Charitable IRA Rollover’ had to be transferred directly from the IRA to the charity. The money could not first be paid to the donor. One of the reasons this is attractive to donors is that in all years other than 2020 everyone is required to take a required minimum distribution (RMD), or pay up to a 50% excise tax on this amount. [The age for RMDs was recently raised to 72, but the option to make a rollover gift still extends to those age 70.5]. Not everyone needs this income to live on, and receiving the distribution has the effect of increasing a donor’s AGI and, therefore, their tax bill. It also potentially subjects them to increases in Social Security premiums for Medicare Part B and Part D, plus exempts them for other credits and could impose a surtax on net investment income.
For donors particularly interested in reducing the size of their IRA, and future RMDs, it’s important to remind them this year they can cash out some of their IRA; then make an offsetting charitable gift and deduct up to 100% of AGI. While this is not a direct “rollover” transfer, some donors may opt to take a larger distribution from their IRA than usual; then turn around and donate the cash to charity to take advantage of this year’s larger deduction opportunity.
Gifting IRA assets now can also provide a future estate tax savings for donors with taxable estates (over $ 11.7 million per individual in 2021). Since income earned in IRAs is pre-tax, any amount left after a donor’s death is subject to a double tax – income (known as “income in respect of a decedent”) and estate. For this reason, it’s a terrific asset to give to charity, leaving heirs with non-IRA assets that will not be burdened with income taxes. And for 2020 and 2021 only, no matter how much donors give, as long as it does not exceed 100% of AGI they can deduct it all if they itemize.
How to Inform Donors of Giving Opportunities
There are a number of ways you can proceed.
- Talk to your major donors. Let them know they may be able to increase their giving this year by taking advantage of the changes to tax deductibility under the CARES Act.
- Write to your donors. Here is a templated letter from Stelter you can update for 2021 and send to inform donors of new contribution opportunities. Download Donor Letter (DOC).
- Develop a special campaign to encourage $300 donations. Encourage everyone to take advantage of this extended CARES ACT universal deduction opportunity, noting that if their employer matches gifts they could potentially benefit you to the tune of $600 – or more.
- Put this information on your website. One place could be your “other ways to give” donation landing page. For an example of how to share IRA gifting information with donors, see the Phoenix Children’s Foundation website.
Final Note
It’s good to be aware of the varying deductions a donor can take for charitable contributions. But also be aware these laws are always changing. Fundamentally, you are not your donor’s lawyer or CPA. You are their philanthropic advisor, helping them to enact their values in the manner most advantageous for all concerned. Remember to include a disclaimer your organization does not provide legal or financial advice and you recommend donors consult with their own professional advisors to ascertain how these opportunities may complement their own personal, philanthropic and tax planning objectives.
Download this Culture of Philanthropy Checklist loaded with action tips to determine if your nonprofit has one in place, and how to get started with adopting a culture of philanthropy.
The post Do You Inform Donors Of These 2 Giving Opportunities? appeared first on Bloomerang.
This article originally appeared in Bloomerang. See the original article here.
