I think Giving Tuesday has been a true game changer for charities all over the world. Co-Founded in 2012 by Asha Curran, Chief Innovation Officer at New York City’s famed 92nd Street Y, Giving Tuesday was created to be the philanthropic alternative to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Donations on the day in 2012 amounted to $10 million; last year, it totaled $3.1 billion.
In 2015, I attended an awards dinner to honor Asha for the success of Giving Tuesday. Asha had time to talk about fundraising during dinner. I wanted to know more about how she came up with the idea and she wanted to know more about the ASPCA’s successful Sarah McLachlan commercials.
Asha said she tapped into the reality that there could be millions of people who would rather donate to a worthy charity than receive another sweater or pair of socks. But more importantly she thought it would benefit charitable organizations of all sizes and unify their fundraising efforts for one day rather than use fundraising budgets to compete with other charities.
She had a true “greater good” intention in creating Giving Tuesday and I don’t think even she could have imagined the level of its success today.
But this Giving Tuesday, I’m concerned that local animal shelters may wind up with only two cents of each donor dollar that is intended to help homeless cats and dogs at local shelters. The sad reality is only one to two percent of donations to large, national animal charities like the ASPCA or Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) get passed along as financial grants to local pet shelters.
How could that be when the majority of their multi-channel fundraising appeals through television commercials, web advertising, and print advertising feature dogs and cats in what appears to be some kind of cage or shelter kennel? The reason of course is that getting homeless dogs and cats adopted into new forever homes is the most successful emotional donor appeal to animal welfare donors.
But these national organizations have a variety of initiatives that have nothing to do with homeless dogs and cats. While those initiatives are important to the leaders of those groups, they are not a priority to most animal welfare donors. Bottom line: a majority of donations to these large national organizations are used to cover excessive administrative and fundraising budgets or allocated to animal welfare issues that could be of little interest to donors.
This Giving Tuesday, the ASPCA and HSUS will be using their sophisticated fundraising megaphones to capture as many of the homeless dog and cat donations as they can, while your local shelter will be doing the actual lifesaving work. The following numbers may surprise you!
The combined annual donation income of the ASPCA and HSUS is just over $500 million dollars and their combined endowment reserves are over $750 million. The ASPCA operates one small shelter in New York City and HSUS doesn’t operate any shelters for homeless dogs and cats.
The five to six million homeless dogs and cats entering shelters each year are being cared for and placed in loving homes by the more than 14,000 local shelters and rescue organizations around the country. These organizations desperately need your generous donation or volunteer time on Giving Tuesday. Please take the time to look up the local shelters and rescues in your community and give as generously as you can.
Let’s make sure homeless dogs and cats receive more than 2 cents of your donor dollar on this Giving Tuesday!