By Richard H. Levey

A multibillionaire Latino businessman who graduated from a major university in California is tapped for a contribution by his alma mater every year. “He’s very brown, very Mexican-looking, and owns a funny-sounding company,” said Armando Enrique Zumaya, founder of Somos El Poder, an Alameda, California-based consultancy that advises Latino nonprofits on fundraising.

The requests come by mail. The suggested donation is just $100.

“I’ll tell you half a dozen stories like that,” Zumaya said. “Prospecting is failing because we’re overwhelmingly looking for rich, old, straight white guys.”

The ill-suited university request highlights a disconnect between an institution and potential funders. This disconnect is not an isolated case. The prospecting field is rife with systematic structures that eliminate communities not traditionally viewed as viable prospecting sources.

“If you’re only looking for public wealth, you will not find a lot of people of color,” Zumaya said. “A lot of our wealth is in families, and it is very private.”

Before an institution can gain access to these sources, fundraisers need to understand the cultural and racial ways wealth is gathered in each community.

These paths are less likely to include indicators that would cause a prospect to rank high on donation propensity algorithms. Add to that the fact that these populations are traditionally under-solicited, so they do not have extensive donation histories. As a result, these prospects do not surface through traditional fundraising research practices or on third-party prospecting lists.

The algorithm biases are not the only barriers. “If a donor does make it into a database, often a development officer or researcher will see that person, look him up and dismiss him,” because that person does not fit the traditional major donor profile, Zumaya said.

Should a nonprofit’s fundraising team overcome these obstacles, its members can still sabotage the nascent relationship by not acknowledging the prospect’s culture. For instance, outside of New York or California, prospects of color might not embrace the directness of New York or California-style outreach, Zumaya said.

One of the major cultural differences is acknowledging the role family plays for funders of color. “If there’s a grandmother in the house, you address her first,” Zumaya said. “You don’t walk past her because she’s old.”

Zumaya recalled a donor visit. “I was with an old-wealth family in New Mexico. I asked the guy I was talking to who else in their family he wanted to discuss [funding] with us. And he said ‘What a refreshing change, because I would love to have my family involved, so let’s wait.’ He called people over. His granddad, his wife and their child came over. We all had this wonderful conversation, and they argued over their gifts. But they did come to a conclusion, and it was supported by everybody. The whole family owned the gift.”

There is more to generating equitable prospecting than individual solicitations. The changes need to be systemic, whether within data collection and use, hiring practices or board composition.

“I can show you boards all over California, major universities with one Latino on them out of 80 people, and we’re 44 percent of the state,” Zumaya said. “We’re under 2 percent [on nonprofit boards] in the country, and overwhelmingly those folks are tokens.”

Appropriate representation on boards is the first step to creating organizations that will be well received by the funding community. “Once the board changes, Latinos see the staffing. They see the program. They see the funding differently. You’re going to raise different kinds of money,” Zumaya said.

The new board members are more likely to advocate for programs that fundraise among underrepresented populations, such as hiring diverse fundraising professionals, and to champion patience with these programs. “Making an extra effort costs time,” Zumaya said.

The good news is that if under-solicitated populations are approached appropriately, there might not be the lags seen in other relationship-building efforts. “I had a million-dollar donor after five meetings over four months,” Zumaya said about the Mexican billionaire donor. “For a lot of major donors, it takes a couple of years. The gentleman was not used to being asked to give, and there was no real impediment.”

Zumaya’s example would come as no surprise to Tyrone McKinley Freeman, associate professor of philanthropic studies at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy in Indianapolis. “There’s a long history of people being left outside of the fundraising process because they didn’t fit the wealth profiles, or they are not perceived as being givers or having resources to part with,” Freeman said. If anything, development programs have been becoming more exclusionary, he added.

Equitable prospecting seeks to reverse exclusionary trends in several ways, some of which go beyond identifying viable lists of nontraditional funders. “It’s attempting to grapple with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) as it relates to philanthropy, and with who organizations are engaging, who they are serving, who they are reaching out to, who they are spending time building relationships with or inviting into the fold of the mission, through volunteering, through giving, through advocacy work or whatever is necessary to advance the mission. That creates an open pathway for all who are interested,” Freeman said.

Part of that process, even before fundraisers make their first solicitation, is taking a critical look at the organization’s history of engaging diverse communities — or not, as the case might be. Freeman includes summarizing the nature of an organization’s clients or students, its history in attracting and cultivating donors from diverse backgrounds and whether the organization has any conflicts or other problems related to DEI in its past as part of the initial considerations.

Expanding the universe of potential prospects often involves going beyond traditional outreach strategies. “That can mean engaging different networks, or having conversations with recognized leaders from these communities, be they religious leaders, or civic leaders or corporate leaders,” Freeman said.

Additionally, new prospect populations might use channels for making donations that are not reflected in traditional funder research. “People from diverse communities have long histories and cultures of giving. They are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting for an organization to reach out to them,” Freeman said. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, African American and Asian American donors used crowdfunding to contribute resources to racial equity-focused causes, according to data in a study from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. “They were creating their own pathways for engaging these important issues in lieu of being engaged by other organizations,” Freeman added.

Fundraisers at some nonprofits might not have the data necessary to create a donor base profile which would allow them to identify opportunities in equitable prospecting. “If we think about racial backgrounds of their donors and think about gender, a lot of organizations might not even be tracking this information,” Freeman said. Health and education nonprofits probably have it, but others, including arts organizations or even neighborhood clinics, possibly steered clear of collecting it, he added.

Organizational leaders who have shied away from collecting data that would help them identify under-solicited communities have had good reason for doing so. In 2021, APRA (formerly the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement) issued the APRA Ethics And Compliance Committee Diversity, Equity And Inclusion (DEI) Data Guide. The guide provides cautions such as:

* “Fundraisers should not make assumptions nor note DEI information without the individual’s consent.” 

* “Take care not to tokenize the alumni or donor base by looking at only one element of their identity.” 

* Avoid funding interest assumptions based solely on an individual’s presumed identity. For example, only targeting women for women’s studies programs or women’s health research.”

Data considerations are key to equitable prospecting, according to Meena Das, founder, philanthropy consultant and community data strategist at Namaste Data, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. For Das, equitable prospecting centers around responsible data collection and use. That means responsible data collection and use incorporates what she calls humanity, privacy and trust considerations.

“If I reach out to you (as someone in the community who might be interested in a nonprofit’s mission), I need to be doing it in a way that is human. I should not be asking you to identify within my five perfect categories, or then say ‘other’ or completely disregard your identity by asking you to box yourself in within the way I’m asking for my comfort,” Das said.

Privacy includes limiting those who have access to the data, and trust involves establishing a relationship that brings a prospect into an organization’s community and provides relevance before clobbering the prospect with solicitations.

But equitable prospecting also involves evaluating nontraditional methods of contribution when considering a prospect’s potential worth. “If you are reaching out to international alumni, their method of giving back to the community might not be exactly the same as you would expect from your traditional alumni who have been in the community forever,” Das said. “My own fundraising activities happen by hosting webinars so their fundraising can happen. Those nonlinear, nontraditional ways of showing up in the community are data points that get missed.”

Organizations that do not value these types of contributions underestimate these populations’ potential impact. But embracing them means an organization will have to allocate some of its prospecting resources to new fundraising models. “Part of the problem of pursuing [these strategies] is the hesitancy to fail, or even detour,” Das said. “The idea of detouring makes us so anxious. If we want to do something nontraditional, [such as] reaching out to nontraditional funders, we already have a bias that we want to hit our [traditional] metrics.”

Occasionally, organizations will attempt to do campaign feasibility studies to determine the efficacy of going in new directions. But even these can be corrupted by bias, such as by only sending surveys to top donors. “Again, [this is] going back to the traditional funders,” Das said. “What if we open it up to include more segments — to include the entire community, anyone from your supporters who understands your mission, who wants to contribute their time and wisdom into making the mission successful?”

Das cautions that implementing equitable prospecting cannot simply consist of generating a checklist of actions. “The day we start creating checklists is the day we start limiting our thoughts,” she said. Once every item on the checklist is ticked, she warned, the ability to continuously innovate becomes calcified.

Freeman offers a similar view. “Going forward, it’s very clear that organizations are not going to be able to keep that business-as-usual approach, because the world is changing,” he said. “It is important to break out of this sense that generosity or giving belongs to one group. It’s part of our common collective human heritage.”

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