Fundraising

August 2024

FY 2023-24 Summary

Seva's FY 2023-24 revenue closed just over $9.3M, below the original revenue budget of $10.2m, but ahead of the revised target goal of $8.5M. In January, Julie met with Kate and Deborah to notify them that she anticipated a shortfall in reaching the $10.2M revenue goal. This was due to several factors, some of which included the renewal timing of Major Donors' gifts which wouldn't come in until after June 30th, a national trend toward donors supporting fewer organizations and/or giving smaller gifts than in previous years (mostly in gifts under $2k), and a slower spend of the funds raised for Guatemala Brillando, resulting in slowing down when we could approach donors for another gift.

Late June Pledge and Giving Levels

Seva received a $1.02M pledge at the end of June from an individual donor of many years; it is the largest gift from the donor to date. The gift will be payable during FY 24-25. This pushed us past the revised revenue goal.

In all, we received 47 gifts that were 10k+ for a total of over $3.2M. In FY 22-23, we received 46 gifts $10k+, totaling $1.86M. Of the 47 donors, 33 increased their giving over last year, or made a first-time gift. Only six decreased their giving and the rest gave at the same level as last year. Most decreases in gifts made this year took place at the smaller giving levels, less than $2k per gift.

Proposals and Reports

Seva submitted 29 proposals to Foundations and Leadership Donors during the past fiscal year, for a total of over $13M. In all, we received $3.2M with another $7.2M still pending decisions. This represents an increase of 5 proposals submitted over the previous year.

August is one of the busiest months for getting Major Donor and Grantor reports out the door; Development and Programs work closely together on this.

WSD in Guatemala and beyond

To celebrate World Sight Day on October 10, Kate will take members of the Jackson Kemper family, our largest donor, to Guatemala. At the same time, two members of the Development team will represent Seva at a meeting of the Central American Donor Forum in Antigua, Guatemala, the premier multi-sectoral networking and learning space to advance philanthropy and development efforts in Central America. 

WSD Fundraising Plans

Development is preparing for the upcoming World Sight Day campaign with Focusing Philanthropy. The goal is to raise $800,000 through FP's matching gift. We will also offer a $150,000 match campaign for our internal campaign for WSD.

Donors thanked

Thirty-one leadership donors (16 new donors and 15 returning donors) received a personal thank-you letter from Kate, along with a copy of the DVD of Open Your Eyes. The select group represented either new donors or returning donors who made a significantly larger gift than usual - each donor gave a gift of $10k or more. This gift recognized their contributions to our work through their generous support this year and was a pure "thank you"/love letter.

New positions

Denise Cruz was hired for a full-time position to oversee the Gifts of Sight campaign and Blanca Rivera was promoted to Donor Relations Manager.

Match goal within sight

A print appeal was mailed in mid-January to those in the general donor group who didn't give at year-end. A second Matching Gift appeal was sent mid-March to all donors who hadn't given recently. We are within $10,000 of the $185,000 Match goal in support of pediatric eye care. The Mothers' Day eAppeal will go toward the match as well, so we are confident of reaching the goal.

Proposals and Reports

Q3 is a busy time for proposal submissions and donor mid-year reports. We submitted eight proposals, have three more in the works, and issued six mid-year reports. One proposal  ($227k over five years of support) was funded, six are still pending and one was not declined.

Got our MODO working

Julie Nestingen attended MODO's Annual Sales meeting (in New Orleans this year) in January to report on the pediatric and vision center work they support.

East Coast donor visit

Kate met with three HNWI in NYC and Boston during her East Coast visit in March. These donors met Kate for the first time and for one, this was his first meeting with any Seva staff member. His first gift was in December 2022.

Fiscal Year closed ahead of target revenue!

Seva's FY year closed ahead of the target revenue. The books aren't closed, but we are already at $9.5+M in revenue as of this writing. Our goal was $9.0M. We expect the final total from Finance any day.

New grants received

Seva received two large grants in July. L'Occitane, the French company, granted a $356,000 grant for work in Ukraine to be spent over three years on the ROP and AIDS initiatives.

Another large gift was received by a Leadership Donor for $111,100. Spread out over two years, the gift will support VMANNN's Corneal Blindness program. This program was supported in its inception by Dr. Dick LItwin and Judith Litwin.

Donor trips to celebrate World Sight Day

Seva is planning two donor trips to celebrate World Sight Day. Kate will take the Jackson Kemper family to Guatemala over WSD. Julie will travel to Nepal with Lisa Laird, and we hope to have the MODO team along as well. MODO is in the second year of a three-year campaign to fund seven vision centers in Nepal and seven in India.

Dev has a new team member

Margo Mays joined Development as a FT Senior Specialist, Grants and Reporting.

NEXIS LEXIS - New software for Dev

Development invested in Nexis Lexis, a database that helps to analyze prospects and donors in terms of support for Seva. Based on public and industry content, the advanced technology and analytics assist with prospect analysis to strengthen our process of screening, validating and prioritizing donors' likelihood of supporting Seva based on affinity and capacity. This is a strong compliment to the iWaves tool, already in use.

WSD campaign exceeded the goal by 64%

FP Seva WSD Matching gift campaign raised a record $1,250,000. This is 64% over the goal of $800,000. We owe a great thanks to the regular supporters who turn out every year to make this campaign successful and a very generous gift from our corporate funder MODO this year.

Quick update on the July-Sept quarter

Closed the Winter appeal campaign over goal by more than $97,000- The $250,000 matching gift offer raised in total $597,000 and change in support of 7 vision centers in Bangladesh. Dev Department restructuring: Hired Denise Cruz for a FT position to oversee the Gifts of Sight campaign and promoted Blanca Rivera to Donor Relations Manager. Closed out the fiscal year almost 40% over budget (goal was $7.46million, ended with over $11.7m in revenue)

31 Leadership donors (16 new donors and 15 returning donors) received a personal thank you letter from Kate, recognizing their contributions to our work through their generous support this year. We enclosed a copy of the DVD of Open Your Eyes. Each donor gave a gift of $10k or more. The select group represented either new donors or returning donors who made a significantly larger gift than usual. This was a pure "thank you"/love letter. 

Seva Receives First Crypto Gift Valued at $87,000 (cash value).

8 months ago I met with Billy to explore the feasibility, ethics, and utility of Seva working with a conversion platform to help facilitate Seva’s engagement with such investments. Wondering What CryptoCurrency is? Billy Luu wrote this overview for the ED Blog.

A cryptocurrency is a form of digital money that is controlled by a large network of computers that enable people to send and receive money for goods and services in a secured, encrypted format from anywhere in the world. It was created to exist without control by any government or traditional banking system. Cryptocurrencies are stored in digital wallets and much of the interest in them is to trade for profit or you can earn cryptocurrency by being part of the computer network that makes these transactions happen. There are thousands of types of cryptocurrencies. Many are created as typical online businesses while some are just digital currency. Currently, some companies, like Microsoft, Wholefoods, HomeDepot, PayPal, Starbucks, Etsy, AMC Theatres, etc… allow cryptocurrency as a form of payment. It’s only a matter of time before cryptocurrency becomes mainstream.  

In recent years, donors started to inquire about how they can give cryptocurrency as donations to Seva. According to IRS rules, crypto is considered personal property similar to stocks. Donors can donate in crypto and not pay capital gains tax and receive a federal tax cut on top of it. 

Who are Crypto owners? Typically, owners tend to be young, wealthy, and male, 43% of men between 18 and 29 have bought or used crypto, compared to 19% of women in that age sector. More recently, there have been trends that women are starting to inquire about crypto. Crypto owners are also very diverse, with young Asian, Black, and Hispanic adults more likely than White adults to say they’ve used or invested in crypto. According to recent studies, crypto donations going into Fidelity Charity DAFs doubled in 2020 to $28M and increased another 60% to $158M in 2021. According to Fidelity, crypto donors tend to be more generous donors. 55% of crypto owners said they weren’t sure they could donate crypto. 46% of donors said it was difficult to find charities that accepted crypto. These are great opportunities to educate new donors and make it easy for them to give. 

Another way of giving related to cryptocurrency is NFTs (Nonfungible Tokens.) Donors are selling digital artwork and receiving payments in the form of cryptocurrency. For more in-depth information on NFTs, there’s a great article on the New York Times linked here.

Heading into the New Year - J. Nestingen

Here we are just out of 2021, still feeling the effects of the pandemic, and global uncertainty, yet, incredibly, as of 2/22/22, based on current financials, we have already passed our revenue target of $7.46M for the year. How did we get here? Recognition amongst our peers as an effective organization trusted relationships with our donors, and our ability to show results–an organization where dollars can do the most - compassionately in action. These are the two catalysts, and supporters leading to recognition as a worthy recipient of two honorable awards.

• Based on a public vote, philanthropist Peter Singer gave away $100,000 to three of The Life You Can Save's recommended charities. Seva was voted second of the three charities by TLYCS followers - an organization that rates charities by their effectiveness.

• Kristof’s Holiday Impact Grand Prize. As mentioned in WaPo, Seva received over $1.3m from Kristof and Seva donors to the campaign. But to top it off, Seva Foundation raised a $300,000 donor match for the first $300,000 of the Kristof campaign. We received the Grand Prize award of $100,000 from Kristof, as well.

• In addition, as of this writing, Kate brought in almost $3M+ for Guatemala, Bangladesh.

We still have two more months until the end of this fiscal year which is four more months of perseverance from the development and the executive offices. And as a reminder, we look forward to the boards' support with the commitment of your annual gift. Remember, 100% Board support is often a consideration for Grants.

Let’s look forward to ending the fiscal year on the highest of notes.

The Origins of the Word: Philanthropy

When I coach development teams, I start by giving a lesson on the origins of the word - Philanthropy. The word "philanthropy" comes to the English language from Greek. In the Greek tradition, the word philanthropy grows from the words "Philos" meaning "love" and "Anthropos" meaning "man" or "humanity." Literally, in the original Greek meaning, the word philanthropy is the "love of humanity.”

Seva's primary way of generating wealth is by tapping into a love of humanity.  And our love of humanity was tested this past year with the pandemic and a highly contentious political season.  

Like the communities we serve, our donors are feeling the strain on every imaginable level. As we look to our future continuing to diversify our revenue portfolio, we must reimagine our Campaigns. To be clear, we believe that Seva needs strong Campaigns to successfully raise the funding our program partners require to do the work they are charged with. Additionally, the Campaign has afforded us the ability to double our annual revenue. Case in point - the collateral materials we developed for MacArthur earned us $500,000 in new monies towards our mission.

What do we mean by reimagining the Campaign? The Lancet report will confirm that, as a community, we have failed to change the trajectory of avoidable blindness. So sadly, we can affirm that the need for work not only continues but grows. Our intent is to raise the necessary funding to help as many people and fully support our partners across the globe.

In the coming months, we will reimagine the Campaign and how we communicate our vision for a world where avoidable blindness is a thing of the past. The C2020 we had previously envisioned will not get us where we need to be. So, we look forward to welcoming any and all board members eager to explore this adjusted path with us as we reimagine the campaign's branding.  

Fundraising - Final Countdown for 2020-2021

Almost and not quite.  Our efforts this year were audacious.  We had over 15MM in the pipeline, and some of those monies are still under consideration by the donors.  That said - we didn't hit the campaign mark.  We did, however, have one of our best fundraising years ever. 

Some board members may not know that before 2018, we had an annual 1MM gift from a donor.  Jerry Jones is an exceptional person who loved the mission of Seva that he developed his institutional mantra, So Hum (this means “I am” in Sanskrit).  All to say, when he passed, we did receive a legacy gift that has given the mission a cushion of failure. The annual monies went away. Since his passing, I've worked with Julie, and together we have replenished that annual gift and grew Annual giving by $2 million.   

• Total Revenue Target for 2019-2020 - $8.35 million (this is the annual 'get' + the campaign 'get')

• Annual Target for 2019-2020, $5.2 million and we secured as of this blog $4,723,490

• The C20/20 Campaign target for this year $2.5 million and we secured $476,510

• A total of $5.2 million as of this writing * this number does not include a new $400K bequest gift we anticipate this year, nor does it include the Payroll Protection Program loan/grant of $375K.

Since January 2019, the C20/20 has helped attract $626,510 with an additional new $5.6 million in future Legacy gifts * this is a result of a Bequest Challenge established during my second year on the job. 

What does this tell us?  First, the campaign, while sluggish, is helping to increase our ability to attract gifts into the mission.  Second, we are competing for more significant amounts.  Third, we will be successful at receiving large amounts and that we will fail bigger, too.

Currently, in our fund development pipeline, we have over $10 million in grants and applications that are under consideration in various foundations and prize categories.  

We continue to advance with high marks from technical judges in the MacArthur 100 Million & Change competition, and this week Charity Navigator shared this update where Seva Foundation is one of the 24 top-ranked MacArthur competitors with a 4.0 Star ranking.  Click here to see Seva's bold solution profiled as part of Charity Navigator

C20/20 campaign is officially in its hush phase.

No summer break for us! Kerry Kaplan, the C20/20 Chair, the Seva Development team and For Impact - the consulting firm hired to structure the campaign - worked tirelessly to outline our plan for this year.

You may wonder - what is a Hush phase of a campaign? It’s essentially ‘the worst kept secret’ - ever. During this time non profits will raise 30%-50% of the monies they need before they go public and formally announce the campaign.

As you can see from the graphic - our fund development goal for this year are ambitious.

2020 is a special window that won’t come around again - or at least not anytime soon. Most of you will remember The Lancet report from 2017 and how it alarmingly reported a tripling of treatable blindness by 2050. Partners across the Seva universe are clear - they are ready, able and willing to do more. They know the work demands that they do more. As a result, they will need more from Seva to do so.

Over the past 18 months we have engaged in close consultation with our program staff, our partners, and our donors. The result of all this work Seva’s comprehensive campaign that ‘bundles’ annual giving (for three years) + additional monies aimed at advancing the work in the following key areas that we have come to call our Drivers and they are:

• Technology

• Vision Centers

• Children

• Training and Job Creation

The official hush phase of the campaign is underway as we actively engage our top 100 donors to explore their level of support for our efforts to raise an additional $40MM to help more people see.

At the October board meeting members of the C20/20 committee and the staff will host a fun, interactive session where we will explore each board member’s participation in this campaign.