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1 R Special Advertising Section | Sunday, April 25, 2021 17 GIVING GUIDE By Paul Sullivan The New York Times The annual gala to benefit a nonprofit group, even one with a good cause? Feels rather old-fashioned. Those glossy annual reports? The money could be better spent. And, please, no ge- neric requests for money. At least that’s how a growing number of the wealthy feel about their relationships with the nonprofit organizations that are seeking their donations, according to a new report, “Transforming Partnerships With Major Donors,” by the Leadership Story Lab, which works with companies and nonprofit organizations on their messaging. The report Raising money for a nonprofit? Try a personalized approach found that the wealthy would prefer that nonprofit groups updated their ap- proaches and made their pitches more personalized. The report looks at three areas where small changes by gift officers could reap large benefits for their “Many nonprof- its have a kind of salesman- ship that needs to go away,” said Joe Pulizzi, who used his money to create a philanthropic organization in Cleveland with his wife. A grow- ing number of wealthy donors would prefer that nonprofit groups update their approaches and make their pitches more personalized, a new report says. ANGELO MERENDINO / THE NEW YORK TIMES nonprofit organizations. It aims to show how many self-made givers are driven less by a need for public recognition than by a desire to solve a problem. In fact, the report found that too much public recognition might turn off certain donors. Joe Pulizzi, a market- ing and communications entrepreneur in Cleveland, is typical of the wealthy donors who have become disillusioned with the tradi- tional ways that nonprofit groups interact with them. He and his wife, Pam, have a son with autism who benefited from intensive speech therapy, and they wanted their money to go to families that couldn’t afford speech therapy when insurance wouldn’t cover the costs or covered them only sparingly. Pulizzi said they were invited to galas, which they considered a waste of money. One organization asked him to join its board, which he did, but he didn’t like what he saw. There was nothing illegal, he said. It was just that too much of the donated money, in his opinion, was paying down debt and covering signifi- cant overhead. “When it came time to spending a dollar and see- ing all the need out there, I didn’t feel comfort- able sitting on the board knowing what I knew,” Pulizzi said. So in 2014, the couple created the Orange Effect Foundation, which pays the cost of speech therapy for about 200 children on the autism spectrum. Two years later, the couple sold their company, the Con- tent Marketing Institute, for $17.6 million. Esther Choy, the presi- See Donations, page 19 F U N C T I O N | I N D E P E N D E N C E | H O P E Take a virtual tour youtube.com/watch?v=VKfqgk3mtbw Maximizing independence for those navigating paralysis & neurological movement disorders S upport Pushing Boundarie s pushing-boundaries.org