Most fundraisers leave their jobs within two years — and often change sectors with each new position. Tona Simpson, however, has been with Ducks Unlimited for 17 years.
Now the managing director of foundation relations for the Memphis, Tennessee-based conservation group, Simpson has an especially long-term perspective on the fast-changing environmental fundraising landscape. What she sees right now is a field rich with both uncertainty and possibility.
“Everything is in sort of a flux. There’s a lot of opportunities coming on board,” Simpson said. “I think there are a lot of people trying to figure out, ‘What is our best place in this space?’” she added.
That was a common perspective across more than a half-dozen conversations I had with fundraisers and leaders at conservation, pollution and agriculture organizations about the state of fundraising in their fields. The discussions were part of a soon-to-be-published IP State of American Philanthropy report on U.S. grantmaking in those three areas.
Below, I’ve detailed the major shifts those fundraisers highlighted, as well as their perspectives on how donor-advised funds, intermediaries and other factors have shaped the development landscape.
Shifts in foundation priorities
More than any other shift, fundraisers emphasized that foundations are putting a new focus on how grantees can support diversity, equity and inclusion, even though some foundations are only starting on that journey themselves. This lens reflects the gradual implementation of pledges foundations made after the murder of George Floyd and subsequent uprisings, as IP recently covered in depth.
For instance, Lee Bodner, president of the New Venture Fund, said that the funding intermediary’s portfolio once largely focused on federal policy and traditional conservation and environmental goals. That’s changed. The fund’s “biggest projects, our most exciting projects” are mostly centered on equity, he said.
Conservation funders are increasingly seeking direct relationships with grassroots and movement organizations focused on equity, Bodner said. Diane Regas, president and CEO of the Trust for Public Land, sees an even broader trend of foundations looking to fund community groups directly.
Along with equity, climate change has become a dominant frame for fundraisers across these areas. For instance, most funders in the pollution space are primarily focused on climate change, rather than the air pollution and public health concerns that brought foundations to the space in the past, even if such concerns can result in similar work, said Joseph Otis Minott, executive director and chief counsel of the Pennsylvania-based Clean Air Council.
In the conservation arena, some fundraisers reported less support for traditional forms of conservation, particularly land acquisition, with many foundations shifting focus to climate change and energy systems, or changing strategies to focus on policy advocacy.
This climate focus may grow further. With a new climate bill authorizing hundreds of billions of dollars of new federal investments, foundations are likely to try to influence that spending, continuing a longer-term trend of funders looking to leverage other sources of funding through their grantmaking, Bodner said.
Amid those shifts, upheaval around the globe has dampened giving in some quarters. The last few years have seen a global pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, widespread inflation and economic turmoil, a growing list of climate-fueled catastrophes, and political uncertainty in major donor nations like the United States and the U.K., among other challenges.
“We do see some folks holding tight right now,” said Clare Bland, global director of philanthropy for the Good Food Institute. However, the situation may change by the end of the year, she added.
What role are donor-advised funds playing?
Fundraisers from across the sectors I covered said support from donor-advised funds (DAFs) has grown tremendously. The Clean Air Council, for instance, has seen its DAF donations double in the last two years, according to Minott.
DAF windfalls have helped groups get funding for work that foundations typically do not support, such as more contentious forms of advocacy. They’ve also helped some fundraisers broaden who they can reach, sometimes with little or no work required. “They’re able to help us reach a larger and more diverse donor pool,” Regas said.
Yet along with appreciation, most expressed some concerns about how DAFs operate. With checks typically coming straight from massive sponsor organizations like Fidelity Charitable, often with no contact information available for the donors, a foremost concern for fundraisers is their inability to follow up with new benefactors personally.
“As a front-line fundraiser, I’m seeking to build a personal, warm, dynamic, transparent partnership with donors and potential supporters,” said Bland of GFI. “Working through the donor-advised fund staff… sometimes doesn’t give us quite the same ability to build that kind of meaningful partnership.”
Others cited more big-picture concerns. Donors earn an immediate tax break for gifts to a DAF, but unlike with a foundation, there is no minimum distribution requirement. Even though industry statistics have shown that on average, DAFs distribute a higher percentage of their assets than foundations, critics say high levels of giving by some may hide stockpiling by others. “There’s a lot of money going into these large donor-advised funds, and the money is not necessarily getting back out,” Simpson said.
How are major donors shaping the space?
Ballooning billionaire wealth, particularly in the technology sector, has been a boon for many conservation, pollution and agriculture-focused organizations. Groups like the Clean Air Task Force have benefited from an influx of wealthy entrepreneurs, often from technology backgrounds, who are passionate about the issues and interested in digging into the nitty-gritty details of prospective grantees’ programs.
Often, these donors are effective altruists, following the philosophy and giving approach advocated by writer and activist Peter Singer. These philanthropists are creating a new generation of major groups, such as the Good Food Institute, which has grown from two people in 2016 to a staff of 150, coordinating with a globe-spanning network of partners.
At the same time, a focus on metrics among this class of donors means relationships are valued less than results. “You have to earn your bread every day and show performance,” said Armond Cohen, co-founder and president of Clean Air Task Force. “It’s actually a great discipline, but the fundraising… has to be much more robust.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with his $10 billion, climate-focused Bezos Earth Fund, is one of several new, widely known mega-donors that have sent conservation, pollution and agriculture fundraisers scrambling to be noticed. “When you have somebody with that amount of money, there’s going to be a lot of ripple effects,” Simpson said. “Every conservation board of directors went to their fundraising staff and said, ‘How do we get a piece of that?’”
As in other fields, fundraisers’ leading concern about certain mega-donors, whether it’s Bezos, MacKenzie Scott, Laurene Powell Jobs or whoever else, is that there’s often no public avenue through which organizations can introduce themselves, let alone make a pitch. Sometimes, there isn’t even a website or any other guide — other than their publicized funding — to illuminate the donor’s priorities.
While some big donors look around the globe for potential causes to support, major donors can also be an important source of support for local projects in this space. Regas mentioned a case where a donor funded a “Central Park” for Bozeman, Montana, where visitors can learn to fly fish. These projects can support equity and act as models to be scaled nationally, but they start at home.
“One thing that really distinguishes some of the individual donors, I would say, is the passion for making their own community or their own state better,” said Regas. “It’s not just ethereal policy that everyone knows is important but you can’t see and touch.”
The growing role of intermediaries
Several sources highlighted that fiscal sponsorship has become dramatically more common in environmental philanthropy over the last five to 10 years. Projects like the Environmental Justice Data Fund and the Campaign for Nature have turned to groups such as the New Venture Fund and the Resources Legacy Fund, respectively, for fiscal sponsorship support.
But fiscal sponsorship is only one aspect of such groups’ role. Funders use intermediaries for a variety of reasons, including ease of multi-funder collaboration, reputational distance for experimental projects, incubation services for new social entrepreneurs, and expertise in a particular place or region.
“The beauty of intermediaries and fiscal sponsorships is that we can do a lot of different things,” said Bodner of the New Venture Fund, one of the field’s biggest operations.
At the same time, as with DAFs, some fundraisers say intermediaries can complicate outreach. Minott recalled coming across foundations whose missions seemed like a perfect fit for his organization, only to be told that all such funding is channeled through an intermediary.
Others find certain intermediaries opaque. “Sometimes, you don’t know exactly who you’re talking to or what mission you should be dealing with,” Simpson said.
Internal challenges and what’s ahead
One of the perennial challenges of raising money has not changed: It’s hard to recruit talented, experienced fundraisers. And turnover can be high. Organizations that have successfully onboarded and retained good fundraisers say an openness to remote work and nontraditional candidates has been key.
Another challenge for some organizations — also not unique to these fields — is deciding when to use development specialists and when to involve program staff. The latter have the deepest expertise, but fundraising time is time spent not doing the actual work. “That tension is what we’re trying to grapple with right now,” said Matt Walker, advocacy director at Clean Air Council.
Despite the challenges, many of the organizations I spoke with are growing their fundraising teams. Clean Air Task Force’s development department has expanded from one person to 11 staffers, while Ducks Unlimited is looking to hire 10 new fundraisers. Others are taking first steps, like the Resources Legacy Fund, which is bringing on its first-ever development director.
In a time of uncertainty, Simpson at Ducks Unlimited isn’t alone in seeing possibilities, or at least a need to make a more vocal case for funding. “What seems like maybe a negative storm of events can be a positive storm of events,” she said. “Natural disasters bring a lot of awareness to some of the things that we could be doing better” as a society to ensure a better future. “I see that as a strong opportunity.”
Correction: The California 30x30 Initiative is an actively managed project of the Resources Legacy Fund. A prior version of this article misidentified it as a fiscally sponsored project.