I was reading a comment to a recent entry on Boards over at Artful Manager where the writer pointed out that but for a dissenting voice, the public may never have learned about some of the biggest recent scandals involving non-profit mismanagement of funds (San Francisco, Capitol Area United Way)

After thinking about how a few jerks made the difficult task of fund raising more difficult, I started thinking about how arts organizations can show good faith with their donors and illustrate where the money went.

The big donors have concrete symbols like seats, lobbys and halls with their names emblazons which they can associate their donations. But for the people who give substantial portions of their disposable income but don’t quite rate architectural features, the physical connection becomes more difficult.

Sure, their name is in the program book, but it cost a couple cents to print and most folks will toss it away at the end of the night. If the donor has paid for admission to a performance or exhibit, it becomes difficult to grasp the abstract concept that the admission fee is only paying for the first 45 minutes of the evening and their donation combined with those of others is paying for the rest.

I was just curious to know if anyone has come across a novel approach to giving donors a better sense of what their money is doing. Something that just came to mind was borrowing on the whole adopt a child from the third world idea and having school kids that benefited from an outreach project write to specific donors.

Another alternative is to have an open books approach and mail home an annual report similar to the ones mutual funds send out outlining how the past season went with revenue statements and balance sheets. Actually, it would probably be even more impressive if you presented plan for the future season with the percentage of earned and unearned revenue you intended to devote to each show.

I imagine one might have to exercise some care if you were planning risker fare and had a chart showing that you were devoting a larger percentage of unearned revenue than earned based on the assumption fewer people would want to see it or would pay as much as other shows to see it. Donors may feel that most of their donation was going to a smut filled show and complain. Might be good to break out unearned into foundation, private, government and show it mostly as foundation.

Anyhow, as I said, if anyone has come across a good program that gives donors a real sense of the value of their contribution to the organization, let me know!