Bar Bar a P. Fer na ndez/The new Yor k Times/r edux
Jorge M. Pérez, a real-estate developer, pledged $30-million to the
Miami Art Museum to help it construct a new building.
Bigger Fundraising Operations Tend
to Rake in Bigger Gifts, Say Experts
ago, tries to accomplish this by inviting would-be donors on home-building
projects, where they hammer shingles
and lay bricks alongside the low-income
families who will live in those homes.
Continued from Page 6
Fundraisers’ Influence
Fundraisers and philanthropy gurus
warn, however, that the goal should be
more total giving, not redistribution of
the gifts currently being made.
“I hate to see this get pitted as an either/or discussion,” says Albert R. Checcio, senior vice president for advance-
Donors “will do
what’s in their
enlightened self-interest
and in
their heart.”
The next time Mr. Levin visited, he
asked for financial support of an engineering school. An engineering major
who believes that people with technical skills create businesses and jobs,
Mr. Malone was intrigued. Talks with
a fundraiser convinced him that Yale
would use his gift wisely: The institution didn’t have unrealistic ideas about
becoming “another MIT,” says Mr.
Malone. And it had a plan to integrate
engineering and medical disciplines.
Of course, Mr. Levin and Yale were
tapping into the right giving vein with
Mr. Malone, not trying to create a whole
new one.
Donors, says Mr. Malone, “will do
what’s in their enlightened self-interest
and in their heart.”
Caroline Bermudez contributed to this
article
On Mega Pledges From Years Past,
Donors Made Big Payments in 2011
SOME of America’s biggest chari- table donors don’t appear on the current Philanthropy 50
even though they were still writing big checks to charity. The list
doesn’t include people who are paying off pledges made in previous
years, and in 2011 several of the nation’s big donors were busy making
payments, not new commitments.
Among those philanthropists are
Warren E. Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Ted Turner.
Mr. Buffett, an investor, gave
19,344,522 shares of Berkshire Hathaway class “B” stock, worth nearly $1.5-billion in 2011, to the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation. The donation was the most recent payment
on the pledge of 10 million shares
Mr. Buffett made to the Gates foundation in 2006.
However, in January 2010, the
company split each class “B” share
into 50 new shares. According to the
Gates foundation, the stock split did
not affect the value of Mr. Buffet’s
gift, and his original pledge of 10
million shares converted to 500 million shares after the stock split.
Including his 2011 payment,
Mr. Buffett has given the foundation a total of 132,454,052 shares
of stock (reflecting the split), worth
more than $9.5-billion. He has
367,545,948 shares left to pay to
fulfill his pledge.
Last year Mr. Buffett also made
payments on additional commitments he had made in 2006. He
gave 1,934,452 shares of Berkshire
Hathaway class “B” stock, worth
$148-million, to the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which is
named for his first wife; and he
gave 677,056 shares of the stock,
worth $51.8-million, to each of his
three children’s foundations. He
Cour Tes YoFTheBill& melindaGa TesFounda Tion
has promised to give a total of about
$1.3-billion apiece to those foundations.
Meanwhile, Mr. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, and his wife, Melinda, gave approximately $67.9-
million in 2011 toward the roughly $3.3-billion pledge the couple
made to their foundation in 2004.
The couple has paid a total of more
than $2.8-billion toward the 2004
commitment and have about $500-
million remaining to pay on that
pledge.
Another big donor, Mr. Turner, gave $50-million to the United
Nations Foundation and the Better World Fund in 2011. Mr. Turner made the donation through his
Turner Global Foundation, which
was established in 2004. The grant
was payment toward a $1-billion
pledge the philanthropist made in
1997 to establish the United Nations Foundation and the Better
World Fund.
To date, the media mogul has paid
slightly more than $900-million toward the pledge.
—MARIADIMENTO
ment at the University of Southern
California, which won two gifts of more
than $100-million last year from Phi-
lanthropy 50 donors toward a $6-billion
campaign. “There are so many worthy
organizations.”
Mr. Checcio also notes that even a
fleet of the world’s best fundraisers can’t
convince donors to support projects they
don’t care about: “Donors give to what
they’re interested in, period.”
And yet savvy charity leaders and
smart fundraisers do wield influence.
Take Mr. Malone’s route to becoming a
Yale donor whose support thus far has
totaled $80-million.
“The first time Yale hit me up for a
contribution, I scratched my head and
said, ‘Yale’s got plenty of money,’” recalls Mr. Malone, a graduate of the college. That was in the mid-1990s, and
Yale’s president, Richard C. Levin, had
visited Mr. Malone to ask for money to
start a business school.
The proposal fell on the wrong set
of ears. Mr. Malone, a libertarian and
free-market supporter, says he told the
university chief: “How can you have a
business school if you don’t believe in
capitalism?”
How The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 50 Survey Was Compiled
By Maria Di Mento
The 12th annual Philanthropy 50,
The Chronicle’s list of America’s most
generous donors, is based on gifts and
pledges to nonprofit organizations of
cash and stock and, in one case, an
art collection. To compile the list, The
Chronicle sought information from
wealthy people and many of America’s
biggest nonprofits.
Although The Chronicle attempted
to find all information about large contributions made by individuals in 2011,
not all donors disclose details about
their charitable donations publicly; they
are not required by law to do so. Gifts
that donors made from their family
foundations were not counted to avoid
including them twice—when the donor
gave the money to the foundation and
when the donor selected a beneficiary
for the money.
The Chronicle counted only those
gifts that donors made to organizations
with charity or foundation status un-
der the Internal Revenue Service code.
Donors are not allowed to claim chari-
table deductions on their income taxes
for gifts to other types of tax-exempt
groups, even if they were made to help
others.
Pledge Payments
The list also does not include payments that donors made on pledges
announced in previous years, to avoid
counting the same gifts twice. As a
result, the most recent Philanthropy
50 list does not include some of last
year’s largest donations, because they
were given as payments on pledges announced in previous years or because
it is unclear if the money was a new
gift or a payment on a past pledge. (For
more about some of those gifts, see article above.)
Two wealthy Americans who received
attention for gifts last year are also not
on the list:
ny, gave the majority of his company’s
stock to the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Mr. Bose gave the stock in
the form of non-voting shares and stip-
ulated that the university cannot sell
the shares. Officials at MIT said they
could not place a dollar value on the
gift, primarily because the business is
not a publicly traded company and part
of the agreement with the donor states
that financial figures will be kept con-
fidential. A spokeswoman for the com-
pany said annual sales for 2011 were
$2.5-billion.
The Philanthropy 50 report of 2011
was compiled by Maria Di Mento, with
assistance from Caroline Bermudez and
Caroline Preston.
