Challenging year for charities: What's changing about how we give?

In the past week alone, three Waterloo Region charities have made headlines for issues that suggest fundraising difficulties.

First, there’s HopeSpring, the cancer support centre which was in the midst of a last-ditch fundraising campaign.

After initially announcing that they would stop offering services as of the end of February, officials with that organization then said they could buy themselves another year if they managed to raise $400,000 in less than two weeks.

With a few hours to go in that campaign, the organization was still about $100,000 short.

As donated dollars flowed into HopeSpring, the United Way Kitchener Waterloo & Area announced that they would be laying off four full-time staff members due to revenue falling below expectations.

Kitchener-based Ray of Hope also voiced concern about fundraising, saying its annual Coldest Night of the Year walk would fall short of the $200,000 goal set after last year’s walk brought in a similar amount.

Harry Whyte, the organization’s CEO, says raising $200,000 was always a “really lofty goal,” and the amount raised this year still represents the second-highest on total for the event.

“In many respects, we didn’t understand why we had such a big boost last year, but we thought ‘Let’s see if it will happen again,’” he said.

Prior to 2016, the walk had been bringing in closer to $150,000 per year. Many of Ray of Hope’s services are funded by governments, but money raised through the community is necessary to keep operating the organization’s community centre and refugee services.

Add it all up, and it seems to be a rough time to be a charity in Waterloo Region.

Linda Maxwell, HopeSpring’s program and volunteer manager, says HopeSpring’s difficult is far from unique.

“We see a lot of charities that are amalgamating because of the same issues that we are having,” she said.

That’s the same approach taken by the United Way, which is merging its two Waterloo Region branches this spring.

Data from Statistics Canada, however, doesn’t seem to bear out the theory that people are becoming less charitable.

According to information compiled from 2015 tax returns, about 86,000 people in the Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo census metropolitan area reported charitable donations.

That number represents 23.7 per cent of all local residents who filed tax returns. It’s also a slight increase over the number of people who reported making donations in 2014.

Between them, those 86,000 people reported making nearly $160 million worth of charitable donations – an increase of more than four per cent over the previous year.

Whyte says that in his experience at Ray of Hope, it’s not that people are less giving than in the past – it’s that the giving isn’t happening in exactly the same ways as it used to.

For one things, he says, capital campaigns – where a specific amount of donations is sought for a specific project or piece of infrastructure – often meet with success.

At Ray of Hope, for example, emails were sent out last December asking previous donors for $12,000 that would be put toward new ovens for the organization’s community centre. That amount and more was raised in less than a week.

“The community can kind of rally around that … and you can raise a significant of money,” Whyte said.

“It’s much harder to go … ‘It’s going to cost us $500,000 a year to do what we do. Can you just contribute to that everyday cost of operating?’”

To get backers for that sort of funding, Whyte says, charities are increasingly looking at building relationships with people and organizations that “really get what you’re about and want to support that type of work in the community.”

The decline of the region’s manufacturing sector and emergence of a more high-tech economy also pose problems for charities.

Companies that used to offer their employees automatic payroll deductions for charitable causes have disappeared, and newer employers may not offer the same sort of programs.

Whyte says the region’s charities have recently started trying to engage the tech sector more, trying to find ways to make charity part of the “culture” at those organizations as well.

With reporting by Carina Sledz