Greetings!

 

It has been quite a while since I worked at the Museum of Science in Boston and briefly enjoyed participating in this forum.  After several years of venturing into development shops in higher education, and now that I’ve begun working for another great museum organization, I’m trying to take some of what I’ve learned about the matching gift revenue stream and apply it to this non-traditional academic environment.  Educational institutions have long enjoyed the greatest muscle in the fight for corporate matching funds with their natural constituency pools (as well as the fact that many matching programs will still only match to academic institutions).  Thankfully, however, more and more corporate matching programs have broadened the match parameters to include the rest of the nonprofit world.  The way I figure it, the academic institutions have those donor pools by default while the rest of the nonprofit world benefits from those who choose to align themselves and offer their support based on interest and passion so we might as well start maximizing that interest as best we can! 

 

A Matching Gifts Practices survey was posted in October of 2005 on SupportingAdvancement.com. Results were compiled and presented last year at both at the CASE Matching Gifts Symposium in Dallas and the CASE Sr. Advancement Services Professionals conference in Baltimore. The feedback on this was all very good and now we’re hoping to broaden the impact of more current results.  We’ve revised and upgraded the survey to allow a greater depth and breadth of details for analysis. We’ll be comparing and contrasting the information to last year’s survey with the intent of providing ideas on how we can all make our matching gifts practices more effective.  It should take less than 10 minutes to complete, so it is our hope that even if you are not involved in this aspect of your museum operations you’ll consider forwarding this to an appropriate contact in your fundraising operation to share your pertinent stats.

 

To find the survey, go to www.SupportingAdvancement.com and select the link in the box at the upper right hand corner of the home page.  Here is a TinyURL link, too:

 

http://tinyurl.com/yumqva

The initial results will be presented at the CASE Matching Gifts Symposium in Seattle after which the results will be published on SupportingAdvancement.com.  If we get enough feedback from other than traditional academic institutions, we might have sufficient data to segment the analysis and target the information better for other nonprofits to use, as well. 

 

With best regards and thanks in advance to any institutions which take part in this survey,

 

Amy

 

Chair-Elect, CASE Matching Gifts Advisory Council

 

Amy J. Phillips

Gift Registrar

Smithsonian Institution

1000 Jefferson Drive SW, 4th Floor

Washington, DC 20013-7012

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202-633-5072 (Phone)

202-786-2516 (Fax)

Mail to:  PO Box 37012, MRC-035

              Washington, DC 20560-0035

 

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