Thank you for sharing your part in this community story.
Thank you for sharing your part in this community story.
Author: Lindsey Linzer, VP of Community Investments, The Miami Foundation
Nonprofits across Miami are gearing up to participate in the biggest fundraising week of the year - Give Miami Day. But before you can begin planning for this annual fundraising campaign, you first must register to participate. We regularly get questions about why nonprofits must re-register every year, and curiosity about why the registration form gets longer each year. We want to bring you behind the curtain to help you better understand what this data enables for us at The Miami Foundation and for our community.
Plainly put, the data we collect as part of Give Miami Day is the most complete, richest source of data we have about our local Miami nonprofit community. It is a snapshot of the health of the 1,200+ most active nonprofits in our social sector. And because we’ve been collecting this data for 13 years now, we have a robust year-over-year view of how our nonprofit community has grown, where they are focused, which neighborhoods they are working in (and not working in), who the leaders are, and so much more. In the early years, we asked only simple questions about an organization’s budget and core focus areas, but as the effort has grown, so has our application.
We don’t ask additional questions just because we are curious. The responses to these questions are our fuel to go out to funders and raise more money in more targeted ways for our Miami nonprofit community. When we show donor partners that half of our local organizations have an operating budget of less than $250,000 – that information changes the way local funders think about grantmaking and capacity building. For example, we came to understand through the Give Miami Day registration data that 30% of our local organizations have almost no flexibility in their budgets because their funding is so restricted. In 2023, that prompted us to bring this data to our funding partner, the Frederick A. DeLuca Foundation, and reimagine with them our Community Grants program. We ultimately decided to shift all grants to general operating support because of this insight.
From the data, we also know that 71% of our local nonprofits have financial gaps, no assets other than an organizational checking account, and, on average, less than 6 months of cash reserves. Without a permanent endowment, reserve fund, or investment account, this means that if there is a major crisis, our nonprofits are not set up to be financially resilient. We use this data, along with the robust questions we ask about capacity-building needs, to inform our grant and bridge loan programs, as well as guide the additional training and resources we offer our local leaders throughout the year.
An example of this is the insight we gathered about the high percentage of nonprofits that have reimbursable grants. When an organization receives a reimbursable grant, they have to front the funding for their community programs and later get reimbursed by a grantmaker. We found out that nonprofits were taking out very expensive loans from banks to run their initiatives and would often have to wait three or more months to get repaid by the donor. We used this data to start pitching funders on an idea to close this gap, and we have been piloting an affordable, short-term, bridge-loan program for the last year that we are now working to bring to scale.
We have also have made it a top priority at The Miami Foundation to unlock this data for local and national funders, government partners, and nonprofits. This data belongs not just to The Miami Foundation, but to the entire Miami community. Each year, for the past three years, we have published multiple reports that dissect the data in ways that can help drive community-wide decision-making about priorities and approaches.
For example, a few years ago, we started asking questions about which organizations receive government funding. Partners like The Children’s Trust and Miami-Dade County have leveraged this information to provide enhanced capacity-building support, especially to their smallest nonprofit partners ahead of Give Miami Day.
The newest questions on this year’s registration form are about recent funding losses and physical space needs. We want to assess the magnitude of recent funding cuts across our community so we can understand which organizations and issue areas have been most impacted. With that knowledge, we can better target our giving, fundraising, and capacity-building support accordingly. Additionally, The Miami Foundation is expanding and moving to a new physical space next year that we are excited to activate and share with our entire nonprofit community, so you’ll find a series of questions that will help us learn about your needs, hopes, and dreams related to this shared space.
The Miami Foundation works hard to create conversations about the data we collect from both the registration form and from Give Miami Day itself, and it is something we hope to do more of in the future. One topic of conversation in most interest in recent years has been the disparities we see related to Black-led nonprofit organizations. They make up 22% of the participating organizations but only receive 12% of the funds. Our goal is not only to lift up these findings through events like our State of Black Philanthropy but also to understand why this is happening and the role we might be able to play in shifting donor behavior in the future.
These are just a few examples of the many ways, 365 days a year, that The Miami Foundation is leveraging the data gathered from Give Miami Day to lead important philanthropic decision-making. Our hope is that when our local nonprofit leaders complete the Give Miami Day registration form this year, they walk away optimistic, knowing that the important data points they shared will lift up opportunities for both their own organization and our entire local nonprofit sector.
Author: Lindsey Linzer, VP of Community Investments, The Miami Foundation
Nonprofits across Miami are gearing up to participate in the biggest fundraising week of the year - Give Miami Day. But before you can begin planning for this annual fundraising campaign, you first must register to participate. We regularly get questions about why nonprofits must re-register every year, and curiosity about why the registration form gets longer each year. We want to bring you behind the curtain to help you better understand what this data enables for us at The Miami Foundation and for our community.
Plainly put, the data we collect as part of Give Miami Day is the most complete, richest source of data we have about our local Miami nonprofit community. It is a snapshot of the health of the 1,200+ most active nonprofits in our social sector. And because we’ve been collecting this data for 13 years now, we have a robust year-over-year view of how our nonprofit community has grown, where they are focused, which neighborhoods they are working in (and not working in), who the leaders are, and so much more. In the early years, we asked only simple questions about an organization’s budget and core focus areas, but as the effort has grown, so has our application.
We don’t ask additional questions just because we are curious. The responses to these questions are our fuel to go out to funders and raise more money in more targeted ways for our Miami nonprofit community. When we show donor partners that half of our local organizations have an operating budget of less than $250,000 – that information changes the way local funders think about grantmaking and capacity building. For example, we came to understand through the Give Miami Day registration data that 30% of our local organizations have almost no flexibility in their budgets because their funding is so restricted. In 2023, that prompted us to bring this data to our funding partner, the Frederick A. DeLuca Foundation, and reimagine with them our Community Grants program. We ultimately decided to shift all grants to general operating support because of this insight.
From the data, we also know that 71% of our local nonprofits have financial gaps, no assets other than an organizational checking account, and, on average, less than 6 months of cash reserves. Without a permanent endowment, reserve fund, or investment account, this means that if there is a major crisis, our nonprofits are not set up to be financially resilient. We use this data, along with the robust questions we ask about capacity-building needs, to inform our grant and bridge loan programs, as well as guide the additional training and resources we offer our local leaders throughout the year.
An example of this is the insight we gathered about the high percentage of nonprofits that have reimbursable grants. When an organization receives a reimbursable grant, they have to front the funding for their community programs and later get reimbursed by a grantmaker. We found out that nonprofits were taking out very expensive loans from banks to run their initiatives and would often have to wait three or more months to get repaid by the donor. We used this data to start pitching funders on an idea to close this gap, and we have been piloting an affordable, short-term, bridge-loan program for the last year that we are now working to bring to scale.
We have also have made it a top priority at The Miami Foundation to unlock this data for local and national funders, government partners, and nonprofits. This data belongs not just to The Miami Foundation, but to the entire Miami community. Each year, for the past three years, we have published multiple reports that dissect the data in ways that can help drive community-wide decision-making about priorities and approaches.
For example, a few years ago, we started asking questions about which organizations receive government funding. Partners like The Children’s Trust and Miami-Dade County have leveraged this information to provide enhanced capacity-building support, especially to their smallest nonprofit partners ahead of Give Miami Day.
The newest questions on this year’s registration form are about recent funding losses and physical space needs. We want to assess the magnitude of recent funding cuts across our community so we can understand which organizations and issue areas have been most impacted. With that knowledge, we can better target our giving, fundraising, and capacity-building support accordingly. Additionally, The Miami Foundation is expanding and moving to a new physical space next year that we are excited to activate and share with our entire nonprofit community, so you’ll find a series of questions that will help us learn about your needs, hopes, and dreams related to this shared space.
The Miami Foundation works hard to create conversations about the data we collect from both the registration form and from Give Miami Day itself, and it is something we hope to do more of in the future. One topic of conversation in most interest in recent years has been the disparities we see related to Black-led nonprofit organizations. They make up 22% of the participating organizations but only receive 12% of the funds. Our goal is not only to lift up these findings through events like our State of Black Philanthropy but also to understand why this is happening and the role we might be able to play in shifting donor behavior in the future.
These are just a few examples of the many ways, 365 days a year, that The Miami Foundation is leveraging the data gathered from Give Miami Day to lead important philanthropic decision-making. Our hope is that when our local nonprofit leaders complete the Give Miami Day registration form this year, they walk away optimistic, knowing that the important data points they shared will lift up opportunities for both their own organization and our entire local nonprofit sector.