Limits of Charity : Even for the Affluent, the Cost of Giving May Be Too High

Elizabeth Glaser was more than a little anxious when she priced tickets to her first “A Time for Heroes” benefit for the Pediatric AIDS Foundation at $2,500 per family, or $1,000 per person. Many of the city’s moneyed elite who drive Jaguars, send their children to private schools and vacation in Aspen found the hefty price tag too steep.

“A lot of people said it was just too expensive for them,” says Glaser, co-founder of the foundation, who hiked ticket prices in hopes of raising $1 million. “They said they wanted to support the organization, but they couldn’t participate. We completely understood.”

Still, Glaser managed to attract 250 families who could afford the celebrity-packed carnival held in June at the gargantuan Beverly Hills mansion of producer Ted Field and his wife, Susie, and her judgment about the price paid off. The event raised $950,000 for the foundation.

Bargains are getting harder to find everywhere, and the charity circuit is no exception. These days, a $1,000-per-person benefit doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, and a $250-per-person ticket is considered a bargain. Anything below $200 is fast becoming an endangered species.

Like everything else, the cost of putting on an event, be it a small cocktail party or a dinner-dance for 1,000 people, has escalated. Ticket prices are reflecting that.

It’s all put a considerable strain on the budgets of even the most upwardly mobile Angelenos who regularly contribute to various nonprofit groups, political candidates and ballot measures. But even as they try to cut back, their mailboxes continue to overflow with invitations from various groups needing money.

The volume is daunting as well as confusing. The sheer number of nonprofit groups, such as child abuse centers, homeless shelters and AIDS organizations, has grown tremendously in the last five years. At the same time, most of these groups have found that government funding has been drastically cut.

In addition, philanthropists are being bombarded by organizations funding suddenly chic environmental issues, and politicians are pressuring their constituents as elections approach.

“We are being more selective about what we go to, without a doubt,” says Shelby Kaplan Sloan, chairman of the board of Tricap Corp., an investment firm, and chairman of the board of the Los Angeles Theatre Center. She estimates that she and her husband spend about $10,000 a year on tickets to parties for nonprofit groups and political candidates.

“I sit on several boards in the city, and I support all of them as much as I can. How do my husband and I decide what to go to? It’s a question of timing--when an event occurs--and then we have to reduce the numbers (of events) to something that’s manageable for our budget and our time. You have just so much time and so many resources, and it comes down to basic economics, how you’re going to allocate those scarce resources.”

Philanthropist Jane Nathanson believes it was Barbra Streisand’s 1986 benefit performance for Democratic senatorial candidates and the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee that, at $5,000 per couple, set a precedent for ultra-high ticket prices.

“It was exorbitant, but it was the most fantastic evening, and it changed people’s expectations,” she says. “After that, people said, ‘If they could do that, we could do $1,000 a plate.’

“Now,” she adds, “it’s commonplace. What you have to do is pick and choose what’s most important to you, number one. And if a close friend is involved in a charity, it becomes a situation of, if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

If that truly is the case, the city should be one long, very itchy conga line.

Take the upcoming Carousel of Hope ball to raise money for diabetes, slated for Oct. 26 at the Beverly Hilton. Chairing this mega-event are none other than society tycoons Barbara and Marvin Davis, who attend many events and contribute much money to numerous local causes.

Now it’s pay-back time.

All but 50 of the 950 tickets to the event, still months away, have been sold, according to Barbara Davis, without a single formal invitation having to be mailed. Tables are priced from $10,000 to $50,000; ticket prices are $2,000, $3,000 and $5,000 per couple. Davis hopes to raise $1.5 million for the Children’s Diabetes Foundation, which supports programs in health care and research at the Barbara Davis Center for Childhood Diabetes, and for the Los Angeles chapters of the American Diabetes Assn. and the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

“I think that if you participate in everybody else’s charities, they will participate in yours,” Davis says. “We try to participate in everything we can, whenever a friend is involved in something. I think when you have a personal request from someone and you know it means a lot to them, we go. It’s not only money, it’s giving of yourself. And the only thing I would ever ask anybody to buy tickets for is diabetes. This is my favorite charity, this is something I’m terribly passionate about.”

Still, even Davis acknowledges that “people can’t support everything. I think that people will have to very carefully choose what they’re going to support; the causes are terribly expensive. There was a time when things were not this costly. At the same time, I think these organizations have to ask ticket prices that are going to raise a sum that’s meaningful and going to help the cause.”

To maximize profits, Davis set ticket prices high and plans to hold auctions during the evening. Portions of the event have been underwritten, and special higher-priced tables have been sold to various sponsors.

“I know that tickets are expensive,” she explains, “so I wanted to give people something very special, more than they usually get.”

That “something very special” includes a gift bag for guests stocked with Revlon products, a commemorative silk scarf or necktie, a Cartier silver picture frame, a Mickey Mouse watch, a Judith Lieber key chain and more, all donated. Auction items include trips, designer gowns, jewelry, center court seats at Wimbledon, auto racing with Paul Newman and a walk-on part in the next John Landis film.

Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie, Liza Minnelli and Placido Domingo are slated to perform; George Schlatter will produce the show and Merv Griffin will emcee.

But not all groups have the pull of Barbara and Marvin Davis, nor can they attract an A-list celebrity contingent.

The Pacific Asia Museum, now planning its upcoming annual Festival of the Autumn Moon dinner/auction, finds it hard to get underwriting from the business community “because we’re too small,” according to Gisele Beugelmans, chairman of the event.

“There’s a lot of competition, and we have limited visibility,” she explains. “Plus, the price of everything has gone up. The overhead is so much.”

Although some wanted to raise ticket prices, the cost was kept at $175 for the third year in a row; Beugelmans hopes the auction will supplement the $150,000 (approximately one-sixth of the museum’s budget) they hope to raise through the dinner.

Still, she won’t call in favors from friends to fill seats in the tented party adjacent to the museum.

“I don’t want to deal,” she says. “If people come it’s because they want to, I don’t want them to feel obliged.”

The Los Angeles Theater Center is starting from scratch, in a sense, when it holds its first large benefit dinner and auction in September in celebration of its fifth anniversary.

Tickets are $250 per person, and according to Shelby Kaplan Sloan, “We made a real conscious decision from the beginning that we would try not to come out with a high-priced event, but one that would enable us to draw a wider cross-section of people. That’s in keeping with the philosophy of the theater.

“We’ll target mostly people we know for our first event, and we’re going to build very modestly this year,” she says, outlining her strategy to raise from $150,000 to $250,000 from the dinner.

But times are undeniably tough.

“Everything has gone up,” says event planner Judy Levy of Levy, Pazanti and Associates. “The hotel, the caterer--everything. It’s all escalated with inflation. And because of cutbacks in grants,” she adds, “foundations have had to go more to the private sector for funding. Also, one of the reasons people are charging more money for tickets is that they read about other fund-raisers, and they say, ‘If they’re charging that much, so will we.’ It’s not that they’re ripping anybody off, but they have to be competitive. And if the going rate is $250, you don’t want to price below that.”

Despite this somewhat bleak picture, Levy says some groups still are able to make a tidy profit. The Lupus Foundation of America, a relatively unknown organization raising money for disease research and education, held its first fund-raiser last spring and netted more than $500,000. They were helped by high-profile honorees (Richard and Jeramie Dreyfuss) and generous underwriters.

Underwriting has become more important as parties have gotten more expensive. The cost of a typical dinner for a few hundred at a Beverly Hills hotel ballroom--complete with cocktail reception, decorations and entertainment--can run high as $150,000, an amount that can take a big chunk out of the proceeds.

But as corporations, foundations and wealthy individuals begin to feel the crush of funding requests from so many nonprofit organizations, event planners have had to look for other ways to subsidize their parties.

Some throw in an auction or raffle as part of the evening’s entertainment. Another technique is to ask individuals and companies to underwrite portions of the event, such as centerpieces, entertainment, invitations and food. Others offer special tables at double or triple their face value, throwing in such added attractions as special recognition in the program and admittance to a VIP reception.

The last tactic has worked for several organizations, including AIDS Project Los Angeles.

“People are drawing a lot of attention to themselves when they give a gift like that (a special, high priced table),” says Bill Jones, APLA’s director of development. “Gifts of that size have been given before, but they were not normally given in conjunction with events.”

APLA’s fifth annual Commitment to Life benefit Sept. 7 will honor Madonna, artist David Hockney and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles). The $500-per-person ticket price, says Jones, was arrived at “to enable us to make the most amount of money, but not be so high that we would have a half-empty ballroom. For some people it doesn’t make a difference if the tickets are $300 or $500; others have to cut back on the number of benefits they attend because prices have risen. Instead of going to three APLA benefits a year, maybe they just go to one.”

Jones added that the organization holds 10 to 12 events a year, some priced as low as $50 per person, to attract more of the community.

Will ticket prices continue to creep up as costs escalate and funding resources dwindle?

“I’m no longer shocked when I see a $1,000 price tag,” says Jane Nathanson. “I get so many in the mail that it’s no longer just for an extraordinary event. You get immune to it, and then you get a little shocked at the next higher price. But the economy in general has taken a bit of a nose dive, and I think this is going to be a different decade than the previous one of freewheeling glitz. We might even see ticket prices going down.”