In the United States, Charity Begins (and Sometimes Remains) at Home

On paper, the pitch looked perfect: Use the Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, to raise money to build playgrounds for children in Sarajevo, which had hosted the Games in happier times.

The result was a 90-second television spot that wove scenes of the Sarajevo Olympics with gut-wrenching images from the war that came later. Actress Sigourney Weaver donated a plaintive narration.

The commercial, which was bankrolled by John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co., aired during the opening ceremonies, which were seen by an estimated 56 million viewers in the United States. Hundreds of operators were standing by. They took in a grand total of 145 calls.

“It was kind of shocking for us that millions and millions of people were seeing this commercial and only [145] gave us a call,” said Jules Hersman, spokeswoman for the American Refugee Committee, which runs the playground program in the Bosnian capital.

Suffering overseas has become a tough sell in this country, particularly when there isn’t a compelling crisis erupting to act as a lightning rod for donations. Although media tycoon Ted Turner grabbed headlines last year when he said he would donate $1 billion to U.N. humanitarian programs--about half of what all Americans gave to international concerns the year before--most people believe charity begins at home.

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According to Giving USA, a publication that tracks trends in donations, international giving fell in 1995 and 1996 during a period when virtually every other category of domestic contributions went up. Although big relief agencies such as CARE USA say they are hitting or exceeding fund-raising targets, they have to work harder and more creatively to do it.

CARE, which has a direct-mail base of donors whose median age is now 70, is trying to target younger people. Like other charities, it’s also trying to broaden the diversity of its donors.

“Bringing home to Americans an international concern is one of the toughest things we face,” said Kerry Semple, director of programs for CARE USA. “It’s not your mom dying of cancer.”

Charities also are increasingly targeting ethnic groups, who may have more of an interest in donating money to an ancestral land. World Vision has for several years aimed ads at Latinos in the United States.

“We raised $25 million a year from the Hispanic population for our clients,” said Tom Harrison of Russ Reid Co., a Pasadena advertising firm that handles marketing for charitable groups, including World Vision. “Ten years ago, that would have been zero.”

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Sarajevo is, of course, an old story for an American public that already has donated an army to help end the Bosnian war. Yet the numbed response from such a vast viewing audience demonstrates the transitory nature of fund-raising in general--and how the wrong pitch at the wrong time can leave checkbooks inexplicably closed.

“Funders are fickle. What happened to the homeless?” asked Darlene Midlang, director of planning for New York-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service.

There are 1.1 million charities in this country, and 30,000 new ones are formed each year, said Dan Langan of the National Charities Information Bureau, a New York-based watchdog group.

They compete for the same small donors, the same foundation and government grants, the same small galaxy of millionaires who routinely dash off six-figure checks to the charity of their choice.

Cuts in domestic welfare spending and other government social programs have been a boost to the fund-raising efforts of domestic charities at the expense of their globally tuned counterparts, some experts believe.

“There’s a feeling that the needs are greater here,” said Toni Goodale, a New York fund-raising consultant and former Ford Foundation executive.

Others disagree. Langan thinks the rise in workfare and the plunge in unemployment may convince Americans that the poor now have jobs and no longer need help, even though many of those jobs don’t pay enough to get by.

In fact, few people who follow the ebb and flow of charitable giving in this country can agree on any sort of trend. However, many believe that international concerns are overdue for a bump, in part because of the publicity from the contributions made in the last year by Turner, currency trader George Soros and other billionaires.

Yet many charities are admittedly terrified of the potential fallout from a recent Chicago Tribune investigation of Save the Children and three other charities that solicit money so people can sponsor a needy child overseas. The paper found instances in which the children in question never benefited from the contributions and, in some cases, had been dead a long time.

The industrywide estimates for how much Americans gave to charity in 1997 won’t be available until May, after Giving USA tallies the numbers. But editor Ann E. Kaplan said she wouldn’t be surprised to see the contributions for international causes climb after two years of declines.

Still, the total will no doubt be comparatively minuscule. The roughly $2 billion that Americans spend on causes abroad every year represents only 1.3% of the $150 billion in total charitable donations made in this country.

Some humanitarian groups are trying to do a better job of putting a human face on foreign crises.

Jesuit Refugee Services has begun experimental meet-a-refugee programs at U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service detention centers around New York and in Los Angeles. The goal is to find a way to get average citizens to think of refugees as asylum-seekers, not illegal immigrants.

Despite publicity in local papers, the Jesuits managed to find only nine people willing to visit the INS detention center in Elizabeth, N.J., and share an hour or two with a refugee.

“If we’re a nation of immigrants, why do we not care about the rest of the world?” asked a frustrated Will Coley. Although he works for a Roman Catholic agency, Coley has begun canvassing Protestant congregations to get the word out.

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One of his successes was Johanna Cooper, who recently slipped into a chair inside stall No. 7 and stared through the plexiglass at prisoner No. 970084, a 32-year-old asylum-seeker named Zheng Deming. Talking by telephone, she told him about her job with an employment agency in New Jersey. He told her about his three attempts to slip into the United States, his two stabs at suicide, his 14 months in custody, the wife and child he left in China.

“I don’t know if I can do anything for him,” Cooper said. “I ask myself ‘Why am I coming?’ I tend to want to believe people. But they are so desperate. I guess I’d want to do more for people who I’m sure have a legitimate need.”

Humanitarian groups say donors increasingly feel the same way.

“Our research shows people are motivated if [a cause] is efficient and impactful and personally moves them,” said Kathy Doherty, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta-based CARE. “The last one is the tricky part.”

Typically, 90% of contributions in any charitable effort come from 10% to 15% of the donors, said fund-raising consultant Goodale.

Aid groups generally rely on varying combinations of grants from the government, nonprofit foundations, corporations and individual donors. Semple said the big three humanitarian groups, CARE, World Vision and the United Nations Children’s Fund, have been able to expand or maintain fund-raising in an era when most other groups are struggling.

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Yet it’s difficult. CARE is behind in its targets this year, she said. There are no quick fixes; it costs $1.50 to get that first dollar from a new donor. That donor must be kept in the fold for a long time before he or she pays dividends.

It’s illustrative of the business of raising money for worthy causes that the Sarajevo spot is being considered a rousing success by the Minneapolis-based American Refugee Committee.

Hersman said the commercial ran daily during CNN and TNT’s daytime Olympic coverage and averaged only about 25 callers per day. It was back on CBS for the closing ceremonies, during which it pulled in only 91 calls. While it was running, Hersman said, it raised about $25,000 in donations. Yet in the end, she said John Hancock contributed a six-figure amount--a huge influx of cash for a small relief agency.

“We didn’t look at it as a failure at all,” she said. “The apathy of the American public, that’s another story we have to deal with.”

People who follow fund-raising are flummoxed by the lack of response to something that reached so many homes. Some analysts suggested it was part of a broader pattern. A study conducted by the University of Maryland’s Center for International and Security Studies found that most Americans generally assumed the United States was contributing more foreign aid than it actually was. And when they found out how little it was, they approved of giving more.

“I think people have the attitude that the U.S. has already done too much” in Bosnia, said Steven Kull, coauthor of the study. “It’s like, ‘I gave at the office.’ ”