If it's not a cost, it's an allocation

By Paul Haist

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The Jewish Federation of Greater Portland raised $4,853,583 in its most recent fund-raising cycle.

That total includes $4,243,583 raised in the regular JFGP Annual Campaign—up $148,583 or 3.6 percent from the previous year—and another $658,292 in the Israel Emergency Campaign to help Israel address needs arising from last year's conflict in Lebanon.

Federation administrative costs and campaign operating costs totaled $764,013 for the just-ended fiscal year. That figure constitutes the cost of federation operations for the 12 months of the fiscal year. For the most recent campaign, expenses amounted to 15.6 percent of total campaign revenue.

"We are proud that our overhead expenses are significantly low when compared to other philanthropic organizations," said JFGP Campaign Director and Associate Executive Vice President Laurie Rogoway.

In his 1999 book "Fund-Raising: Evaluating and Managing the Fund Development Process," James Greenfield reports that "the overall national average cost to raise a dollar is 20 cents," that is, the national average overhead for fund-raising organizations is 20 percent of their revenue, and some fund-raising groups spend much more than 20 percent.

For its two campaigns during the 2006/07 fiscal year, the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland comes in 4.4 percent below Greenfield's assessment of the national average.

Non-operating and non-fund-raising expenses in the last fiscal year amounted to $646,424. These include ongoing expenses such as debt service and the agreement the federation entered into to help the Mittleman Jewish Community Center resolve its financial crisis of three years ago.

David Lippoff is a member of the JFGP Allocations Committee who was recently named the panel's new co-chair with Jim Davidson, who chaired the committee this year.

The Allocations Committee meets several times throughout the giving cycle to weigh needs versus resources before distributing JFGP campaign funds each year.

Lippoff said he agrees with Davidson who this year stressed that the federation and the community need to view all federation expenditures apart from actual overhead as "allocations," even when those expenditures fall outside what has been the traditional concept of allocation, that is, a disbursement to a Jewish agency.

But Lippoff said, "The community at large must understand that the federation is not only the central fund-raising organization for our Jewish community, it also delivers services to the community, and the community should understand the cost of those services as allocations, and not mistake them as overhead."

JFGP allocations to traditional recipients of federation support, which include several constituent agencies, some semi-autonomous federation operations such as the Community Relations Committee and the Jewish Review, and some other wholly autonomous, non-constituent Jewish agencies, such as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and Jewish Educational Services of North America, shared a total of $2,756,116 from the federation's most recent campaign.

Outside of those traditional allocations another $617,569 in campaign funds was distributed to outside Jewish organizations and some JFGP in-house community-strengthening programs. The latter are direct federation services to the community.

Among the former were groups such as the Portland Ritualarium (mikvah) and Portland Area Jewish Educators. Among the latter grouping were some of the federation's own service-delivery programs such as Community Planning and Coordination, Leadership Development (for the whole community) and Jewish Outreach (See chart on this page for specific allocations to all groups and areas).

JFGP Executive Vice President Charles R. Schiffman said, "If we fail, people suffer, so we must not fail, and part of not failing is making sure our donors understand what we do, including that we work as hard to keep costs down as we do to raise as much money as possible and to distribute it with wisdom.

"We must earn our donors' trust. Telling our story is part of how we do that."