Case Studies

Food Fight

How Hurricane Katraina—and a surge in
global philanthropy—forced the Food Bank of New
York City to get smarter about fundraising at home.

On Sept. 2, 2005, only four days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, Gregory L. Boroff, vice-president of external relations for the Food Bank For New York City, issued an order to his staff: Get off the phones. We need them."

The phones at the downtown Manhattan offices of the largest food bank in the nation were commandeered to reach 340 other food banks and relief agencies in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast to find out which were still open and able to receive supplies. Almost immediately, the Food Bank For New York City also began collecting food for Katrina victims and organizing a September 17 citywide food drive. By then, the organization already had sent three staffers to the Gulf Coast to assist relief efforts.

Meanwhile, problems were surfacing closer to home. In the first two weeks of September, the food donations on which the Food Bank relies to feed New York's hungry were down by 23 percent from the same period in 2004. One anonymous donor informed the organization that his annual gift of at least $10,000 would be going, instead, to hurricane relief.

And there was more bad news. Local media sponsors were declining to air the Food Bank's public service announcements; their focus, too, was now on the hurricane. And supermarkets were delaying or dropping support for the Food Bank's Check-Out Hunger campaign, a program that encourages shoppers to donate money at checkout. "It was chaos," recalls spokeswoman Carol Schneider.

With as much as two-thirds of the groups fundraising concentrated in the last quarter of the calendar year, as is true for many nonprofits, this was a disaster in the making.

Within days, senior managers began holding crisis meetings to brainstorm a response. "We were nervous," says Lisa Jakobsberg, senior director of communications and marketing. “So we sat and debated what to do.”

The Food Bank had planned to launch ambitious initiatives in October, including a new awareness campaign called New York City Goes Orange and a celebrity Lunchbox Auction. Was now the time to wait or to forge ahead?

Jakobsberg and her colleagues were not alone in facing these questions. Last years Gulf Coast hurricanes along with the December 2004 tsunami in Asia and the Kashmir earthquake last October were leaving many food banks and other social service agencies across New York and the nation in the lurch, feeling thepinch of sudden stinginess from donors.

A Nov. 21, 2005, story in USA Today reported that food donations were down 12 percent in Los Angeles, 30 percent in New York City and more than 50 percent in Milwaukee and Denver. A Dec. 26 story in the Chicago Tribune laid the blame on donor fatigue prompted by hurricane-related giving.

Meanwhile, Crain’s New York Business, in a recap of 2005 giving, said that organizations helping victims of Katrina, the December 2004 tsunami and the earthquake in Pakistan raked in more than $4.7 billion while local nonprofits, ranging from groups that fight hunger to those helping foster children, “have seen donations plummet by as much as 50 percent during the most important fundraising weeks of the year.”

At the Food Bank For New York City, managers gave serious thought to canceling their Oct. 17-21 NYC Goes Orange campaign, which included free public service announcements, the distribution of orange Hunger Awareness pins in exchange for donations and the illumination of major public buildings. They feared that without post-Katrina support, the campaign wouldn’t attract enough sponsors.

For Jakobsberg, though, that fear didn’t last very long. She and Food Bank CEO Lucy Cabrera decided to take the risk that innovation and more marketing, not less, would help keep the Food Bank from fading to dark during the crisis. “That moment was the time to get the word out about us as never before,” Jakobsberg says. “It was not a time to get lost in what was not happening.”

The Food Bank, in making that decision, did what many nonprofits fail to do, according to local fundraising experts: take marketing and public relations seriously as both a competitive fundraising tool and a strategy for donor retention. With heightened competition for donor dollars since 9/11, nonprofits need to adopt some of the marketing techniques already used by the for-profit sector, says Art Feinglass, a public relations executive and the author of The Public Relations Handbook for Nonprofits.

“Some nonprofits are waking up to this reality,” Feinglass says. “People who are saving the whales are also saving the wetlands, supporting a soup kitchen and fighting cancer.”

Nonprofits are not only competing within their own field, he says, but with every other organization in every other field. Gradually, says Feinglass, “(nonprofits) are getting it. They know they have to stand out from the crowd. The question for many is how.”

At the Food Bank For New York City, Jakobsberg went ahead with preparations for the NYC Goes Orange campaign. She and her staff stepped up plans for a celebrity-studded Lunchbox Auction. In addition, they sent out 150,000 donation request letters. And in each case, the Food Bank decided to play off the Katrina crisis rather than get buried by it. Says Cabrera: “We reminded them that we did food aid all the time not just for New Orleans but on the streets of New York, every day.” In that late September mailing, for example, the agency tweaked its message to link it to the searing images of destitution in New Orleans. “We don’t see this kind of devastation everyday, but we deal with poverty every day,” says Cabrera. “I remember thinking at the time, ‘Wow, they (the media) finally got it.’ We finally got it.“

The Food Bank then went directly to the media, sparking stories in the New York Post, USA Today, the Associated Press, and elsewhere on the challenges of local fundraising after Katrina. It was a tactic that not many nonprofits adopted, for fear of acknowledging problems within.

But Jakobsberg opted for full-steam ahead. She says she stressed that with 20 percent of New Yorks population at or below the poverty level, “we couldn’t forget about the people who live here.” Not a bad strategy for the weeks after Katrina, and not a bad strategy going forward in a new climate of competition for donor dollars.

Change Strategy

In a sense, the Food Bank, founded in 1983, had been preparing for this moment for five years. Its response to the 2005 hurricanes was conditioned by a restructuring proposed in 2000 and accelerated by its role as an emergency responder after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The organization devotes 94 percent of revenues to programs, according to the independent charity watchdog service, Charity Navigator. “We were always extremely solid,” says Boroff, but the Food Bank struggled with a low public profile. “It was really New York City’s best-kept secret,” he says, and that needed to change.

Relying on informal focus groups of friends and family and mostly pro bono consultants, the organization set about making itself more relevant to a new wave of younger, wealthier and more activist donors. It decided to become more proactive. It focused on problem-solving and changed its name (from Food for Survival), its logo (which now features the crown of the Statue of Liberty) and its mission (from relieving hunger in New York City to ending it). It also began a staff expansion, increasing employee head count from 50 in 2000 to 97 presently including a new 15-person external relations department.

Part of getting smarter message-wise also meant adopting other for-profit approaches, such as moving away from hierarchical management structures to creating teams. “It’s almost like working at an ad company sometimes,” says Boroff. “We’re all very much together now, brainstorming different ideas.”

The payoff? Innovative fundraising programs such as the spring CANS Film Festival, which asks moviegoers to drop off cans of food in theater lobbies on their way to a film, and the NYC Bank-to-Bank Partnership, which pairs the Food Bank with the city’s financial institutions in an annual November food drive.

The organization also worked to ratchet up its celebrity caché. Since 2004, when Sarah Jessica Parker of Sex and the City fame donated a public service announcement, the Food Bank increasingly has tapped into the power of celebrities to make stamping out hunger in New York seem chic. Actor Stanley Tucci recently joined the board. A cultivation cocktail party on Feb. 1 for grocery industry executives was cosponsored by the Food Network, and featured appearances by two of its star chefs, Dave Lieberman and Mario Batali. Batali is on the Food Bank board.

But for pure star-power, the Food Banks mid-October Lunchbox Auction undoubtedly marked a watershed, with lunchboxes decorated by such luminaries as former President Clinton, Bono, David Bowie and New Orleans chef Emeril Lagasse garnering enthusiastic coverage in publications ranging from People magazine to The New York Times. At the kickoff party, held at Chelsea’s Wooster Projects Gallery Oct. 13, the photograph-filled lunchbox designed by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. touched off a bidding war among Bono, Mario Batali and Chris Martin. Martin, of the band Coldplay, made the winning $20,000 bid.

Local Food Groups
How New York area food banks compare, according to Charity Navigator"

Julia M. Klein is a Philadelphia-based freelance journalist whose articles
have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal,
The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.