Advancing the Profession—For You—Every Day

I talked about the importance of Chapter Lobby Week a few weeks ago, and I hope you and your chapter are planning to participate later this year, May 23 – 27.

While I discussed how fundraisers are natural-born advocates, and how setting up a meeting with a Congressional office is like scheduling a donor meeting, you didn’t get a sense of our comprehensive advocacy program, how all of our components work together, and WHY it’s so important you get involved.

Fortunately, a great example occurred just last week.

The Senate Finance Committee scheduled a hearing last Thursday about charitable giving and trends in the nonprofit sector. 

What AFP was able to do, with just a week’s notice, was submit a unique set of comments by drawing in all of the programs and research that we conduct. With your observations and input creating a clear picture of the current fundraising environment and its challenges, we called on Congress to enact giving incentives such as the universal charitable deduction and the IRA Legacy Act. 

We cited the AFP Foundation for Philanthropy’s Fundraising Effectiveness Project (FEP) and all new data about the importance of tax incentives. Our latest data shows how gifts of $300 and $600 (the limits of the universal charitable deductions for individual taxpayers and married couples, respectively) increased significantly in 2020 and 2021, the years the deduction was in place. Some of that data was mentioned specifically by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), one of the sponsors of the universal charitable deduction legislation, in his remarks during the hearing.

Then we took your responses from our Fundraising Confidence Surveys and shared the optimism that fundraisers were feeling as we slowly emerged from the pandemic. However after talking with some of you over the last few weeks, we also know that you’re feeling concerned and anxious about skyrocketing gas prices, high levels of inflation and weak consumer confidence. 

We also worked with our partners and coalitions, including the Charitable Giving Coalition—of which AFP is an original co-founder—and the IRA Rollover Coalition to ensure our comments aligned and that we all supported key provisions to support fundraising and the nonprofit sector.

With the amount of support demonstrated by Senators for these giving provisions, we now have an amazing opportunity to build on this momentum and ensure these bills are enacted and signed into law. AFP Global will be doing its part by following up with members of Congress, pushing all of our research and data, and contacting key media contacts to ensure our story is heard.

THAT is how our education, research, collaboration, media, public policy and advocacy activities all come together to advance the profession. And that’s why we need your participation during Chapter Lobby Week in May, as well as when we distribute public policy alerts and updates later this year. 

This is our moment!

The Senate Finance Committee hearing has given us the chance to push our public policy priorities. Let’s come together during Chapter Lobby Week, as a community, to help ourselves, our organizations and the overall profession.