Ten years in, Give Miami Day goes from barely known to spreading millions to nonprofits
Give Miami Day, which changed the scope of philanthropy in Miami, from how big-pocket donors to the college kid on a budget gives, celebrates its 10th anniversary Thursday.
Over the years, The Miami Foundation’s Give Miami Day ushered a transformational change in how people in Miami view giving and supporting their favorite nonprofits.
Give Miami Day, for the few uninitiated, is primarily an online campaign where anyone can become an instant philanthropist by clicking an amount on online that they wish to give to one of more than 900 nonprofits — a more than threefold growth of participants since its inception. These nonprofits serve the arts, housing, environment, education, health, Black equity, LGBTQ equity, mental health support, animal care and many other civic, economic and spiritual services.
Early Giving begins Monday through numerous community events, leading up to Thursday’s main event.
“Give Miami Day is really becoming a huge part of our securing our budget each year,” said YES Institute Executive Director Joseph Zolobczuk. “For example, three Give Miami Days ago, people contributed about $5,000 to the YES Institute. And in 2019, that went to $13,000. Last year, people contributed a total of $24,000. So it’s become a very important way that we can secure our finances and continue to do that work.”
Celebrating its own anniversary this year — its 25th — the YES Institute, headquartered at Riviera Presbyterian Church in South Miami, has as its mission the prevention of suicide and healthy development of all youth through dialogue and education on gender and orientation, Zolobczuk said.
“We have a bold goal of doubling that from last year, aiming for $50,000, which would allow us to hire one new educational staff person and support the growth of our youth leadership council,” he said.
The council, Zolobczuk says, provides critical mentoring life coaching skills for youth who have been especially impacted during the pandemic. “Everyone is experiencing mental health stress,” he said, citing the rise in bullying and aggression as schools open up for in-person learning.
“We are trying to support individual youth, family and support the school community to make sure there is safety and belonging and inclusion for everybody,” said Zolobczuk.
Raised more than $80 million over 10 years
Since 2012, Give Miami Day has raised more than $80 million, according to the Miami Foundation.
Last year, Give Miami Day 2020 raised more than $18 million — breaking the previous year’s $14 million record despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the 10th anniversary, the foundation aims to score at least $20 million to push Miami’s generosity over the $100 million mark, said Miami Foundation CEO and President Rebecca Fishman Lipsey.
“Ten years is an amount of time you build a habit and we have made it a habit in Miami that every year, at the end of the year, our whole community rallies to give and to give meaningfully and to pay attention to the nonprofits and the changemakers that are sustaining our community — especially sustaining our community in a time of pain like we are in right now,” Lipsey said.
A challenge over breakfast
Give Miami Day began as a dare between two buddies bonding over breakfast in downtown Miami.
That the two gentlemen in question are major figures in the philanthropic community — Alberto Ibargüen, the president and CEO of the Knight Foundation and Javier Soto, then the CEO of The Miami Foundation — could explain how their coffee talk led to big changes.
“Javi Soto was thinking of a way to get people to be charitable and giving through the Miami Foundation and I said there’s the idea out there of Giving Tuesday, I think in Minneapolis and a couple different places,” Ibargüen recalled.
“He said, ‘Well, that’s an interesting idea. We can look at it.’
“It was something like March, maybe April, and he said, ‘We can think about it for next year.’ And I said, ‘Well, a really good community foundation person would be able to do that this year — certainly by the fall.’ You can check this with him and if he denies it, he’s lying,” Ibargüen said on the phone, chuckling.
The bait was set. Ibargüen, a former publisher of the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald, also said he offered to kick in somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000 from Knight funds. Soto told his pushy pal he’d think about it.
“And he got it done. I didn’t do anything. I was just an agent provocateur and threw a little cash in there so he couldn’t say no. So it was all Javi and his staff,” Ibargüen said.
“Point blank: This would never have happened without Alberto Ibargüen,” said Soto who, after 10 years heading the Miami Foundation, joined The Denver Foundation as its CEO and president in October 2019.
“This grew out of a conversation he and I had over breakfast a block from our office. He started talking about this and when I said I’m in he said he’d give the matching money to make the program work, and he did, and that’s why we were off and running,” Soto said. “Without Alberto Ibargüen, there is no Give Miami Day. Full stop.”
Of course, it took more than a friendly challenge and even the offer of matching funds to make Miami’s entrée to the nation’s Giving Days arena a reality — let alone a success.
Soto realized at the time he had less than three months to pull off something the Miami Foundation, which had been founded in 1967, had yet to conduct. Soto says he tapped the talents of Grant Oliphant, then the head of the Pittsburgh Foundation. In 2009, that organization started one of the first 24-hour gift days.
“Grant said, ‘Come up to Pittsburgh and we’ll give you the playbook’ and he did. We relied on peers around the country who did some of this work in the past to avoid some of the mistakes. So many people came together around this. And other people took a leap of faith,” Soto said.
Longtime supporters include Marlins, Heat
Soto names a few of the early supporters who have remained loyal to the Miami Foundation’s efforts: Sports teams the Miami Marlins and the Miami Heat. The Miami law firm of Stearns Weaver Miller. Developer and museum namesake Jorge Pérez.
(Pérez, the chairman and CEO of Related Group, recently donated $33 million from the sale of his Coconut Grove residence to The Miami Foundation in September. The gift is the largest donation the foundation ever received and is among the largest philanthropic gifts in Miami’s history.)
Lipsey, Soto’s successor, adds some names of newcomers to the Miami area that have embraced the Miami Foundation’s mission. She mentions SoftBank, a Japanese technology conglomerate that launched its $100 million Miami Initiative in February to focus on supporting racial and ethnic minorities and developing academic programs aimed at teaching Miamians advanced skills.
In 2012, that first year, Give Miami Day raised $1,124,050 from 3,628 donors who gave 4,995 donations to 300 nonprofits.
In 2020, more than 33,000 individuals donated to their favorite causes through more than 55,000 donations, according to the Miami Foundation.
Now standard practice for the Miami Foundation to offer training to nonprofits on how to strengthen their mission through seminars, webinars and one-on-one coaching, the first year had three training sessions.
“That first year we didn’t put out a public goal,” Soto said. “We were afraid nobody would want to participate in this or the technology wouldn’t work. But we had a very modest goal — I think it was half a million. And in year one we raised a million so to double the goal in year one when nobody knew what this was, when it was really just word of mouth, at this point we [realized] there’s probably something here.”
The success of Give Miami Day exceeded its founder’s expectations, Soto said. “Every year we were doubling in size but I remember the first couple years some of the nonprofits asking, ‘What’s the catch?’
“Some people were suspicious. What was in it for the Miami Foundation? I had to say nothing is in it for the Miami Foundation. Quite the opposite. We’re pouring in tremendous resources — financial and labor — to make this happen so that we can grow philanthropy and so all the organizations doing great work on the ground can benefit. But the first couple years we had some people be very skeptical of what we were up to,” Soto said.
That mindset has apparently changed. Check your inbox and note how many nonprofits started reaching out weeks before Thursday’s big day.
Celebration of ‘better angels’
Some of the bigger nonprofits, like the Greater Miami Jewish Federation, Achieve Miami and Jewish Community Services of South Florida, repeatedly find themselves at the top of the leader boards when Give Miami Day results pour in by Friday mornings.
Greater Miami Jewish Federation President and CEO Jacob Solomon told the Herald last year, “This is not a competition between or among nonprofits; it is a celebration of our ‘better angels’ as we work together to celebrate the decency and humanity of our wonderful community.”
Beyond the dollars received by individual nonprofits, some of the other related services have proven valuable, too. The Miami Foundation’s training of nonprofits, for instance.
“I think its such a wonderful community doing an incredible job putting together a whole plan with resources on how to advocate for yourself and how to put together a really great communication plan for a small organization like ourselves,” said Everglades Law Center CEO Kelli Doré.
The Everglades Law Center, a team of four who focus on restoration projects for the Florida Everglades, garnered $2,000 from Give Miami Day 2020 donors.
That doesn’t sound like a lot of money given the challenges facing the Everglades but for the small nonprofit, it’s not the only benefit from participating in the 24-hour day of giving.
“To have a team to walk us through and guide us is huge,” Doré said. “Bigger nonprofits have a bigger marketing arm or fundraising arm so Give Miami Day gets to be an extension of our organization. That’s a huge benefit to us.”
Any dollars raised via Give Miami Day 2021 will go to support the center’s Clean Water Miami Project that is trying to help local governments identify and fix major stormwater problems, she said. Funds would also be used to support ongoing restoration work.
Similarly, grants and training have aided Chainless Change, a Miami-based staff of 11 that helps those impacted by the criminal justice system and transitioning back into the community. Chainless Change, established in 2018, offers aid like basic resources, advocacy, peer support, mentorship, workforce development, housing, educational and vocational training.
“Having accessible funding through the Miami Foundation has helped us stay afloat, which is a challenge for us given the work we are doing and how relatively new our organization is,” said Chainless Change CEO Marq Mitchell. “We take strong stances on policies and policy makers that sometimes makes it hard for us to access pots of funding. With the Miami Foundation, we are able to connect with funding programs that have helped sustain us in the most critical times.”
In particular, Mitchell cites lessons learned from foundation toolkits that bolstered the way Chainless Change optimizes its presentation. Such as Facebook. “We have better social media funding strategies that we were lacking. Now we are picking up a bit of steam getting donations online,” he said.
Secret of GMD success?
So it’s been established that Give Miami Day is a hit. The buzz is real. “People have Give Miami Day in their calendar almost like Thanksgiving and other holidays. Give Miami Day is the thing here,” YES Institute’s Zolobczuk said.
But why?
The Knight Foundation’s Ibargüen has one theory.
“The lesson of the internet. The lesson is engagement,” he said. “Everybody who thinks about the internet as: ‘I write, you read’ is wrong. The other part is, ‘What’s the engagement and what’s next?’ The logic of it is inescapable.
“Everyone wants to click and reply, click and buy, click and give, click and do something, click and be engaged. And this is so natural for the moment we’re living in. So the expectations every single year are met because people are living more and more online,” Ibargüen said.
The Miami Foundation wisely went all in on the digital concept.
“The lesson is to pay attention to what’s happening in the market. I wish we had followed these lessons back in ‘98, ‘99, 2000 in the newspaper business — or before that,” Ibargüen added. “Pay attention to what’s happening in the society. As Yogi Berra said, “If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s gonna stop them.’ You’d better figure out where that ballpark is. If the fans are all online and you’re not, you’re out of it.”
Mitchell, Chainless Change’s CEO, gives credit to the Miami Foundation for its skillful communication. “Miami Foundation does a great job at explaining the gaps that exist in our community and connecting people with resources and opportunities.”
Next, don’t be afraid to challenge the viability of reputations.
“One fundamental thing we believed strongly in is that Miamians are as generous as anyone else,” said Soto. “The reputation about a lack of philanthropic giving and charitable giving — those things we have as a reputation — didn’t sit well with me and others who were there at the beginning. So Give Miami Day was almost an experiment to test the hypothesis of how generous Miamians are.
“After Give Miami Day started to grow and gain momentum, I never heard anyone question the philanthropic spirit of Miami again. We proved it not only for ourselves, we proved it nationally and people have taken note of what Give Miami Day is. It is frankly one of the biggest 24-hour Giving Days in the country and now they happen all over the place,” Soto said.
Lipsey, the Miami Foundation’s president, adds one more theory.
“I see Miami as a place of gratitude. People fled here from all over the world and from all over this country. People come here because they want to be here and are grateful to have the opportunity to build here. This is something that is very alive, a feeling in this place. And I think there’s a humility that comes out of a city that was built so much on people who came here by choice because they wanted an opportunity that Miami provides.
“When the chance comes at the end of the year to give back, people take it seriously,” Lipsey said. “And I think they understand what it means to live in a place that takes care of its own.”
How to take part in Give Miami Day
▪ Give Miami Day 2021 runs for 24 hours starting at midnight Wednesday, Nov. 18 and ends at 11:59 p.m. Thursday via the GiveMiamiDay.org portal.
▪ Early Giving donation period runs midnight Sunday, Nov. 15, through Wednesday, Nov. 17, via the same GiveMiamiDay.org site.
This story was originally published November 12, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
