In case you had not heard, cash is tight. Credit is tight. The stock market is unpredictable.
On the other hand, many are rushing in to predict what giving will do in the coming months. Some say up. Some say down. Some say it will stay the same. Don't let the prognosticators fool you. Things are changing.
We live in an age of relatively stable if not declining birth rates here in the United States. Meanwhile our population continues to age. In the coming years, some demographers tell us that we'll have a population where 19% of our people will be 65 and up. What does this mean for charity? We'll have, relatively speaking, less people and those that we do have will be older. In short, cash giving will remain squeezed regardless of the economy or the predictions about it.
We need to look at giving another way. The simple facts tell us that America's wealth is not in cash--it's in non cash assets. Over 90% of America's wealth is in non cash. Meanwhile, ministries tend to fish in the smallest pond--cash. It's time to fish in the bigger pond.
The non cash asset giving is currently $40+ billion dollars per year. Translation? It still remains largely untapped. What do we mean by non cash? It means everything from cars, including junk cars to collector cars, to timeshares, to collectibles, to jewelry, to RVs, to boats, to business inventory....the list goes on.
Recently, we had a ministry sharing warehouse space with a business. As it turns out, we taught them to ask the question about what kinds of assets the business held. As things turned out, the business just so happened to have acquired another competitor. In the acquisition, they also took upon all the inventory, but it turned out some of the inventory would not match their current product lines. The company was left with a couple of options: send it to the landfill and be a bad corporate citizen or donate it. They chose the latter, got a nice tax deduction, solved a problem for themselves and helped one of their favorite charities. Everybody wins.
Non cash giving programs are relatively easy to start. They are a matter of having a website and subscribing to an online non cash giving provider. The most comprehensive in nature is www.idonate.com. For an example of their work, visit www.equip.org, then click on donate now, followed by non cash donations. In a matter of days, Equip was ready to roll and began receiving non cash donations almost immediately.
It's time to start thinking outside of the cash box and turning to non cash.
--William High is the President/General Counsel of the Servant Christian Community Foundation (www.servantchristian.com).