Policy Wins Don’t Always Translate into Easy Money for Telecom, Media Nonprofits

But those successes have coincided with a recession that wiped out billions of dollars in foundation wealth. Major foundations’ endowments lost 26 percent of their value in 2008, according to a survey of 290 donors by the Commonfund Institute. With less money to go around, some organizations are making do with less and putting off expansion plans. Others said they're still having success finding grants despite the recession, and some, such as Consumers Union and the Minority in Media and Telecommunications Council, have other sources of revenue to fund their advocacy.

Free Press tabled plans to expand its budget to $6.2 million from about $5 million this year, said Josh Silver, its executive director. “We had to put those plans on hold,” he said. “Funders are battening down the hatches and sticking to their current grantees,” Silver said. “It is very, very difficult to get any funder or philanthropist to fund anything new. It’s essentially almost not happening at all.”

The Media Access Project has eliminated elective expenditures and is being very careful about costs as fundraising becomes more difficult, said Executive Director Andrew Schwartzman. “We currently have some vacancies and we've been slow in filling them -- not intentionally but it’s had the effect of easing our budget crunch a little bit,” he said. “While there are glimmers of light at the end of the tunnel for next year, we're really struggling to meet our targets for this year.” The timing is frustrating, Schwartzman said. “We have been very successful programmatically in the last year or two, even in an adverse political climate, and this is a time of tremendous opportunity,” Schwartzman aid. “So it is frustrating and ironic therefore that like everybody else, this is a very difficult fundraising environment. We're not alone in having a very tough year.”

Public Knowledge lost grants from two small foundations this year after the foundations saw their endowments shrink substantially, Sohn said. But Public Knowledge is well- funded for the next two years, she said. “I'm less worried about this year and next year than I am about 2011,” Sohn said. “My focus right now is getting more foundations interested in our work and getting them to understand how the kind of policy issues we work on cut across all subject areas.” Public Knowledge has also broadened its scope as a way of attracting more donors, she said: “That not only expands our visibility but also the number and types of people who might want to contribute to us.”

Though funders are increasingly paying attention to policy groups because of the turnover in leadership in Washington, the drop in endowment wealth hurts, said Charles Benton, chairman of the Benton Foundation. His group’s endowment is down 30 percent from last year, he said. The larger foundations are also suffering, he said. “Even huge foundations like Robert Wood Johnson and Ford are going for early buyouts of staff and trying to reduce staff so they can maintain their level of funding,” he said.

But some groups are succeeding in locking down new funding. “We've got this harrowing economic environment and unprecedented opportunity to effect change. That tension is really very much at play in terms of fundraising,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. “We've had a fairly banner year because the latter has really been winning out. People see the opportunities here and are willing to support that kind of work.”

Other groups have been insulated from the foundations’ woes because they have other revenue streams to help them. For instance, Consumers Union’s Consumer Reports magazine continues to thrive. At the MMTC, its TV and radio station brokerage has contributed 40-60 percent of its budget every year, Executive Director David Honig said. Even though the broker business isn’t great this year, a large deal it put together last year is still paying commissions, he said. MMTC also hasn’t sought money from the big foundations such as Ford, he said. “We have not had to lay people off, but neither have we had to hire new people. We're probably the most insulated of any of the organizations because of the way we decided to structure ourselves.”