What loyalty looks like on paper

We've spent a couple of weeks on the big picture of giving — two weeks ago, that most foundation money never crosses a state line; last week, that the checks are small while the dollars are big. This week the lens narrows all the way down: one organization's filings, and what repeat funders do for it. Historic Linwood Foundation is a small preservation nonprofit in Columbus, Georgia, running about $185,000 a year. Across eight years of foundation filings, twelve funders gave it money — fifty grants, $118,387 in all. Small checks, mostly. The interesting thing isn't the total. It's the shape.

Eight of the twelve show up in more than one year, several of them in nearly every year we can see. The Frank G. Lumpkin Jr. Foundation gave in seven different years, in checks of $2,500 to $5,000. The House of Huston Foundation also gave in seven years, in checks of $750 to $1,000 — never large, never absent. The Cliboca Foundation sent exactly $1,000, six times — its filings are public. Add up the funders who came back and they account for $97,000 of the $118,000: 82 cents of every dollar this organization has received came from someone who had given before.

Two details in that record are worth sitting with. The single biggest check in eight years — $15,000 — came from a foundation that had never given to Linwood before and gave for the first time last year. Meanwhile the largest relationship, the Jordan Foundation, has sent more than twice that, $32,000, in six installments of $3,500 to $6,500. Rank this organization's funders by their biggest check and you'd rank them almost backwards. The second detail is what the returning money is labeled: "general operating," "unrestricted contribution," "for general operating needs." The funders who stay tend to send the kind of money you can actually spend.

So the lens I'd offer this week: a $1,000 check that shows up every year isn't a small gift. It's a relationship that happens to be denominated in $1,000. If your own funding history has a Cliboca in it — the small check that just keeps arriving — reply and tell me about it.