Craig Harris
CEO
NOZA

I have done a lot of searching of NOZA’s charitable giving database over the past three years. Occasionally I use NOZA to research prospects for organizations with which I volunteer, but my typical usage revolves around conducting demo searches for prospective customers or business partners. Whatever the reason for my searching, my ritual has always been the same: type a name into the "search by name" field, click search, and then cross my fingers, hope and pray for hundreds or even thousands of results.

Then I read the news about Freddie Mac…then Fannie Mae…then Merrill Lynch….then Lehman Brothers. My kneejerk response to the recent news of these troubled companies was to plug their names into NOZA’s database to see their level of charitable giving over the years, and to begin to contemplate the downstream impact on the charitable organizations that have relied on their support. Over the last couple weeks I’ve had to create a new ritual: key-in the name, click search, and cross my fingers and pray that the above mentioned companies return zero results. I figured there was at least a chance that my NOZA searches would return results indicating that Freddie, Fannie, Merrill and Lehman were all ridiculously un-philanthropic, meaning that the nonprofit sector wouldn’t take a huge direct hit. Unfortunately I was wrong. According to NOZA’s database these companies were extremely philanthropic.

Here’s what my searches returned:
Freddie Mac – 1,163 results
Fannie Mae – 1,934 results
Merrill Lynch – 6,320 results
Lehman Brothers - 1,265 results

For those of you unfamiliar with NOZA’s database of charitable giving, each "result" represents a single donation that was made to a U.S. based charity. It is important to realize that NOZA represents only a cross-section of philanthropy (albeit the largest searchable compilation of philanthropy in the world), meaning that the actual impact to charities is many times greater than reflected in NOZA’s cross section of results.

What does this mean for U.S. nonprofits? What does this mean for the individuals and communities served by these nonprofits? I don’t know the answer to those questions but I suppose that those charities who received the highest levels of support from Freddie, Fannie and Lehman will take the biggest hit (hopefully Bank of America will still honor the rich philanthropic history of Merrill Lynch, but we’ll need to wait to find out). These charities will need to either replace the lost dollars from new donors or cut programs.

I’d like to end this post offering a list of all the charities that were recipients of funding from Lehman Brothers. If you are interested in this list, please email support@nozasearch.com for a copy. The magnitude of this crisis is much more tangible once you peel back the onion and see the actual names of the charities affected.