Competition Hurts AIDS Charities : Disease: Even symbols of support are fading. Red ribbons signifying oneness with the cause were rare this year at the Academy Awards. Celebrities wore emblems of new causes.

Remember the days when a new and terrible killer called AIDS inspired an outpouring of generosity with an optimistic surge of walkathons, glittery award dinners and soaring donations?

These are now distant memories for AIDS victims, their friends, families and scientists trying to stop the disease that has claimed more than 270,000 lives in the United States alone.

But for many, the sense of urgency is gone. And AIDS organizations are feeling the pinch.

The American Foundation for AIDS Research, the nation’s largest nonprofit source of research funds, cut its budget by 20% this spring, blaming a drop in donations on an increasingly complacent and resigned public.

“A sense of crisis has largely evaporated,” said foundation chairman Mathilde Krim. “People don’t make grand gestures. They’ve learned that $100,000 is not going to make it go away.”

In Seattle, where donations to an annual AIDS walkathon quadrupled in its first three years, participation in the past few walkathons has remained flat.

“People are getting weary and getting new people to give is getting harder,” said Carol Brogmann, director of development for Northwest AIDS Foundation.

Even symbols of support are fading. Red ribbons signifying solidarity with the AIDS cause, ubiquitous at past Academy Awards presentations, were rare this year. Celebrities wore emblems of new causes from breast cancer to the National Endowment for the Arts.

“People are moving on to other issues,” said Marcia Levy, a spokesman for the Whitman Walker Clinic, a Washington, D.C., AIDS service group that saw donations drop more than 6% last year.

“For some people the issue of AIDS is a downer,” she said. “People who contribute to cancer hear lots of stories about cures. With AIDS, it’s an unhappy story.”

There is no central accounting of the money donated to thousands of organizations that offer AIDS programs, but a survey by the American Assn. of Fund Raising Councils Inc. estimated between $575 million to $850 million went to AIDS causes in 1992.

That compares to $373 million raised by the American Cancer Society alone in 1994.

With new AIDS organizations popping up all the time, it is hard to track the flow of contributions. But Ann Kaplan, director of research for the fund-raising council, said current data show some AIDS charities “are not faring well.”

“Some smaller, grass-roots organizations are doing well, but our sample of the large national organizations shows declines or increases below the general increase in charitable giving for 1994,” she said.

AIDS groups are not alone in their predicament. Philanthropy in general has weakened over the last few years, with total giving barely topping increases in inflation.

Fund-raising experts blame a range of causes: skepticism about waste and fraud in larger charities, uncertainty about the economy and a “compassion fatigue” that burned out potential donors.

AIDS fund-raisers say this burnout has a new, terrible dimension for them: Many of their strongest advocates and donors in the gay community have died. Others have given all they can.

“We’ve already lost a generation of leaders. Some of the people who were there leading the charge in the ‘80s are gone,” said Henry Goldstein, a New York fund-raising consultant.

Those supporters who have survived have given all they can. Paula Van Ness, president of the National AIDS Fund, which has distributed $42 million to community-based AIDS groups, talks of an overreliance on “black-tie bake sales,” expensive fund-raising events that used celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor as a draw.

Guest lists, she said, were invariably the same.

“They kept going back to the same people again and again,” she said. “When I worked in Los Angeles, it was not uncommon to be invited to an AIDS event every week.”

Kaplan said her survey found 75% of AIDS donations were raised by special events that relied on a specific group of donors. Other charities, she said, draw just 25% of donations from special events. The rest come from such broad-cased methods such as direct mail and telemarketing.

Officials at AIDS charities admit the reliance on a limited group slowed potential growth of donations. But they said it was hard to branch out in the face of the scorn some attach to a disease that claims many victims from the gay community and intravenous drug users.

“What they are finding is, the stigma is making it very difficult to broaden the appeal,” Goldstein said. “No CEO of a major Fortune 500 company is stepping up and saying there’s a tremendous financial and social cost associated with this disease.”

Krim said contributions also have been hurt by a growing feeling that AIDS only affects a limited part of the population, dispelling early public pronouncements that the disease would spread to the general population.

“People expected to see an explosion of AIDS in their neighborhood, but that is not the way AIDS spreads,” she said.

Michael Seltzer, who recently left his post as executive director of Funders Concerned About AIDS, believes the plethora of small AIDS organizations has made it harder for donors to find the equivalent of a National Heart Assn. to give their money to.

There are an estimated 18,000 nonprofit groups raising funds for AIDS programs, ranging from the $16-million American Foundation for AIDS Research to the Atlanta Girl Scouts, which supports an AIDS project.

“In the campaign to find a cure for polio, the March of Dimes was anointed as the leader. That’s not the case with AIDS,” said Seltzer. “My hunch is the average American does not know what organization to send a check to.”

Some groups try to solve that problem by joining forces. In San Francisco, where 200 different organizations compete for donations, there are attempts to unify both fund-raising efforts and the services they provide.

“If I go to a corporation and say we are working with two other agencies, that makes the entire program more appealing,” said Jane Breyer, director of development for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.

Some fund-raisers believe AIDS donations will recover as organizations consolidate and mature in fund-raising efforts. They say they were slow to react because of a misplaced optimism that a cure was just around the corner.

Van Ness tells of working for a Los Angeles AIDS group early in the crisis. At that time the group decided there was no reason to sign a long-term lease for a copy machine.

“We really thought this might just be a little blip and that if we could just get through this next phase, the crisis would be over,” she said. “A lot of us were caught in this hope we wouldn’t have to work on this for too long. Now we have to face the fact that it is going to be here for the long haul.”