Six years after the attacks of ­September 11, the memorials at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, are far from being fully funded. And with the passing of each anniversary, new worthy causes appear in the headlines, intensifying the competition for dollars. Corporate giving as a whole was down 10.5 percent last year; businesses may be getting pickier about their donating. Many are opting to practice so-called strategic philanthropy, measuring the effect their donations will have on their goals, which range from pacifying investors to increasing media exposure. This has led to a rough adjustment for fundraisers who traditionally rely on big companies with big pocketbooks. These days, it’s more likely to be a rich uncle, or several thousand of them, who shells out: The Center on Philanthropy says giving by individuals reached a record high of $295 billion in 2006, compared with $12.7 billion by corporations. But online efforts by the 9/11 folks have been a bust. So the memorials must seek funds from firms bent on realizing returns from their philanthropy, with little to offer but the gratitude of the families of those who died that day.

WORLD TRADE CENTER

The original goal was $500 million. Then in May 2006, project consultants estimated the cost at $972 million. Fundraising was suspended as donors and government officials mulled the folly of a billion-dollar memorial, and the memorial foundation’s president resigned, saying, “Perhaps it would help if there was one less player.” In fact, the ­memorial needed one more player, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, who became chairman of the private fund­raising effort and worked with the governors of New York and New Jersey and developer Frank Sciame to cap costs at $500 million, plus an endowment for maintenance. After just six months, $165 million was collected, $30 million more than had been raised in the previous two years. But there are still controversies, including one over the order of the names of the dead. The families of the police officers and ­firefighters were upset with the proposal that names be placed randomly, to mirror the randomness of that day’s brutality. Bloomberg’s push to group victims by affiliation has pleased those families, but not those of a number of workers in the towers. Some companies have promised to give but are holding back: Cantor Fitzgerald is waiting to see how the names are grouped; PricewaterhouseCoopers (C.E.O. Samuel DiPiazza is on the foundation’s board) hasn’t ponied up and declines to comment. buildthememorial.org

FLIGHT 93

Nearly 80 miles from Pittsburgh, a 2,200-acre national park will hold the largest and most isolated of the three memorials. After Ketchum, a fundraising consultant, brought in only $10.4 million during its two-year contract, which in April was not renewed, the National Park Foundation took over.

As the private, philanthropic complement to the National Park Service, the foundation aims to build a national fundraising campaign and raise a minimum of $30 million, mainly through large gifts. The foundation hopes that the national-park concept will help it find a national base of support for the fund. And since Pittsburgh-based businesses, including Bayer and PNC Bank, haven’t made large donations (Bayer gave $10,000 in September 2006; PNC put up $5,000 to underwrite a fundraiser in 2002), a national strategy may be the only way to raise the rest.

Chris Sullivan, Outback ­Steakhouse’s chairman, has been hired to lead the ­fundraising. Perhaps he’ll take a page from the way other ­restaurateurs raised money for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts and add a Flight 93 tip line to diners’ checks at his company’s 1,300-plus restaurants. He will also have to reconcile his campaign with some contentious land-acquisition negotiations. The owner of the 273-acre lot that includes the crash site has reportedly asked for $10 million, 20 times the property’s estimated value. The memorial’s original design bore an uncomfortable resemblance to a crescent, a potent symbol of Islam, so the planners changed it into something that now bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the foundation’s bank account: an empty bowl. honorflight93.org

PENTAGON

Washington has more memorial-building institutions than any other U.S. city, so it’s not surprising that this memorial is set to open first. A committee that included family members of victims chose to build where American ­Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon, despite warnings that a nearby highway and the Pentagon’s ­military-grade security might make the site inhospitable. The deputy chief of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency threatened to close the park nightly, telling the ­Washington Post, “About 10 o’clock at night, that should be enough. Then you have to worry about who is really in there. . . . They are probably not reflecting at that point.”

The group is trying to raise just $32 million, but there haven’t been many big donors. Most contributions have been for less than $500,000. Defense contractors are the obvious first place to look. Six of them, combined, have given about $3 million to the ­memorial; since 2001, ­Lockheed Martin has given twice that to the two major political parties. The Short-Arms Award could go to L-3 Communications, which earned about $2.4 billion from defense contracts last year but gave less than $100,000.

In a harsh bit of irony, as the memorial nears a quick completion, opportunities for a corporation to make a big media splash with a major donation dwindle, penalizing rather than rewarding the efforts of the fund’s chairman, James Laychak. Washington Post writer Steve Vogel says in his book The Pentagon: A History that the site of the Pentagon was specifically chosen to be out of sight from downtown Washington. That may explain why the corporations that do business with the Department of Defense have been slow to give: Perhaps out of sight is out of mind. pentagonmemorial.net