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Effective Frontline Fundraising A Guide for Nonprofits
Political Candidates and Advocacy Groups 1st Edition
Jeffrey David Stauch Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Jeffrey David Stauch
ISBN(s): 9781430239000, 143023900X
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 5.14 MB
Year: 2011
Language: english
For your convenience Apress has placed some of the front
matter material after the index. Please use the Bookmarks
and Contents at a Glance links to access them.
Contents
About the Author .............................................................................................................vii
Acknowledgments............................................................................................................viii
Introduction .......................................................................................................................... ix

Chapter 1: Nonprofits, Cash Flow, and Philanthropy ................................................ 1

Chapter 2: The Role of a Fundraiser............................................................................ 13
Chapter 3: The Gift Cycle .............................................................................................. 23
Chapter 4: Assembling Your Team .............................................................................. 35
Chapter 5: The Basic Tools ............................................................................................ 55
Chapter 6: The Annual Plan ........................................................................................... 71
Chapter 7: Crafting Your Message ............................................................................... 93
Chapter 8: Stewardship .................................................................................................107
Chapter 9: Face Time.....................................................................................................125
Chapter 10: The Ask ........................................................................................................149
Chapter 11: Major Gifts...................................................................................................171
Chapter 12: Political Fundraising ...................................................................................193
Chapter 13: Charity, Advocacy Group, or Both?......................................................209
Chapter 14: Get Out There and Start Asking............................................................219
Appendix A: Additional Resources...............................................................................229
Appendix B: Example Appeals and Websites You Should Envy.............................231
Appendix C: Funding Sources beyond the Individual Donor ..................................243

Index ..................................................................................................................................245

v
Introduction
There’s No Such Thing as Luck
My first job as a fundraiser was not glorious. I was working for a for-profit
company that contracted with progressive nonprofits that had opted to out-
source their fundraising operations. While the job was far from glamorous, it
was a great training ground, and I was fortunate to meet many people dedi-
cated to what we called internally the movement, or the left-wing conspiracy.
My first year, I was put in charge of directing the street canvassing office in
Boston, in the lead-up to the mid-term US elections. Our client at the time,
not surprisingly, was the Democratic National Committee (DNC). I worked
six to seven days a week, averaging more than 60 hours a week (and often-
times pushing 80). Three or four of those days, I was out with my crew, clip-
board in hand in a bright blue DNC t-shirt, waving down pedestrians with a
smile and a question along the lines of, “Do you have a minute for the
Democrats?” or “Have a second to talk about the mid-terms?”
The work was grueling, and there were certainly moments when I ques-
tioned what I was doing. Back at the office, the saying went: “The hours are
long, and the work is thankless, but at least the pay sucks.”
One of the first lessons I learned, direct from the mouth of one of the vice
presidents of the company, let’s call him Stan, during our week of intense
training in Newton, Massachusetts, was there’s no such thing as luck. It was an
interesting thought, and just counterintuitive enough to make all the young,
starry-eyed liberals in the room pause for a second to internalize what ex-
actly that meant.
Stan’s point was that becoming an effective fundraiser is about developing a
skill set, just as in any other job. His conviction proved true first in my job
canvassing on the streets of Boston, then down the hall as I grew the call
center of the canvassing company’s sister organization, and now, at a small
college in New England, soliciting six- and seven-figure gifts and coordinating
eight-figure solicitations in collaboration with the college administration.

ix
We often get into fundraising by accident; that was certainly the case for
me. I was fresh out of graduate school, and I took the first job I was offered.
Despite the long hours and lackluster paycheck, I was fortunate to have a
solid training program and great supervisors who were goal driven and
checked in weekly on how my staff was doing (or more frequently if per-
formance was down). In most of the nonprofit world, this type of diligence
and attention to quantitative data, at least with respect to the development
shop, is rare.
Granted, this organization was a for-profit, whose sole duty was to raise
money for nonprofits. The fact that nonprofits are outsourcing, however, is
a sign that they aren’t terribly good at doing the development work them-
selves. This can bring with it a number of problems, especially as an organi-
zation first turns toward making its fundraising department a professional
“shop.” Many clients that this company brought on were quite large: the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Sierra Club, Save the Children,
the Democratic National Committee. All of these organizations were able
to make that investment to outsource significant components of their de-
velopment operations to a third party.
Smaller, younger nonprofits do not have that luxury. First, you might not
have the money to spend to pay the vendor. Second, and more important, it
is unlikely that you would be taken on as a client. The company I worked
for operates on a profit motive, so it wants to concentrate on clients that
already have name recognition, nonprofits readily recognizable to the aver-
age passerby on the street as canvassers like me tried day after day to flag
someone down. Name recognition matters. In fact, the company I used to
work for is now turning away business. So instead, young, protean nonprof-
its are left to their own devices when it comes to fundraising.
Even if it were financially viable for your organization to consider outsourc-
ing, I would recommend against it. As you’ll read later on, when I discuss
messaging in Chapter 7, when you outsource your fundraising operations,
you are also sacrificing a certain degree of quality control. You risk your
message getting convoluted by a profit incentive as opposed to a sincere
dedication to the mission that your nonprofit represents.
This book is intended to guide you through the steps of setting up a profes-
sional development shop, to help you come up with ambitious but achieva-
ble annual goals, to make you aware of the important behind-the-scenes as-
pects of the shop that are essential to moving your operations forward, and,
of course, to provide you with the necessary tools to solicit gifts ranging
from a one-time donation of $25 to a five-year commitment of $1 million—
or more.

x
You should walk away from reading this book with the confidence to ap-
proach your nonprofit’s top decision makers with a strong case for why you
need to develop and staff a fundraising shop, and why it is a wise (and ne-
cessary) investment in the organization you represent. You should also be
able to recruit, train, and manage a top-notch development team; come up
with a strong annual plan; craft effective messaging; and follow it up with
solid stewardship, which in turn prepares you to resolicit your donor base
all over again.
Another lesson, which I learned in my second fundraising post working with
a college’s “Young Alumni” program was this: You are not responsible for the
outcome of the conversation, but you are responsible for the preparation going
into that conversation.
To that end, this book will also teach you how to plan a great fundraising
trip, how to provide your prospects with meaningful follow-up, and how to
shine in your face-to-face meetings with prospects small and large. This
book will also provide you with lessons on how to solicit by phone and e-
mail, which will in turn help you to train volunteers to do so. In short, you
will learn how to ensure your organization has an impact on society for
decades to come.
Before we get into the details, however, let’s first look at philanthropy
within the context of the nonprofit world.

xi
 CHAPTER

Nonprofits,
Cash Flow, and
Philanthropy
Fitting the Puzzle Pieces Together
The aim of this book is to provide you with the tools necessary to expand
and improve your nonprofit’s fundraising operations. There are many rea-
sons that make the effort worthwhile. Most importantly, more money em-
powers your organization to do more of what it’s designed to do.
What you’ll learn is that there’s a lot of work that goes into an individual
solicitation, whether for $100 or $1,000,000. Preparation and follow-up is a
big part of what we do as fundraisers. The actual execution (i.e., the solici-
tation) is a small, small part of a much larger process.

The Road Ahead

This chapter will ease us into the wide, wide world of philanthropy. I’ll begin
with a broad sketch of nonprofits in the United States and where cash flow
and philanthropy intersect. I’ll then talk briefly about philanthropy, both in
the United States and abroad. We’ll end the chapter with a road map and
preview of the path that your fundraising shop might follow.
2 Chapter 1 | Nonprofits, Cash Flow, and Philanthropy

Nonprofits in the US
The best way to explain how philanthropy fits into the nonprofit world is
with an example. One with which I’m most familiar involves my current em-
ployer, a small liberal arts college in the heart of New England.
Like almost every college and university in the United States, it has three
main sources of revenue. The first and most visible source of revenue is tui-
tion. Every parent of a college-aged child knows about this one, as does
every student graduating with thousands of dollars of college debt.
For many small, liberal arts colleges, a full-paying family will spend over
$40,000 to send a son or daughter to college for one year. While a hefty
price tag, to be sure, this amount does not even cover the entire cost of
educating, housing, and feeding a student while at college, plus the costs of
extracurricular activities, such as sports, speaking engagements, social
events, etc. In many cases, the total cost is closer to $80,000 per year.
So, in the “best” of circumstances (i.e., when you have a full-paying student),
there is still a gap of tens of thousands of dollars between tuition and the
actual cost of obtaining an education. Also, since upwards of 40 percent of
students receive some sort of financial aid (the average grant at many col-
leges is about $30,000), the gap between a student’s family’s financial contri-
bution and the cost of educating that student is even greater. Financial aid
can represent 15–20 percent of a top college’s expenditures, usually second
only to what it spends on instruction.
How do such colleges make up the difference between the true cost of edu-
cation and the tuition charged? Many colleges and universities have endow-
ments that help to alleviate some of the cost. The endowment is invested (in
global equities, private equity, alternative assets, etc.) and grows over time.
Small colleges and universities have endowments ranging from hundreds of
millions to a few billion dollars (larger universities have endowments in the
multi-billion dollar range). An average “spend-rate” for a college’s endowment
is 5 percent,1 and the hope is that the endowment grows at a rate faster than
5 percent. In 2008–2009, the desired rate of growth was not achieved, which
got a lot of institutions of higher education into some pretty troubled waters.

1
Institutions of higher education are not taxed on these endowments, so long as they’re actu-
ally spending the money. Some institutions have actually gotten into trouble, or almost gotten
into trouble, because their endowments had grown to such proportions that they were only
spending 2 percent.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 3

Even with expensive tuitions and large endowments pushing $1 billion, these
elite colleges still rely on philanthropic support in the millions, each year,
from alumni, parents, and friends.
Many schools in this category will, for example, raise $15–20 million each
year in expendable support (i.e., money that is spent immediately) and up-
wards of $20 million in endowed funds each year (i.e., money that is rein-
vested into the endowment and spent at the 5 percent spend rate).
This financial model is the industry standard for independent, private liberal
arts colleges and universities, insofar as there is an industry standard. Some
colleges rely more heavily on tuition than others, but philanthropy always
plays a role in keeping educational institutions afloat.
The college that I represent now, and the nonprofits on whose behalf I can-
vassed in Boston, are relatively affluent. When I was working as a canvasser in
Massachusetts, I was under contract with nonprofits that were large enough
to outsource their fundraising—large in the sense that they had the money to
spend on outsourcing and also in the sense that they had name recognition.
Some of the nonprofits that my organization represented were ACLU, the Si-
erra Club, Save the Children, the Democratic National Committee, Amnesty
International, Human Rights Campaign, People for the American Way, and
even political candidates. There was a time, in the heat of the 2008 presiden-
tial elections, that my organization had to turn away business because it did
not have enough staff to meet the demand for services.
Some of these very well-recognized nonprofits that outsource certain aspects
their fundraising also have in-house operations. Arguably, this ability to invest
in fundraising gives these nonprofits a distinct advantage over smaller non-
profits. One of the ways for smaller nonprofits to compete (and survive) is to
invest in their own development shops. Outsourcing fundraising operations
raises standards concerns and quality-control issues that can be avoided if the
fundraising staff is on a nonprofit’s payroll.
My own experience observing and managing canvassers that were fund-
raising for multiple clients at a time revealed several problems. Some of
those were tied to pay structure, while other problems arose due to the
fact that the canvassers were only indirectly working for the client. A good
number of canvassers were there solely for the paycheck, and they lacked
devotion to the cause of the nonprofit that they were representing. This
problem can be avoided by making the investment to pay professional fund-
raisers to represent the nonprofits directly.
Whether protecting women’s rights, saving the rainforest, eradicating
poverty, or sustaining the local soccer organization, many nonprofits find
4 Chapter 1 | Nonprofits, Cash Flow, and Philanthropy

themselves in similar situations: they are fiscally solvent, but are held back
from expanding programming because they are just making ends meet every
year. These nonprofits need someone to manage their fundraising programs,
so that they can worry about advancing their main goals.
You can bring your nonprofit to new heights if you make the leap of faith
that investing in a fundraising shop is a good idea.

Nonprofits Need Cash

Let’s face it: asking for money can make people uncomfortable. Often, when
I explain to friends or new acquaintances what I do for a living, the immedi-
ate response is “Oh, I could never do that!” My initial reaction is “Yes, fund-
raising is not for everyone,” but I think that this mindset is little more than a
mental barrier that must be overcome if you want to succeed in the non-
profit world.
Think about it: You asked your parents for an allowance. You negotiated a
raise. You negotiated the price of a new car. While not exactly the same
thing as asking someone for money to support a nonprofit, the skill set, I
would argue, is quite similar. You just have to begin to see it that way.
Sometimes, asking for money makes people feel somewhat ashamed, much
like asking for help with something that they should be able to take care of
by themselves. This mindset must be abandoned if you are to be an effective
fundraiser. This book will help you do just that.
It is also easy to start perceiving money, or those with money, as dirty, im-
pure, and compromising to your mission. This outlook is perilous. Money,
like it or not, is critical to your mission. The more quickly you can accept
this truth, the more quickly you can set your sights on doing a good job so-
liciting people for money.
One of the most disarming questions a new fundraiser can face is, ironically,
the most basic one. The question can come in many different forms, but
usually is something along the lines of the following:

Are you asking me for money?

What do you need from me?

What’s the bottom line?
We’ll get to how to respond to questions like these later on, but for now,
know that your prospects, particularly the savvy ones, are going to be asking
you these kinds of question every day, so you better have good answers at
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 5

the ready. While that inquiry can sometimes come off as combative or con-
frontational, it is, in all actuality, an invitation for you to make your pitch.
The overarching point here is that all nonprofits—hospitals, women’s shel-
ters, soup kitchens, private (not-for-profit) schools, food shelves, local envi-
ronmental groups, etc.—need cash. So do political candidates and advocacy
groups. The bad news is that fundraising takes you away from your non-
profit’s mission—unless you devote staffers to the task. The good news is
that professional fundraising is a growing industry, meaning that there are
more qualified people to hire. The better news is that there are plenty of
people out there looking to give their money to your cause.

Wealth: Where Is It?

With an unbecoming frequency, when we think about where there’s money
to be had, expendable income to be given away, we turn our sights towards
the financial sector, toward Wall Street. There is certainly plenty of money
there, make no mistake; however, to stop your search there is to be fatally
myopic.
You may not immediately become an expert on wealth and where the money
is, but you should at least begin to think creatively about where to look for
money. You can start with conventional wisdom, but then be sure to push
past it. For example, major gift officers often have working knowledge of the
wealthier zip codes in the regions and neighborhoods that they cover. To fail
to search beyond those wealth zones, however, can be a costly mistake.
Think, for example, about the recession of 2008–2009. Almost every sector
of the economy got hit. We know that Wall Street got slammed, that real
estate wealth plummeted, etc., but not every industry got hit evenly. The ar-
tisanal chocolate business, for example, continued to thrive throughout the
recession. I tell you this fact in an effort to drive home the point that there
is always money somewhere, at all times, despite what headlines tell you. It
is up to you to put negative messages aside and go bravely in search of the
money. Turn over enough stones, and you will find buried treasure.
If you become your own detective, you’ll soon learn where and how to look
for wealth. Sometimes it’s obvious; for example, the CEO of a large clothing
company that distributes its product internationally. Sometimes, it’s more of
a surprise: someone inherits the family fortune of a meat-packing dynasty. If
you look hard enough and think hard enough, you’ll be able to find traces of
wealth anywhere.
6 Chapter 1 | Nonprofits, Cash Flow, and Philanthropy

Our consumer-based economy provides you with ample clues. Anytime you
go to the supermarket and buy chicken, or soda, or peanut butter, you are
building the wealth of a company that put those products on the shelf. Not
just the poultry company or the soda company or the peanut butter com-
pany, but also the trucking company that transports the goods, the bottling
companies that packaged the soda and the peanut butter, and the super-
market itself. There is someone at the top of each of those companies, each
one of them with lots of money which they, thanks to our tax code, are in-
centivized to give away.
When on your search for expendable wealth, one tip that seems simple, but
is easy to overlook is never, under any circumstances, judge a book by its cover.
Someone who looks wealthy may not be. It also means that someone who
doesn’t look wealthy may in fact be sitting on top of a fortune. One of my fa-
vorite prospects (as well as one of my most generous) drives a pickup truck
and shows up to meetings unshaven in blue jeans and sandals. During those
meetings, however, we’re having discussions about six- and seven-figure gifts.
Get curious, and engage people on your search. You’ll be surprised by how
quickly networks begin to overlap and how soon you’ve stumbled upon
someone with a huge family foundation, or at least someone who can write
you a check for $2,000. We’ll learn later on about the power of having
events and engaging volunteers and donors to do your reconnaissance work;
but, for now, just understand that there is wealth hidden everywhere and
part of your job will be to uncover it.

Philanthropy in the US
The United States is uncharacteristically philanthropic. American citizens, as
a population, simply give away more money than most other nations. There
are plenty of historical and political reasons that this is the case. The histori-
cal reasons have largely to do with a relatively decentralized system of gov-
ernance and a populace that was reticent to have the government involved
with certain aspects of society. Out of this system rose voluntary associa-
tions. Alexis de Tocqueville noted as early as the eighteenth century that this
phenomenon of voluntary associations, of citizens grouping together to
change something in society, was distinct from European culture. At the time
of Tocqueville’s writing, in France one usually looked to the government to
solve certain societal problems. In the United States, however, voluntary as-
sociations were formed.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 7

Voluntary associations were the precursor to what we today call nonprofits.

Each one focused on a mission and carried it out with help from volunteers,
paid staff members, and, yes, patrons or philanthropists. Much like today,
these associations had costs, and those costs were offset by dues, sales, and
charitable donations.
Not only is there a history of philanthropic behavior in the United States,
but charity is also encouraged by the tax code. Charitable giving is rewarded
in this country by a generous tax-deduction policy. To give you an idea of
just how incentivized charitable giving is, consider the following regulations:
in 2011 and 2012, individuals have the ability to give away up to $5 million
to recognized nonprofits without paying any gift taxes. In 2013, the amount
will revert back to $1 million, unless Congress extends this window, but $1
million is still a pretty significant amount.
Granted, not all gifts are tax-deductible. Gifts to political parties, candidates
and Political Action Committees (PACs), or groups that lobby are not. How-
ever, the exemptions still leave a good number of organizations that accept
tax-deductible donations. Tax deduction is often a big selling point for pros-
pective donors who are on the fence. Many Americans don’t enjoy paying
taxes, and if they are able instead to give what would be taxed to a cause in
which they believe, they will.
A quick word on tax deduction: A nonprofit must apply for tax exempt status
with the IRS. If an organization is not registered as a 501(c)(3) organization in
the Internal Revenue Code, contributions made to it will not be tax-deducti-
ble. You can learn more by visiting the IRS’s website: http://www.irs.gov/pub/
irs-pdf/p4220.pdf.
To give you an idea of how much Americans give away in a year, let’s look
at some data from the Giving USA Foundation (www.aafrc.org). In 2010, ap-
proximately $291 billion in philanthropic contributions from private sources
were made to this organization. All from big foundations, right? Wrong; 73
percent of that was from individuals. Fourteen percent came from founda-
tions, and only 5 percent from corporations (another 8 percent came from
bequests). To put $291 billion in perspective, consider that the amount is
equal to 2 percent of the United States’ entire GDP.
The numbers are a bit fuzzier when we get into how many Americans give
money each year. Estimates range from 65 percent to 85 percent.2 Either
way, that’s a lot of individuals giving money away. At the low range of that es-

2
Arthur C. Brooks, “Giving Makes You Rich,” http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/2007/
10/15/Charity-Makes-Wealth/index.html, 2007.
8 Chapter 1 | Nonprofits, Cash Flow, and Philanthropy

timate, that’s about 195 million people making some type of charitable dona-
tion—that’s the populations of the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, and
Spain combined giving something away each year—and that’s at the low range
of that estimate!
Despite the economic uncertainty over the last few years, philanthropy either
remained constant or increased; in 2010, the amount of philanthropic dollars
increased in most sectors. While the United States is still not back at the lev-
els of philanthropy that we saw in the mid-2000s, there has been a steady in-
crease (with dips, of course) in giving since the 1970s: from just over $100
billion in 1970 to nearly $300 billion today.
So, Americans are generous. They give away money at a comparatively higher
rate than other people in the world. This generosity is a good thing for your
nonprofit. This largesse presents a separate problem, though: competition. In
this country, there are a number of very worthy nonprofits that need money:
public radio, the local hospital, your alma mater—the list goes on . . . and on
and on. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reports each year on the number
of nonprofit, charitable organizations registered under Section 501(c)(3) of
the Internal Revenue Code. In 2001, there were 865,096 such organizations.
In 2010, there were 1,280,739.3
If you’ve ever made a gift to one of these organizations, you probably get
mail, e-mail, or phone calls from them annually asking you to renew your
support. The challenge for a nonprofit then is to stick out in the crowd. How
does a nonprofit create the most compelling message, the most inspiring
case, so that at the end of the day, a donor, who is deciding between three
different nonprofits, chooses to write the biggest check to yours? We’ll get
to that soon. Here, I want simply to highlight that while there is no dearth of
generosity in the United States, there are an abundance of nonprofits, many
with stated missions not too dissimilar from your nonprofit, which are com-
peting for charitable contributions.

Philanthropy Around the World

Once you leave the United States, the philanthropic landscape changes dras-
tically. Historically speaking, other nations just do not have a culture of giv-
ing money away like we do. The United Kingdom is often cited as having a
somewhat philanthropic citizenry (there is, for example, the Prince’s Chari-

3
The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, “Giving USA 2011: Executive Summary,”
http://www.givingusareports.org/products/GivingUSA_2011_ExecSummary_Print.pdf, 2011.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 9

ties, which is a group of 20 not-for-profit organizations of which HRH The

Prince of Wales is Patron or President), but for the most part, philanthropy,
on the scale that we see it here in the United States, is quite literally a for-
eign concept (even in the United Kingdom, the tax incentive for individual
giving just isn’t as lucrative as it is in the United States). The one notable ex-
ception to this rule is religion. Religious institutions and causes do tend to
receive a good amount of charitable contributions.
In 2010, I had the pleasure of visiting friends in France. At that point in my
career, I was a major gift officer. As such, my job was to cover the Midwest,
Texas, Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Eastern Canada, and to manage
a prospect pool of about 250 individuals who had the capacity to donate any-
where from $100,000 to $1 million over a five-year period. When I was ex-
plaining to my French friends what I did, they found the very concept of my
job strange. To pay someone to travel to meet people to ask for large do-
nations just didn’t make sense to them.
This global attitude and awareness towards philanthropy is beginning to
change, however, and some cultures are becoming more philanthropically in-
clined. This change is happening partially out of necessity, notably in Western
Europe: the traditional welfare state, which has historically provided publicly
for citizens such goods and services as health care, education, and more, is
under a huge strain. The reasons are numerous: an aging population that no
longer works is not only exhausting the resources drawn from taxes, but
also living longer; families are getting smaller and fewer people are entering
the work force, thereby eroding the tax base; stringent immigration policies
also make it difficult for foreign workers to fill jobs, which would help to off-
set that eroding tax base; and yet, unemployment remains high.
These factors have all forced heretofore generous welfare states to cut cer-
tain services and to reduce the budget for others, or to increase the number
of hours employees are asked to work each week. If a public school’s budget
is cut, how is it to make up the difference? The answer is to turn to alumni.
The situation described is exactly what has happened in France with the
school at which I studied during my year abroad. The school is now allowed
to raise money, and two-thirds of the value of the gift is tax-deductible for
the donor. I now get solicited by them via e-mail and by mail, and once I
even had the pleasure of being called at 7 a.m. to be solicited; the caller had
neglected to account for the time difference.
It is an amateur shop, to be sure. The campaign has the feel of a small,
scrappy shop when, in reality, the school is one of the more prestigious
schools in France. It feels that way because it has no experience fundraising—
10 Chapter 1 | Nonprofits, Cash Flow, and Philanthropy

and it shows. In a video that features the president of the school, the lighting
is poor, the classroom in which the video is shot is messy, and the message
isn’t all that clear (and that isn’t just because my French is no longer that
good, I promise). Interestingly, in that video, the school president explains
that France is behind the curve on fundraising efforts and cites the United
States and the United Kingdom as examples that must be followed, given the
new economic landscape.
You don’t have to go overseas to see the differences in cultures, however.
You only have to cross the border into Canada to confirm that philanthropy
in the United States is something unique. My work in Canada has been par-
ticularly challenging, as there does not appear to be as robust a culture or a
history of giving, much less to an American institution such as the school I
represent. While we are making headway there, and the tax code is favor-
able to charitable giving, it is still an uphill battle to educate Canadian pros-
pects on the importance of philanthropy.
I include this section not to discourage those fundraisers who have shops
outside the United States. There is still plenty to be optimistic about. As
noted, the current economy and an aging population are putting a strain on
governmental resources across the globe, so private charity will be playing a
bigger role than ever. In many ways, nonprofit employees are in a great posi-
tion to be ahead of the curve if they are on the ground outside of the United
States. A peer I met at a conference, who was my age with similar experi-
ence, was already the director of major gifts at a nonprofit in France because
he had taken his skills and experience in fundraising with him from the
United States. One of the websites that I often cite in this book and refer
peers to continually, the Showcase of Fundraising Inspiration and Innovation
(www.sofii.org), is actually a British organization. The United States, while it
is culturally well developed in terms of its philanthropy relative to other na-
tions in terms of its philanthropic behavior, is not the only place in the world
where private support plays a major role in the nonprofit world. The United
States might be a trendsetter, but for all of you international fundraisers, in-
stead of despairing, take full advantage of the robust set of practices that
have evolved in the United States over time.

The Evolution and Development of a

Fundraising Shop
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the book, let’s take a quick second
here to set some realistic expectations for traveling the road toward a pro-
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 11

fessional fundraising shop. It’s a long one, with many potholes and potential
detours (or, worse, road closures!), so it makes sense to start off with a
clear idea of what lies ahead for you.
If you’re reading this book, you may be part of a small or medium nonprofit
that has little or no systematic fundraising operations. You might send out
an appeal annually, have one phonathon a year in which you call your do-
nors, or have one big benefit night per year. Other than that, maybe your
nonprofit does not do much to raise money.
It can be overwhelming to think about setting up a fundraising shop. Depend-
ing on the scale you’re hoping for, the investment on the front end can be
huge.
There are two pieces of good news: the first is that your fundraising shop
should earn you a good return on that initial investment. Frontline fundrais-
ers (i.e., the folks like me who are actually on the road, meeting directly
with donors to discuss giving face-to-face) pay for themselves, which is to
say that they raise more than they are paid.
The other piece of good news is that a shop can be built piece-meal, which
enables you to build over time. While in a perfect world, you’d actually be
able to go on a hiring binge and set up a fully staffed shop such as the one I
design for you in Chapter 4, it’s very unlikely that your executive director
or your board will give you the thumbs up to sink tens or hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars in salaries (and benefits—nudge nudge).
In short, your odyssey to establish a fully staffed, well-oiled, aggressive fund-
raising machine will likely have humble beginnings—and this is okay. You’ll
have war stories to tell your employees down the road of when your de-
velopment shop was little more than one fundraiser with a telephone, a lap-
top, and a desk made out of two sawhorses and a piece of plywood.
Glorified histories aside, you will undergo several iterations, and there will
be bumps along the road. The biggest caution, especially in the early stages,
is to watch for burnout. Your first few hires will have to be Jacks- or Jacque-
lines-of-all-trades, so be sure that their workloads are designed in such a
way that they have a sustainable, happy work-life balance. The fact of the
matter is you will have the work of 20 people with a staff of one or two at
the very beginning.
Once you have your fundraisers on the ground and raising money, both
through mass outreach (phone, e-mail, and mailed solicitations), as well as
through individually based conversations with major donors, you’ll then be-
gin to think about support and logistics staff to help with the administrative
12 Chapter 1 | Nonprofits, Cash Flow, and Philanthropy

and clerical work so that the fundraisers can fan out more aggressively.
Once the support staff is in place, you can then think about making your
fundraisers into specialists, placing them into either annual giving, major gift,
or other categories. Then, you can turn your sights toward a stewardship
department, and then toward researchers.
Again, we’ll discuss staffing at far greater length in Chapter 4, but I want to
drive this point home early: your shop will likely build slowly over time.
While the ideal would be to hire your entire staff of 10 or 15 right out of
the gate, I wouldn’t bank on that being a possibility. The likelihood is that
you will have to fight tooth and nail, especially at the beginning, to get per-
mission to hire and expand operations. The board members for your non-
profit, understandably, will want both forecasted results and proof that
you’re delivering on those forecasts. They’ll want to know that their deci-
sion to hire a fundraiser actually resulted in increased funds.
Having taken a broad look at how nonprofits rely on philanthropic support,
having explored briefly how wealth is ubiquitous, and having reflected briefly
on the evolution of a development shop, let us now turn our attention to
the role of the fundraiser and discuss in more depth what exactly what a
fundraiser does (and does not do).
 CHAPTER

The Role of a
Fundraiser
In Chapter 4, I’ll get into the nuts and bolts of recruiting your stellar fund-
raising team. But first, I need to discuss the role of the fundraiser, and the
development shop in general, within the context of the organization. I want
to give you an idea of where exactly fundraising fits into the nonprofit.

Your Context Within the Organization

When I first tell people what I do, I say that I’m a spy. While this is an out-
right lie, it is not an accidental choice of words. A fundraising shop, while
not a top-secret organization, nonetheless tends to operate behind the
scenes. We let the advocates, the lobbyists, the professors, or anyone else
in the organization who most directly carries out the organization’s mission
take the glory while we do our job in the background.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a good system. While we might per-
sonally prefer to be more in the limelight, it is, in my opinion, wiser to fea-
ture your fundraising shop a little less prominently than you might wish.
(Note: This is subtly but very distinctly different from making the fundraising
shop hard for the public to find, whether your website, in person, or by
phone). Why do I say this? Because at the end of the day, fundraising isn’t
exactly sexy. It is necessary, beyond any doubt. But that does not make it
14 Chapter 2 | The Role of a Fundraiser

glamorous. People who have philanthropic relationships with nonprofits

know that a fundraising shop exists, but they don’t necessarily want to think
about the development team more than is absolutely necessary. Nor do we
want them to. We want them to focus instead on the latest and greatest
thing that the nonprofit is currently doing, thanks to their last gift. Featuring
the development team too prominently can be a turn-off in an already deli-
cate situation.
Note that when I say fundraiser, I mean anyone on the development staff
within your organization. Whether you are in gift administration, the annual
fund, corporate and foundation relations, stewardship, events, or any other
area, you are still a fundraiser. It’s a simple enough dictum on paper, but it can
be difficult to put into practice. Granted, researchers or events coordina-
tors are much less likely to be in a position of soliciting someone, but they
should at least be comfortable with the idea of being in a situation where a
gift conversation could happen. Imagine, for example, the likely scenario in a
young, nascent development shop that only one staff person happens to be
in the office, and he or she is a stewardship writer or a recordkeeper. You
do not want to miss out on a gift because the staff member is unable to take
the gift either over the phone or in person. You want that staff member to
be able to engage in conversation with prospects about why they should
support the organization. You also want everyone in the shop to be able to
talk, at least at a cursory level, about all the exciting things that the organiza-
tion is doing!
Above all, a fundraiser is a revenue source. Every employee on the develop-
ment team, whether directly or indirectly, adds or should be adding value to
the organization’s bottom line. For example, a major gift officer is expected
to raise much more money in a given fiscal year than he or she will be paid.
With researchers or administrative support, it’s a bit more difficult to do
the exact math, but their role is to enable the frontline fundraisers, whether
annual fund officers or major gift officers, to do their job more effectively.

Deciding Institutional Goals

So, who gives the marching orders? Who decides on your shiny new fund-
raising shop’s goals? Who determines whether you’re going to launch a
capital campaign to build a new center or instead raise money to start a
$500,000 trust for long-term financial security? Or, at an earlier stage, if
you’re simply going to try to increase annual gifts from $50,000, in the last
fiscal year, to $75,000?

4
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 15

While rank-and-file fundraisers could (and maybe even should) be part of

those executive meetings, they shouldn’t hold the chief decision-making
power. In the delegation of work, that isn’t necessarily considered our forte.
Your board, your organization’s executive director, and perhaps the direc-
tor of development, in short, your pioneers and visionaries, should be the
ones deciding what your funding priorities are. They should seek out feed-
back from the top fundraisers (your director of development, director of
major gifts, or equivalents—more on staffing in Chapter 4), since they will
have their hands on the pulse of the larger donors to your organization and
will be able to give you an idea of the feasibility of the goals and priorities
that are being set, as well as provide realistic (which can sometimes mean
sobering) estimated timelines.
This said, however, fundraisers should be vocal about their successes or
struggles in raising funds for each priority. Certain priorities will be inher-
ently more difficult than others, and that feedback needs to be communi-
cated upward, eventually back to the board. It’s no use pushing a certain
organizational priority if there’s simply no donor interest. While this is
hardly ever the case, it does happen often enough where the original dollar
goal or timeline proves too ambitious, despite the very best efforts of your
frontline fundraisers.
While the board and the executive director should originally decide for
what your shop will be fundraising, the planning and implementation of the ac-
tual fundraising should be left to the development shop—that is our niche and
our strength. I’ll talk about planning and goal setting later on in Chapter 6.
Here’s a tip for the director of development, executive directors, and board
members reading this book: take your fundraisers seriously when you receive their
feedback from the road. They’re the ones in the trenches, scrapping to bring
your vision to life. Good frontline fundraisers are smart and intuitive; they
know when fundraising for a certain funding priority is much harder than for
another one. How, then, are they likely going to lead when pitching an idea to
the donor across the table? Unless the donor has previously expressed inter-
est in a priority that the fundraiser has found more difficult to sell, it’s highly
likely that the fundraiser will lead with a more palatable priority.
What makes fundraising for one organizational priority more difficult than
for another? One easy answer is that some naming opportunities are more
expensive than others. If, say, it costs $10,000 to name the foyer of the local
theater and only $2,500 to name the summer acting class program, well,
you’ll probably have an easier time naming the acting class program.
16 Chapter 2 | The Role of a Fundraiser

Another possibility is that the scope of a given priority is too narrow. It can
be easier, although not always, to raise money for “big idea” priorities than
seemingly mundane ones. If you were asked to give $10,000 to name a
room in an office at a given nonprofit or asked to give $10,000 to signifi-
cantly increase the amount of health services and free counseling offered to
battered women, which would you choose?
The long and the short of it is that certain funding priorities will be an easier
sell than others. Fundraisers should feel empowered to share that informa-
tion with the director of development, and the director of development
should feed it upward to the executive director and the board. That isn’t to
say that the board needs to abandon the priority altogether, but that they
should reconsider the amount they hoped to raise or the timeline in which
they hoped to do it.1
Board members and directors, here is another quick aside: err on the side
of transparency and giving your fundraisers too much information. Trust
that they’ll treat it with the proper discretion. If some internal document
needs to be “eyes only,” that’s OK; go ahead and share it. Let the recipients
know if something can’t be communicated externally, but they need to
know what it is. When we fundraisers are having those absolutely essential
face-to-face conversations, especially at the major gift level, we need to have
a ton of information at our fingertips so that we can speak knowledgeably
about any aspect of the organization’s programming, whether it’s related to
the funding priorities or not. I’ll talk more about the perils of being caught
off guard in Chapters 9 and 10, but for now, trust that from a fundraiser’s
perspective, we’d like to know more than you think we’d like to know.

Excellent Fundraising Depends on

Collaboration
As a fundraiser, rather than think of yourself as a godsend to the organiza-
tion, you need to realize that you fit into the larger fabric of the institution
that you are representing. Sometimes, this can be a good thing, as it allows
for cross-departmental collaboration. For example, at the school where I
work, at certain junctures in a gift conversation, we might enlist the help of
a coach, a dean, or a faculty member (and, of course, at the highest levels of
solicitation, the president or vice presidents can and often do get involved).

1
Of course, it could also be a question of making the messaging around a certain priority more
interesting and compelling. Invite your communications team to help you if a certain funding
priority is a flop.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 17

Sometimes, this can be a hindrance, especially if another department within

your organization is loath to cooperate on some aspect of your operation.
Examples abound: You can’t get information that you’re hoping to put into
an appeal. A department affected by a gift stewards the donor poorly, re-
sulting in a miffed donor.
How do these negative interactions happen? The answer is not that the de-
partment whose cooperation you were hoping to get wants you to fail. They
just aren’t thinking about fundraising the same way you are. That’s OK. That’s
why your job exists in the first place, so that you dedicate your workday to
thinking through the gift cycle, from start to finish. It isn’t the primary job of
other departments to provide John Donor with information on the latest ef-
forts that your nonprofit is undertaking to improve the local public school
system. That’s your job. Sometimes it requires persistence; it usually requires
some patience. But know that the casework that you do on behalf of your
prospects is worth it.
So, how do you fit into the organization as a whole? Your role exists because
the nonprofit you are representing would be leaving money on the table by
not bringing you on board. You help the organization to dream bigger than it
would otherwise. You take the pressure of asking for money off them (which
they’re probably not good at anyway . . . or they don’t see it as a priority),
thereby allowing them to focus more exclusively on their mission. As noted
above, this can sometimes be to your detriment. Yours is a specialized role;
you are but a piece of the organization, although an essential one.
Getting buy-in from other departments can sometimes prove to be a chal-
lenge. If you’re reading this book, then it’s likely you’re the one who will be
starting up the shop or developing it further, so it will rest on your shoul-
ders to get that buy-in from the necessary departments, and notably the top
brass. Again, while it is logical on paper, institutional inertia, especially in the
nonprofit world, can be a plague to any kind of forward movement. I’m not
saying that you will face a fight with the executive director (or, if you’re the
executive director, with the trustees or steering committee). Just be ready
to make the case. Again, topics such as the bottom line and cash flow aren’t
necessarily the most fascinating things to talk about when you could be talk-
ing about deforestation or rural poverty or toxic materials in your drinking
water. Moreover, talking about money makes some people uncomfortable.
Even worse, the idea of spending money to raise money can sour things fur-
ther still, especially in a young organization without any pre-established
track record in fundraising.
18 Chapter 2 | The Role of a Fundraiser

Mastering the Coordination Game

OK, so all fundraisers are revenue sources and help to feed the bottom line.
Does this mean that your sole purpose is to craft written, telephone, and
electronic appeals and get in front of high net-worth donors? While that is
certainly a good part of what a development shop does, the fundraiser is not
always the one making the solicitation. In fundraising-speak, a fundraiser is of-
ten referred to as a prospect’s coordinator. This term is not accidental. As a
major gift officer, I was the coordinator of about 250 prospects scattered
throughout the region that I used to cover (the Midwest and Texas). Many
of these folks I solicited myself. However, for a good number of those pros-
pects, other key players have entered the gift conversation at certain points
along the way, up to and including the solicitation itself.
This is where the term coordinator becomes more pertinent. A proper gift
conversation is much more than asking someone for money, just like any
good visit is assessed not solely by the content of the lunchtime conversa-
tion, but also by the quality of the subsequent follow-up. As one of my su-
pervisors likes to say, a single gift has many moving parts. It is your job, as a
fundraiser, to coordinate all those moving parts in a harmonious manner.
Sometimes, as a coordinator, you operate proactively. Other times, it is nec-
essary for you to step in to put out a fire (that you might have set, or that
someone else might have made for you).
Proactively, you will be reaching across your institution to bring in those
colleagues who can help move a conversation forward, either with an indi-
vidual donor or as part of a broader solicitation. Having a coach pen a letter
to alumni athletes is one example. Simply getting the executive director to
sign off on an appeal going out to all current and past supporters is another.
There may be some ego-checking involved in certain situations where you,
as a frontline fundraiser, are not the best person to make the ask (develop-
ment-speak for a request for a donation). As gift officers, we have a ten-
dency to get territorial and possessive about our prospects. It isn’t entirely
our fault. After all, we are each assigned a region of the country or a set of
class years or a certain aspect of the organization’s programming. And we
are ultimately the ones getting evaluated on whether a prospect has moved
along in the gift cycle.
However, sometimes it’s wrong to assume a fundraiser is the right person
for the ask. Not all constituents are comfortable meeting with a develop-
ment officer directly. If that’s the case, you need to think creatively about
how to engage those prospects in meaningful ways without traveling to their
hometown to take them out to lunch.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 19

I’ve come to be thankful when I can enlist the help of others. For purely
selfish reasons, it saves me time if I can delegate a certain aspect of the gift
conversation to someone else. For more altruistic reasons, it is sometimes
more effective when the solicitation comes from someone who has a more
direct connection with the prospective donor (again, the example of a coach
personally asking former players to step up comes to mind).
I am extremely fortunate to have established a cooperative relationship with
a great high-level volunteer on the ground in one of the cities I frequent for
my work. She is well connected in this particular city, and happens to be a
very good fundraiser. I cannot quantify just how much her support has bene-
fited my work in this particular area, but I can tell you that he has opened
doors that I could not, and that she has moved certain conversations along
much more quickly than if it had been me taking that donor out to lunch.
“You’re a talented young individual,” she said the last time we worked to-
gether. “But you know, sometimes these guys want the ‘elder statesperson.’ ”
And the thing is, she’s absolutely right. Sometimes, she’s in a much better
position to cultivate or solicit a prospect. At other times, I’m the best person
for the job. Each prospect is different, and each constituency is different, so
be sure to take the time to strategize and consider who is actually the best
person to make the ask. Even if you’re technically the frontline fundraiser.

On Being Cool (or Not Being Cool)

I already noted that fundraising isn’t exactly glorious work, or sexy. Let’s
draw parallels with spies once more. If a spy movie were based on your non-
profit, your executive director would be the head of the CIA, your lobbyist,
policy advocate, and volunteer managers would be the devastatingly good-
looking spies who get all the cool gadgets and have wild nights with double
agents. The fundraisers would be the computer nerds wearing coke-bottle
glasses and Aloha shirts in the background and providing all of the logistical
support. In the movie, our scenes would be short, and they would feature us
displaying technical wizardry or handing off a sealed envelope to our more
attractive costars.
Don’t despair, though. Your job is essential.
I will talk about this in Chapter 4 when I discuss recruiting and what to look
for in a frontline fundraiser, but I think it is worth driving the point home
early: fundraising is not about being cool. It is by nature a somewhat awk-
ward art. You are asking people to do what they wouldn’t necessarily do by
themselves: give away money that they have earned (or inherited).
20 Chapter 2 | The Role of a Fundraiser

Yes, it helps to have social graces, and to be able to adapt to a donor’s given
vernacular. If you didn’t like being called a nerd in an Aloha shirt, allow me
another simile: you are like a cheerleader for the organization. You have to
be enthusiastic, sometimes uncomfortably so, so that the donors can rise to
your level of excitement. People are not usually chomping at the bit to give
their money away. For this reason, you have to bring copious amount of en-
thusiasm, so that they can feed off of your energy. You need to belt out the
call to action, and explain why your nonprofit not only needs their money,
but is more deserving of it than the other nonprofit next door.
The instant you falter in your step because you’re about to do something
uncool or unsmooth, you’re in big trouble. Fundraisers often have to oper-
ate in hyperbolic fashion: you have to lead the call to arms, and you can’t
always do so by sitting back and trying to be suave.
Part of the reason we try to be cool in fundraising is because we want our
donors to like us. That will make them more likely to give us money. We
don’t want to get rejected. Sadly, getting rejected is part of the trade. Not
everyone you ask is going to say yes. In fact, the majority of people you ask
will say no, or give at a level lower than you had asked. In Chapters 7 and
10, when we get into planning and discuss the actual ask, respectively, I’ll re-
flect at length on just how often you’re going to hear “no,” just how much
of your work will be steeped in rejection, and how you have to remain op-
timistic and retain a positive mindset anyway. For now, trust that you’ll hear
“no” a lot, and that that’s OK—think of it as sifting through a desert of
“no,” which is dotted with some very beautiful oases of “yes.”
But remember—and this should help tie things back to why I insisted that
being cool is not the objective—when the donor says yes or no, they are
not saying yes or no to you. They are saying yes or no to their belief in the
organization as a worthy recipient of their philanthropic support. So, it’s a
better use of your time to make the case enthusiastically than to worry
about whether or not the donor across the table thinks you’re smooth.
The truth is, and I mean this as a high compliment, that the best fundraisers
I know tend to be a little strange, which in part enables them to make the
case for giving in very imaginative ways.
In this chapter, we’ve taken a look at just where exactly your fundraising
operations, and, more importantly, your fundraisers themselves fit into the
broader context of your organization. While not operating behind closed
doors accessible only by secret punch codes, the development operation
does tend to do most of its work behind the scenes, leaving the more public
successes of the nonprofit for the executive directors, program officers, etc.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 21

We also saw that the frontline fundraisers will sometimes have to enlist the
help of other members of your organization to close a solicitation. I ended
with a brief meditation on why you shouldn’t trouble ourselves too much
with being cool and should instead work on being the ever-enthusiastic
cheerleader of the organization, in the hopes that your prospects will rise to
your level of excitement.
In Chapter 4, I’ll discuss how to build a top-notch team, but first, let’s take a
look at the gift cycle. That will help contextualize the role of each staff
member on the team.
 CHAPTER

The Gift Cycle

Setting the Foundation
A fundraising shop does not just ceaselessly ask people for money. There is a
lot of strategy behind crafting a message, coming up with an annual plan, and
so on. It isn’t rocket science, but it’s important to know that a lot of thought
has gone into those appeals you get in the mail, or those phone calls you get
between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. local time.1 They were timed that way on pur-
pose. Your efforts must be just as well planned. While annual planning and
strategizing are not the primary focus of this chapter (we’ll cover these top-
ics at great length in Chapter 6), they’ll give you a backdrop for thinking
about its contents: an overview of the gift cycle, and the steps you will take
to engage donors and maximize their contributions to your organization.
The gift cycle is less about mass appeals and more about cultivating the do-
nors who will be receiving individual attention from your staff in person. Un-
derstanding the gift cycle is key to understanding the information I present in
the chapters on stewardship and major gifts. It will also provide you with a
framework for the contents of the next chapter, on assembling your team.
I am including this information early in the book because all too often, we
charge forth, frantically raising money to keep the lights on, without any
long-term view. This serves to hurt your organization down the road. You
need to set up your fundraising shop with a solid understanding of annual
gifts, major gifts, and the steps involved in raising both. The first step is un-
derstanding that the actual act of asking for money is only one element in a
much larger cycle.

1
Yes, even the really bad pieces of direct mail.
24 Chapter 3 | The Gift Cycle

The Gift Cycle

There are five steps in the gift cycle: assessment, cultivation, presolicitation,
solicitation, and stewardship, which starts the cycle all over again (after all,
it’s called the gift cycle, not the gift line). These five steps can be automated,
or they can be individually tailored depending on the available staffing re-
sources at your organization as well as the size of the gift.
In fundraising lingo, we often talk about “moves management.” Moves man-
agement refers to the system of moving your donors along to the next step
in the gift cycle. Ideally, each new contact with a donor should move that
donor to the next level (although plenty of times they get caught in cultiva-
tion limbo, as we’ll see later in this chapter).
Let’s now dissect each of the steps in the cycle. The majority of what you
are about to read is tailored for conversations revolving around larger gifts
and donors who merit individual attention from a frontline fundraiser. As I
discuss this information early in the book, so should you consider it early in
what I’m assuming to be the development of your shop. This is because,
again, I want you thinking about the entire gift cycle from day one. It’s easier
to do it now than to have to backtrack when your team is already operating
at 90 miles an hour. I want you to appreciate the many steps involved in a
professional solicitation.

Assessment
Think of it as your first date, a meeting to get to know one another. Assess-
ment is best executed in person, but can be done via phone or e-mail if your
organization does not have the staffing resources (consider that a suggestion
to push for such resources if you don’t have them yet!). The goal of assess-
ment visits or calls is to get an idea of each prospect’s capacity to make a gift
(in other words, how high you can shoot), inclination (feeling of warmth to-
ward giving to your particular institution), and the timing (of when it is likely
that a gift will occur). You also want to begin to discern where individual do-
nors’ interests might lie with respect to your organization, and where they
might be looking to make an impact.
Major gift officers, principal gift officers, and senior staff will often have re-
searched a prospect beforehand to discern the prospect’s capacity to give,
or had research done for them (we’ll discuss research in the next chapter).
If this is the case, then focus your attention on trying to figure out inclina-
tion and timing.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 25

If you’re strapped for resources and therefore don’t have research staff,
then you’ll have to start making assessment calls with your already-generous
donors.
For nonmajor gift work, assessment takes on a different tone. From raising
money chiefly through mass appeals, assessment turns to analyzing the effi-
cacy of each solicitation, and each mode of solicitation, within your shop.
What modes (written, e-mail, or telephone appeals) worked best? Which
individual appeals or telephone segments got the best response?
However, with individuals at the larger gift levels, the assessment meeting,
more than any other, necessitates that you listen actively and with intent.
Have your ears open for any cues that will help you perceive the donor’s
position.
If you’re meeting at the prospect’s home, drive around the neighborhood to
get a sense of the community. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but it will
give you at least an introductory idea of your prospect’s wealth.
Don’t fret if you don’t get a view of the house. You can drive by it later.
And if you can’t do that, then you can do homework on the value of the
house. The point is that the conversation itself should yield enough clues for
you to begin to home in on capacity, inclination, and timing.
Here are some questions for which you want the answers, if you don’t al-
ready have the information on hand:

How old is this prospect?

In what industry does this prospect work? What is his/her job title?
Is it possible to know this prospect’s annual salary, or at least esti-
mate it?

How is the economy treating the industry in which this prospect
works?

Does the prospect own property? Multiple properties?

Does this prospect come from family money? Is there a family
foundation?

Does this prospect have children? How many? How old? Are they
going to private or public school?

What other organizations does this prospect support philanthropi-
cally? Where does your organization stand in this prospect’s esteem
relative to these other organizations?

What is the prospect’s level of awareness of what your organization
is doing today?
26 Chapter 3 | The Gift Cycle

Is there a history (positive or negative) with this prospect and your

organization?

Is there anything happening right now in the personal life of the
prospect that could affect the tempo of a gift conversation (for ex-
ample, divorce, lawsuit, bankruptcy, scandal, family illness)?
During this first conversation with prospects, be very up-front with them
about your role and your ultimate intention. Never skirt around the fact
that you are a fundraiser. In my major gift work, I often say something along
the lines of, “Now, I am a major gift officer, so it is my job, at some point
down the road in our conversation, to ask you to make a significant philan-
thropic commitment to us at the six-figure level. Today is not the day that
I’m asking you for that commitment, and I want the conversation to advance
at a pace that is comfortable for you. But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I
didn’t let you know that up front.”
Terrifying, right? On some level, sure, but think of it this way: by frontload-
ing the idea, you are offering them an opportunity to reveal the answers to
your questions about inclination and timing.
It is a huge time saver to have prepared some phrases such as the ones I
have just used. If they let you know that now is not the right time, or that
six figures is totally beyond their current price range (or that your organiza-
tion is not high on their list for philanthropic relationships), this is very use-
ful information to you. It helps you prioritize your prospect pool. You can
put that particular prospect a little lower (or a lot lower) on your call list.
Again, in the words of Stan, from Grassroots Campaigns, “Just move on to
the next door.”
If they don’t jump out of their skin—and you’ll be surprised: they rarely
do—then you know that this is a good prospect and that you can continue
the conversation with confidence. And if they do fall out of their chairs,
well, that’s OK, too.
Of course, if you’re not raising major gifts yet, there’s no need for that sort
of end-of-meeting language, but it is always useful to let donors know that
your ultimate intention in continuing to meet with them is to get them to
open their checkbook.

Cultivation
Assuming your first date went well, it’s time to start cultivating your pros-
pect. In the dating parallel, this is where you buy flowers, write poetry, and
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 27

make a mix tape (or an iTunes playlist for the younger readers out there). In
the actual world of fundraising, this is where you engage the prospect on
the goings on of your organization in a way that is tailored and meaningful
to that person.
Cultivation is usually the longest stage of the gift cycle in that it can take a
while to move a prospect from cultivation to presolicitation. Gift officers
will often refer to their prospect pool, or portfolio, as “cultivation heavy,”
meaning that an overwhelming number of their prospects are stuck in the
cultivation stage.
Depending on how you view it, it can be the most challenging, tedious, or
fun part of the gift cycle. It’s often all three at any given point within the cul-
tivation process. It is also the most exciting part because it allows you to
think creatively about how best to engage your prospects. You are getting
them to trust you, or as we say in fundraising lingo, building (or cementing)
the relationship.
Put yourself in their shoes: What do they want to know about the organiza-
tion? What gets them excited about the work that your organization is do-
ing? When meeting with them, take note of how they react to what you’re
pitching to them, of when their posture and body language changes, of when
they really perk up or get enthusiastic.
Cultivation can take on innumerable forms. It can be as simple as forwarding
a press release they might find interesting. It can be as formal as getting the
executive director to meet them for lunch. It can be making a personal
phone call to make sure that they plan to be at an event that you want them
to attend.
It could even be asking them to host or underwrite an important event that
your organization is putting on. Yes, hosting or underwriting costs money in
itself, but it engages donors by allowing them to feel, correctly, that they are
promoting your organization in a manner beyond simply writing checks. Put-
ting on an event, whether it’s an “all-come” event or a smaller, invitation-
only dinner with a targeted invitation list, donors often feel good when
asked to help put something like this together, and it gets them involved in a
way that isn’t strictly monetary (although there is still a check being written).
Here’s a trick that I’ve never worked up the courage to use, but I think it is
brilliant. It’s not necessarily restricted to a cultivational strategy, but could
certainly be a good gimmick to employ. A colleague of mine used to work
with someone who once a year would mail thirteen or so of his top pros-
pects a hand-written card that merely said, “Congratulations!” above the
officer’s signature.
28 Chapter 3 | The Gift Cycle

He reported that over half the people who received that card would call
him, reference some event (pregnancy, marriage, graduate degree, house
purchase, or retirement) and thank the gift officer, asking how he knew
about the event! You’d have to be quick on your toes to come up with a
reply, or have them canned in advance, which is why I don’t do it, but I think
the idea is fascinating, and could be useful in cultivation if you can pull it off.
The length of cultivation will depend both on the prospect’s inclination and
timing, and the scale of the gift that you are hoping to secure. It can take as
little as 90 seconds or as long as a year (or more!). As you visit with more
and more prospects, and ask for a variety of gifts ranging from $100 to
$100,000, you will gain instincts that allow you to gauge how long the cultiva-
tion stage needs to take. A general rule of thumb is that the larger the gift,
the longer the cultivation. While there are certainly exceptions, it’s a safe bet.
There are two things that can elongate the cultivation stage (well, there are
many, including any number of untimely changes in personal circumstances).
The first is that a donor’s interests can change over time. I have a number of
prospects in my pool that were once very interested in supporting financial
aid. However, when their children began applying for college, the prospects
changed their tune for fear that their support of needier students would be
crowding out their own children’s potential for getting into our institution.
Another example is a prospect of mine whom we had been targeting, with
some progress, for financial aid with an eye toward soliciting him upon his
son’s graduation. Then, he learned about another effort to build an en-
dowed scholarship fund to honor a professor of his, who had recently
passed away. He very quickly changed where he steered his support for the
college, and to a level lower than we were hoping for.
It isn’t always a bad thing when your prospects’ interests change. I was meet-
ing with a prospect recently to discuss building his already-endowed fund to
$750,000 over five years, when in passing, I mentioned the college’s efforts
to endow its cross country program. He wasn’t a runner in college, but has
since become one. His son is now quite an accomplished cross country run-
ner, so he made a gift over and on top of his current pledge schedule. Some-
times a change in interest can be a pleasant surprise. It can just change the
time horizon, or alter the direction of the conversation. Or, in the case of
this alumnus, supplement an already-robust conversation.
The second reason that cultivation might take longer than you like is that
the donor’s interests in your organization don’t match up with current fund-
ing priorities.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 29

A quick detour: Funding priorities are usually set (or should be) by your
board of directors and your executive director. Those priorities should be
communicated clearly with the advancement shop. It is your job, as director
of development, to ensure that this happens. Don’t assume that your board
or executive director will think to tell you immediately. You need to be pro-
active, especially early on in your shop’s development. There’s no buy-in yet,
nor is there a standard operating procedure to communicate these priorities.
I want to stress just how important it is for your fundraisers to be receiving
top-level communication from your board and your executive director. You
do not want a situation where your donor knows more about your organi-
zation than you do. Having a fundraiser get caught off guard undermines the
donor’s confidence in your institution. If a development officer asking for
money cannot successfully articulate the nonprofit’s mission, that officer and
therefore the institution are in trouble.
Again, be proactive and interact with your executive director and your
board. You need them to understand the importance of keeping the devel-
opment office in the know. When there’s a new project, you need to know.
When there is a change in funding priorities, you really need to know. Don’t
leave it to chance—or worse, to your donors—to become informed about
the latest and greatest things that your nonprofit is doing.
When a donor’s interests don’t align with your institution’s funding priorities,
you need to be delicate, as you want to honor their desire to give and the
spirit of how they want to steer their philanthropic support, even if it is in a
way that does not perfectly correspond with their explicitly stated intention.
Sometimes, incompatibility with a donor’s interests occurs because institu-
tional priorities change. For example, one time I had a prospect whom I was
planning to solicit for $100,000. When we got down to discussing where he
might like to make an impact, he expressed interest in funding winter in-
ternships that would send students abroad to lesser-developed countries.
At the time, this was not a funding priority at the school. I had to explain
that while I was ecstatic for his support, internships were not a top need at
the moment. Would he consider instead a gift that would support bringing
students from lesser-developed countries to our college in the form of an
expendable financial aid commitment? He ended up making a gift to financial
aid; it was at a much lower level than I was hoping for, but he was on board,
which was the important part.
Imagine my surprise (and rage) when not six months later I learned that the
college had a new goal of pumping up its experiential learning programming.
This meant both that there was a push to provide internships to students,
30 Chapter 3 | The Gift Cycle

but also to raise money so that students who had unpaid internships could
have a stipend to live on during their experience.
The good news is that once the aforementioned prospect’s current pledge is
paid off, we can go back to him and get him excited about a new undertaking
that aligns more directly with his original interests. The not-as-good news is
that the timing was misaligned and it might undermine his confidence in our
ability to communicate clearly and accurately with donors. That, and the fact
that we might have been able to get him on board at a higher level of com-
mitment earlier on. I could have had a $100,000 commitment on the books,
but now we’ll have to wait five years to resolicit him. If your organization
runs on a shoestring budget, that five-year waiting period can be extremely
costly. If this is the case, it might make sense to communicate the change in
priorities sooner, in the hopes that the donor might convert his pledge to
cover his original area of interest, at the amount for which you originally
asked. Beware, though: asking for another gift while a pledge is being paid off
can upset donors. Be diplomatic if you’re forced into this situation. And do
everything that you can to avoid being caught there in the first place.
Sometimes, things don’t fall into place and you are forced to make things
work imperfectly, like a Gemini and a Capricorn trying to date. Don’t de-
spair—it can be done—it just requires finesse, patience, and an openness to
a longer, more drawn-out conversation.
If your organization has a very narrow mission, the chance that your pros-
pects’ interests might not line up with your institutional priorities decreases.
Of course, each organization has a wide range of needs, some as mundane
(but essential) as keeping the lights on and having a budget for office sup-
plies, but the narrower your mission, the more focused your donor base
will be in the first place.
Sometimes donors aren’t particularly excited about your current undertak-
ing. This can be especially relevant for nonprofits that focus on influencing
policy, either locally, at the state level, or nationally. That isn’t to say that
they won’t be excited about your next battle. It’s just that this project might
not be the right one for them to fund.
If, after much effort, you find yourself still finagling an angle that is pleasing
to the donor and in line with your organizational priorities, you have to
make a decision: do you side with the donor or the institution? Sometimes,
it can turn into a bit of a skirmish, and you’ll have to be the mediator.
One example is a prospect of mine from the Midwest who had set up an ex-
pendable lectureship fund that would bring a speaker to campus once a year
to lecture in Japanese on the state of, and trends in, that language. This was
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 31

done through a gift of $200,000. After a few years, she was satisfied with
how the lectureship was being managed and wanted to endow the fund, so
that the lectureship would live on in perpetuity.
When I broached the subject with the budget office on campus, I met some
resistance. Lectureships were not a funding priority on campus. Would the
donor consider repurposing the fund?
After reviewing this donor’s history, having spent time with her smoothing
over some rough patches that she had already had with the college, and hav-
ing several conversations with her face-to-face, it became clear to me that it
was going to be lectureship or bust on this particular prospect.
For one, she had already reconverted the fund a few years ago from a re-
search fund to a lectureship fund, when she quadrupled the level of the fund
with a significant gift. Secondly, her philanthropy to her other alma mater
supported the library and its acquisitions. Finally, in conversation, she re-
vealed that her other alma mater had pushed her about financial aid and that
she just flat out wasn’t interested in supporting that aspect of the univer-
sity’s programming. I floated the idea of faculty support at our college, since
she had been a professor, but at the end of the day, she wanted her fund to
remain a lectureship fund.
I did my homework and put in the effort, but with all other options ex-
hausted, I had to go back to the budget office and explain that this donor sim-
ply wouldn’t budge and that we had to go ahead and endow this fund, despite
the fact that it did not align with our institutional priorities.
Of course, you can’t always take the side of the donors. Sometimes you have
to draw a hard and fast line and insist that in order for them to support your
organization, they have to change their tune. Ethical questions can arise, and
when they do, red flags should go up. Philanthropy is not a quid pro quo ar-
rangement (we’ll visit this theme in depth in the chapter on political fundrais-
ing). You have to make it very clear to donors what their support does and
does not entail. Supporting an athletic club does not give them a say in who
coaches. Supporting a college does not get their children into that institution.
In short, cultivation is a critical step in the gift cycle. The majority of pros-
pects that receive individual attention (i.e., your major gift prospect pool)
will likely be in cultivation at any given moment. As noted, it requires
imagination, creativity, and persistence to move them from cultivation to
the next step.
32 Chapter 3 | The Gift Cycle

Presolicitation
In the interest of propriety, it’s time to stop drawing the parallels between
fundraising and dating. I’m confident that by now, you get the idea. Presolici-
tation is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: you either ask donors if
they’ll consider a proposal in writing or you simply let them know that you
plan to solicit them soon, whether as a part of your follow-up to this visit,
or the next time you see them.
Be prepared, in this scenario, to be asked how much you were planning to
solicit them for. Some donors don’t really want to draw things out and want
to cut right to the chase. When a donor is asking for “the bottom line,” or
asks you outright, “So, what is it you want from me?” you had better be
prepared to turn the presolicitation visit into a solicitation visit (find out
how in the following section, and in Chapter 10 on “the ask”). You need to
have a figure in mind in case this does happen. And it happens often enough.
As noted before, the gift cycle can be as short as a single visit, or as long as
years. By the time you are at the presolicitation stage, you have gained a
good understanding of where the prospect is interested in making an impact
on your organization via their philanthropy. You’ve done your homework,
figuring out which programs would be involved, and you’ve gotten buy-in
from the parties to be affected. More importantly, the prospect continues to
be warm to your advances. Even more importantly, you have been able to
calculate just how much you think this person might be willing to give you.

Solicitation
The big moment is upon you. You are either going to solicit your prospect
for a gift during this visit, you’re compiling your talking points for the phone
call, or you’re preparing a proposal for them in writing.
If you’ve done your job up to this point, your ask should not catch the pros-
pect off guard. The amount might, and that’s OK. Believe it or not, at some
level, the prospect has been waiting for this moment much like you have (and
probably looking forward to getting it over with, much like you have!). Their
time is limited as well, and the last thing you want to do is leave a meeting
with the prospect wondering, “Where was the ask?” It’s a delicate balance,
as you don’t want to be hasty, but again, if you have been up-front with
them, prospects will know that there is a solicitation coming. Linger too
long, and you’ll actually undermine your chances of success.
Chapter 10 will focus on the solicitation itself in much more detail.
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 33

Stewardship
The prospect says yes. Tell your boss, tell the executive director, pop the
champagne, leave work at four. It’s time to celebrate. After all, the develop-
ment shop has done its job, right? Well, mostly.
Stewardship is the art of thanking your donors for their gifts. It is you report-
ing back to them on the impact of their generous support. You have to dem-
onstrate to your donors how their philanthropic relationship with your orga-
nization has enlivened your programming, helped you to succeed when you
otherwise would not have been able to, and how grateful you are for them.
As a gift officer myself, I cannot stress enough how much I value having a
strong stewardship team where I work. Solid stewardship renews the gift
cycle all over again, and when properly done, makes resolicitation a whole
lot easier . . . or inspires a new commitment all by itself. I’ve devoted a
whole chapter to the subject (Chapter 8). It’s that important.
So, there is the gift cycle in a nutshell. I spent a good deal of time on assess-
ment and cultivation, and I went a little lighter on the nuts and bolts of
presolicitation, solicitation, and stewardship. Again, examples and more in-
depth explanation will appear later on in the book. For now, I want you just
to have a basic idea of the life cycle of a gift, so that it makes more sense as
we move on to talking about staffing your office, which we are about to dis-
cuss in the next chapter.
 CHAPTER

Assembling
Your Team
Having taken a look at philanthropy and its relationship to the nonprofit
world, the development shop in the context of the nonprofit as a whole,
and having discussed the gift cycle at an introductory level, let us now turn
toward recruiting an institutional advancement team.
In order to give you a better snapshot of an ideally staffed team, I am going
to assume that you have unlimited resources to hire as many people as you
want (knowing that this is likely an erroneous assumption). At the end of
the chapter, I will talk about how to prioritize when you are cash-strapped
and can’t recruit everyone you want.

Frontline Fundraisers: A Strangely

Effective Team of Black Sheep
It should be no surprise that I start with the frontline fundraisers. We’re
called many things: gift officers, philanthropic advisors, road warriors, pro-
fessional beggars. Whatever you want to call us, we’re the folks who are
going to be asking prospects big and small for money in person, over the
phone, and via e-mail; who are going to be writing your individual proposals
and general appeals; and who are going to be adding most directly to your
bottom line.
36 Chapter 4 | Assembling Your Team

Pretty important stuff, right? So, what should you be looking for in a gift
officer?
It’s a tougher question to answer than you might think, for a few different
reasons. One is that there is no universally accepted way to ask for money.
This is because every donor is different; every constituency is different—and
never mind the fact that there are myriad things that philanthropists could
support. Your organization will undertake short-term funding projects and
longer-term investments, and your approach to fundraising for each of these
types of efforts will likely (and should) differ.
There is another reason that the question of what to look for in frontline
fundraisers is difficult: successful fundraising, especially successful face-to-
face solicitation, is owed in large part to the personal style of the officer in
question, and their ability to relate well with the prospect on the other side
of the table.
That said, there are certain traits that tend to make for a solid frontliner. An
ideal fundraiser:

Has a passion for the cause one is representing

Has an intellectual understanding of the cause one is representing

Does not upspeak (meaning you want people who do not end all of
their sentences as though they were questions)

Is a self-starter that can also play well with others

Is an engaging and captivating speaker

Is extroverted

Can build and manage relationships with prospects

Can connect to a variety of different audiences

Has hobbies or interests outside of work (since this enhances the
likelihood that the fundraiser will be able to connect with a pros-
pect on a personal level)

Is comfortable asking for money (I know this sounds really, really
obvious, but I’ve worked with a few fundraisers who actually didn’t
enjoy asking for money)

Can write well
I’d advise against dismissing any CV or résumé on the sole ground that it
does not have previous fundraising experience on it. The qualities that I
listed above are not exclusive to the development field. What’s more, a lot
of people tend to get into the development field by mistake. This is changing,
as the field becomes increasingly professionalized (and as institutions find
themselves short on cash), but whenever I am at professional fundraising
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 37

conferences, I am always struck by the variegated backgrounds people bring

to the trade.
There is a burgeoning field of professional study in institutional advance-
ment. A number of universities that have programs in higher education ad-
ministration now offer masters programs in development or advancement.
Not having attended one of these programs, I cannot speak to their value;
it’s a relatively new field of study, and I am confident that as the fundraising
industry continues to professionalize, you will see more and more candi-
dates applying for jobs who have this kind of degree. There is certainly value
in studying the industry, its practices, and its historical context. However, it
is hard to replace the practical training of getting out in front of donors,
making actual “asks,” getting actual rejections, and closing actual gifts.
Previous experience in sales is common, and, for all intents and purposes,
sales brings to the table a transferable skill set. I have gotten feedback from
fundraisers with a sales background that the pace is a bit slower in fund-
raising than in product or service sales, particularly in the major gift field.
Your next fundraiser could come from anywhere, and as time goes by and
the field of development/institutional advancement continues to grow, so
will the candidate pool of people with fundraising experience.
If you’re fortunate enough to have the resources to hire a number of fund-
raisers, go for variety. You don’t want a team of carbon copies. It’s likely
that your donor pool is too diverse for a single “type” to cover all of your
bases, even if the nonprofit that you represent is focused on a singular issue.
Some gift officers are formal and buttoned up; others are a little more laid
back and casual. Some are better writers; some are better speakers. You’ll
need all types, so mix it up if you have the resources to make multiple hires.
If you’re really lucky, you’ll be able to construct different divisions of front-
line fundraisers. If this is the case, you’ll want to focus on establishing two
teams: the annual fund team and the major gifts team.

The Annual Fund

The Annual Fund raises expendable gifts, usually revolving around your fis-
cal calendar and special projects. The annual fund team is the group that
will be writing the appeals for your direct mail campaigns, your e-mail so-
licitations, and your phonathon program if you have one. The job of the
annual fund team is to get as many gifts as possible, from a $5 contribution
all the way up into the thousands. They will be soliciting gifts large and
small, and they should certainly push their individually assigned prospects to

3
38 Chapter 4 | Assembling Your Team

give as generously as possible. But at the end of the day, their chief focus is
on obtaining a high volume of gifts, as opposed to generating large gifts; in
other words, quantity over quality.
An annual fund officer will be making face-to-face solicitations, recruiting or
managing volunteers (see the section in this chapter on volunteers), and
strategizing on how to maximize your organization’s exposure to create as
large an audience (and donor base) as possible.
You might be asking: Why not just focus on big gifts? Why not just hunt for
the biggest buck and be done for the season?
The answer is threefold: First, sometimes you don’t have time to wait around
while the major gift prospect upon whom you were resting your hopes de-
cides how to steer his or her support. You simply don’t know in advance
when a major gift will close, and if you’re relying on that pledge payment and
it doesn’t come, you’re in big budgetary trouble. Major gift prospects come
and go: they make their big gift and often move on to the next nonprofit (un-
less you steward them well and keep them on your roster!). Some stick
around, but others don’t. And if you don’t have an endowment, where that
gift is going to live on in perpetuity, the gift’s value will eventually dry up and
you’ll need to go in search of the next big donor. Conversely, you will always
have a base of donors who can make smaller contributions.
Secondly, it helps to think of the annual fund donors as major gift prospects
in the making. People don’t just start giving away thousands of dollars willy-
nilly. They do so because they have been gifting for years and it just so hap-
pens that now they are able to do so at a higher level, for whatever reason.
If you look at most major donors at any institution, it is very likely that be-
fore they were making six-figure commitments, they were giving small contri-
butions each year to that institution. Sure, there are exceptions (notably with
prospects that are preliquid), but for the most part, you’ll see this trend.
Thirdly, participation matters. You want a variety of gift levels from a variety
of donors. You want mass appeal. If you are applying for grants, for exam-
ple, foundations will often want to see evidence of other bases of philan-
thropic support upon which your organization relies. A strong level of an-
nual participation will often be one of the things that these foundations and
charitable trusts look at when considering your application.
What’s more, if your organization only focuses on raising money from
sources that can give you six figures at a time, you’re eroding your support
base. You’re sending a message to prospective smaller donors that their $25
doesn’t matter. Not only that, but small gifts add up. At one institution I
know of, gifts of $50 or less usually end up totaling around $150,000 each
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 39

year. If you don’t empower the donors that are giving you $10, $25, or $50
a year, you are cutting yourself off at the knees.

Major Gifts
A major gift officer is charged with managing a prospect pool of a set num-
ber of individuals and moving them through the gift cycle with high levels of
personal attention. The size of the pool will vary depending on how many
major gift prospects you have, if you’re geographically diverse or regionally
focused, and how a major gift is defined at your institution.
In educational philanthropy, major gifts are usually those in the six-figure
range, and occasionally into the seven-figure range. For small nonprofits, it is
likely that the major gift threshold will be significantly smaller, and that’s
okay. The same principles and strategies will apply.
We’ll focus more on major gifts in Chapter 11. Meanwhile, I’d like to talk
about the distinction between the annual fund and major gifts in the context
of recruitment. Major gift officers tend to be recruited up through the ranks
of the annual fund, but not always. Some candidates have no previous fund-
raising experience. However, with major gift work, you do want to scruti-
nize your candidates carefully. The stakes are a little bit higher. While the
annual fund team can be depicted as a scrappy but plucky, frenetically paced
office, major gift work can require a slightly more refined approach. Again,
more on the distinctions later, but know that it’s fair to expect experience
with direct solicitations when interviewing for major gift officers.
As noted, there is no ideal type of fundraiser. There are ideal traits, but they
can be embodied in very different ways among individual candidates. During
interviews, ask yourself if you would give them a donation right then if you
were asked. It’s fair game to ask them to pitch you for a hypothetical major
gift at the interview. Also ask yourself: could they have a meaningful con-
versation with someone half their age? Twice their age? More generally,
could they connect with a wide variety of audiences?
Let’s now move off the frontline and peek behind the curtain at all the folks
who help fundraisers do their job.

Administrative Staff: A Gift Officer’s

Life Line
Again, I’m boldly going to assume that you’re able to hire an entire shop. In
reality, it is more likely that a small number of you will have to be jacks-of-
40 Chapter 4 | Assembling Your Team

all-trades. However, by giving you an idea of what a fully staffed shop might
look like, you’ll be able to get a broad idea of the tasks necessary for a well-
run shop, and plan (and delegate) accordingly. It will also give you a hiring
roadmap, so that as your operations expand, you can turn back to this to
know what your next recruitment step should be.

Recordkeeping and Reporting

The staff member responsible for recordkeeping and reporting is your ref-
erence librarian, who is responsible for making sure that you have the most
accurate, up-to-date information on your donor base as possible.
You should capture as much information as you can on every single donor.
How you design your gift forms, both on paper and online, will help you in
this endeavor. Every time you have an event, you should provide a sign-in
sheet that asks for each guest’s e-mail address, mailing address, and phone
number.
You should make sure that your gift officers are feeding your recordkeeper
all of the information that they learn, whether it’s new work e-mail ad-
dresses, new cell phone numbers, etc.
Ideally, you should have the following information about each of
your donors:

Full name and spouse’s name

Maiden names (for possibly family wealth connections)

Employment information (and spouse’s)

Personal e-mail, work e-mail

Personal phone number, work phone number, mobile phone num-
ber, fax number

Primary mailing address

Alternative mailing address (read: other properties)

Birthday

Other family information (such as children, parents,
family foundations)
Recordkeepers will need database software in order to do their job well.
This type of software can be expensive, but if resources are an issue, there
are free, reliable options available, such as OpenOffice. You could even get
away with using Google Docs if you have to.
The Raiser’s Edge, by Blackbaud, is software geared specifically toward fund-
raising operations; it is quite fancy, and thus coveted by a lot of fundraising
 Effective Frontline Fundraising 41

shops. It does come at a cost, though, and if resources are tight, you can
make do without it.
Other institutions have database software that isn’t geared specifically to-
ward fundraising, but does include fields where development officers can en-
ter and retrieve critical information (solicitation plans, visit notes, and so on).
How you keep your data and records will depend on your resources, but at
the end of the day, you need to make sure that you are keeping your re-
cords accurate and up to date.
Besides budgetary constraints, another question in terms of what type of
database software you will be using is what the rest of your organization
uses, which inevitably raises the question of compatibility.
Records isn’t just a dump site for the data listed earlier. You want a history
of how you’re communicating with donors. The point of having a designated
recordkeeper is to use that person as the conduit for getting information
captured into the database. Granted, this person shouldn’t act as a gate-
keeper, restricting other support staff from accessing or contributing to the
database, but the recordkeeper’s utility is in making sure there are standards
on how to capture, enter, and report on information about individuals, about
the efficacy of certain appeals, and other data.
In the next chapter, I explore the role and importance of records at greater
length. For now, trust that it is impossible to have too much data on pros-
pects. In addition to their personal information, you will want information
that clarifies and explains their relationship with your organization to date.
This type of information should include answers to the following questions:

How much has this person given to your organization in the past?

Has this person made good on their pledges historically?

Has this person requested not to be contacted by any particu-
lar means?

Who from your organization has contacted this person? For what
purpose? What was the outcome of that contact? Was it an in-
person visit, a phone call, or an e-mail? Was it possible to catch the
donor’s mood or personality on that visit?

When has this prospect visited your organization?

Which events has this prospect attended in the past?

Does this person volunteer for you?
The more data you have on someone, the more prepared you can be, and
the less likely you are to get caught off guard (see the section on disaster
stories in the next chapter), when you do contact a given donor.
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
Among our ancient mountains,
And from our lovely vales,
Oh! let the prayer re-echo,
God Bless the Prince of Wales!
With heart and voice awaken
Those minstrel strains of yore,
Till Britain's name and glory
Resound from shore to shore.

[Chorus] Among our ancient mountains,

And from our lovely vales,
Oh! let the prayer re-echo,
God Bless the Prince of Wales

Should hostile bands or danger

E'er threaten our fair Isle,
May God's strong arm protect us,
May Heav'n still on us smile.
Above the Throne of England
May fortune's star long shine!
And round its sacred bulwarks
The olive branches twine.

Among our ancient mountains, etc.

GOD SAVE THE KING.

 God save our gracious King,
Long live our noble King,
God save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King!

Thy choicest gifts in store,

On him be pleas'd to pour,
Long may he reign.
May he defend our laws,
And ever give us cause,
To sing with heart and voice,
God save the King!

SAMPLE PROGRAMME OF ATHLETIC SPORTS.

 Throwing the life line Open.

Patrol drill (demonstration) Curlews.

Fire-lighting competition Wolves v. Bulls.

Physical drill or ju jitsu (demonstration) Ravens.

Dragging insensible men race Lions v. Curlews.

Basket ball (final ties) Patrols.

Deer-stalking Wolves.

Spotty face Bulls.

Shoot out Ravens v. Lions.

Bang the bear Curlews.

Cockfighting Wolves v. Ravens.

French and English tug of war Birds v. Beasts.

Whale hunt All patrols.

In place of Challenge Cups it is well to have Challenge Banners. Each

scout in the patrol that wins a banner should receive a small copy of
the flag to keep as a memento.

NON-SCOUTING GAMES.

Useful for Evenings in the Club or in Camp.

Nobody's Airship.—Two patrols sit on two forms facing each other,
knees about a foot from those of opposite side. A small air-balloon is
thrown in, both sides pat it with their hands to keep it up in the air
and try to send it far over the heads of their opponents. If it falls to
the ground behind one party that party loses a point. The game is
best of five points.
"Artists."—Players sit round a table, each with paper and pencil.
The right-hand one draws a picture, in separate firm strokes, of an
ordinary figure or head—putting in his strokes in unusual sequence
so that for a long time it is difficult to see what he is drawing. Each
player looks over to see what the man on his right is drawing and
copies it stroke by stroke. When the right-hand artist has finished his
picture, compare all the rest with it.
"Target Ball."—Indoor cricket with a lawn tennis ball, small wooden
bat, and a disc or small target for wicket.
"Circle Ball."—A large circle of players throw lawn tennis ball at one
in the centre.
The object of the player in the centre is to remain "in" as long as
possible without being hit; if he catches the ball in his hands it does
not count as a hit.
Whoever hits him with the ball takes his place.
The player who remains "in" longest wins.
Counting the Words.—Let someone read out half a page from a book,
pronouncing the words with moderate rapidity. As he reads, let the
members of the company try to count his words. The persons who
comes the nearest to the truth in his estimate is judged the victor. It
is astonishing how widely these estimates vary.
Animated Portraits.—Over a door drape a curtain, in the centre of
which is hung a frame through which can be thrust the heads of
various persons chosen from those present. These heads are to be
attired in such a fashion as to represent various well-known
characters, such as Christopher Columbus, Queen Victoria, etc. The
audience are to be informed that they are at liberty to make frank
criticisms on these animated pictures for the purpose of causing a
smile. In case the audience is successful in identifying within a
certain time, the person who represents the picture must pay a fine.
To Fit.—Cut a square opening in a pasteboard, which is placed
prominently in front of the room. Distribute to the members corks of
different sizes. Provide with sharp knives those that are not already
provided. Explain that the task before them is to cut the corks so
that they will fit the square opening, without measuring the opening,
judging entirely by the eye. The one whose cork fits the best wins.
City Chains.—Place the players in two groups facing each other. Each
group must choose a leader, with whom the members of his side
communicate in whispers. In the centre is an umpire, who, with his
watch, gives each side a quarter of a minute, or less, for their
response.
The leader of one side begins by naming a city, such as New York.
Within the prescribed time the leader of the opposite side must
name a city beginning with the last letter of New York, as
Kalamazoo; and so it proceeds, each leader using the wits of all in
his group to assist his own.
When a leader fails to respond in time, the opposite leader chooses
one player from his opponent's side, and in his turn starts a new
chain. The game can be played also with the names of famous
persons, but this is harder.
A Memory Game.—In order to play this game successfully, it is
necessary that the list of words and sentences given below be in the
memory of one of the players, who acts as leader. This leader,
turning to his next neighbour remarks, "One old owl." He turns to his
neighbour, and gives the same formula. So it passes around the
circle till it comes to the leader again, who repeats it, and adds the
formula, "Two tantalising tame toads."
So again it goes around, and again, and each time the leader adds a
new formula, until the whole is repeated, up to ten. It is safe to say,
however, that no society will ever get that far. All who forget part of
the formula are dropped from the circle. Here is the whole:

One old owl.

Two tantalising tame toads.
Three tremulous, tremendous, terrible tadpoles.
Four fat, fussy, frivolous, fantastic fellows.
Five flaming, flapping, flamingoes fishing for frogs.
Six silver-tongued, saturnine senators standing stentoriously
shouting, "So-so."
Seven serene seraphs soaring swiftly sunward, singing, "Say,
sisters."
Eight elderly, energetic, effusive, erudite, enterprising editors
eagerly eating elderberries.
Nine nice, neat, notable, neighbourly, nautical, nodding nabobs
nearing northern Normandy.
Ten tall, tattered, tearful, turbulent tramps, talking tumultuously
through tin trumpets.

Post.—This game may be played in a large hall, or out of doors on

the lawn. It is especially adapted to the juniors, and may be so
played as to teach them a great deal of geography. The leader either
marks with chalk, or indicates with his fingers, the outlines of some
mission country. Let it be India, for example. A rough triangle is
fixed, and the places of the prominent mission stations are indicated
by marks, sticks, stones, bushes, or trees, and at each of these
places one of the players is stationed. One player might stand at
Calcutta, one at Bombay, one at Madras, one at Madura, one at
Delhi, etc.
The leader then takes upon himself the name of some prominent
missionary of India—say Bishop Thoburn; then, declaring that
Bishop Thoburn wants to go from Calcutta to Madras, he attempts to
reach one of those stations while the two occupants thereof are
rapidly changing places. If he succeed in doing this, the player left
out has to take his place as Bishop Thoburn, and in this way the
game proceeds.
Number Groups.—Give each person present a number, printed in large
type on a card which is pinned conspicuously on the breast. The
numbers range from 10 to 24, and so of course there will be many
duplicates. There is a leader, who begins the game by calling in a
loud voice some number, such as 180. Immediately the players as
rapidly as possible arrange themselves in groups, seeking to form a
group the sum of whose numbers will equal 180. As soon as a group
has been thus formed it presents itself to the leader, and to each
member of this successful group is given a slip of paper.
As soon as one group has thus formed 180 and been rewarded, the
half-formed groups are dissolved, since they do not count anything,
and the leader calls out a new number. After this has been tried a
certain number of times, the person that has received the largest
number of slips is adjudged the winner. If you want to make this
game very difficult, use higher numbers, and attach them to the
backs instead of the fronts, of the members.
Their Weight.—This contest will make pleasant material to fill some
interval in your socials. Let the committee previously gather six
articles, as dissimilar as may be in size, shape, and material, but
each weighing a pound. You may take, for instance, a wooden pail, a
tin pan, a piece of lead. Call out different members of the company,
and request them to arrange these six articles in the order of their
weight. Of course, almost every one will think the large article to be
the heaviest.

BASKET BALL.

This is a game something like football, which can be played in a

room or limited space. A small football is used, but it is never to be
kicked. It is only to be thrown or patted with the hands. Kicking or
stopping the ball with the foot or leg is not allowed. The ball may be
held in the hands, but not hugged close to the body, nor may it be
carried for more than two paces. All holding, dashing, charging,
shouldering, tripping, etc., is forbidden; and there is a penalty of a
free throw to the opposite side from the fifteen foot mark at the net,
which forms the goal. The net is hung up about ten feet above the
ground on a post, tree, or wall, so that the ball can be thrown into it.
Opposite each goal a path of fifteen feet long and six feet wide,
beginning immediately under the basket and leading towards the
centre of the ground, is marked out. At the end of this path a circle
is drawn of ten feet diameter. When there is a free throw, the
thrower stands inside this circle, and no player is allowed within it or
within the measured path. Corners, byes, and shies are the same as
in Association football; but in ordinary rooms, with side walls, it is
not necessary to have "out" at the sides. The usual number of
players is four or five a side, and these can be divided into goal-
keeper, back, and three forwards. If there is plenty of room the
number of players could be increased. A referee is required, who
throws up the ball at the start of each half of the game, and also
after each goal. When he throws in, the ball must be allowed to
touch the ground before it is played. With four players a side, 7-1/2
minutes each way is sufficient time; with five a side, ten minutes is
the usual time. A short interval at half time. The net or basket goal
should be about 18 inches diameter at the top and 2 feet deep.

BOOKS TO READ.

"School Games." By T. Chesterton. (Educational Supply Association.)

"New Games and Sports." By H. Alexander. (George Philip & Son.)
"Industrial Games." By Mrs. Aldrich. (Gale & Polden.)
"Social—to Save." (Published in New York.)
"Finger Problems:" Games with String. (Plumbe & Richardson,
Mansfield.)

SUGGESTION FOR A DISPLAY

By two patrols or more, to demonstrate Scoutcraft, bringing in

Drill, Pathfinding, Camping, Pioneering, Life-saving, Hygiene, etc.

Can be performed out of doors or in a big arena.

Improved by incidental music.

Enter advanced scout, left, finding his way by the map, noticing
landmarks, and looking for sign. He crosses the arena and
disappears, right, unless it is a wide, outdoor space, when he
remains at a distance, squatting, on the look-out.
Enter scouts, left, in patrol formation, followed by second patrol
in close formation. Scoutmaster halts them. One scout
semaphores to advanced scout, "We camp here. Keep good look-
out." Patrol leaders drill their patrols at quick, smart drill for
about three minutes by whistle or hand signal, etc. (Page 203.)
Camp: Break off and form camp.
One patrol makes camp-loom (page 163) and weaves a straw
mat 4 feet wide 6 feet long, and makes a lean-to frame (page
148) or tent frame, with scout staves, and with the mat form a
lean-to shelter.
The other patrol makes a camp grate or kitchen (page 159 or
165), and lights fire. It then makes tent frame of staves (page
371), and makes tent with canvas squares (page 371).
One patrol commences cooking, making dough in coat, etc. The
scouts of the other give themselves physical exercises, such as
body-twisting (page 229—page 237). Clean teeth with sticks
(page 216).
 Scouts' War Dance: All fall in and carry out Scouts' War Dance
(page 56), combined with Follow My Leader (page 375). Just
towards the end the dance is interrupted by an
Alarm: Shots heard without (right). Alarm signal given by leaders
(page 203). Smoke-fire made, alarm signal sent up by one of the
patrols, while the other throws down tent and shelter, cuts
lashings, and distributes the staves to scouts. One patrol then
doubles out in extended formation (right) towards the firing.
Sentry staggers in, and falls. One scout attends to him. Second
patrol follows the first at a double in close formation. A scout
returns from right carrying a wounded one on his shoulder;
bandages him. Another scout drags in a wounded one (see
pages 289 and 306). Firing ceases; both patrols
Return, cheerful in having driven off the enemy.
One patrol makes stretcher with staves and tent-canvases.
The other tidies camp ground, puts out fire, etc.
Parade and march off. Union Jack in front. Then scoutmaster,
followed by one patrol; second patrol carrying one sick man on
crossed hands, the other on stretcher.

The whole scene should be frequently and thoroughly rehearsed

beforehand.
It must all be carried out as smartly and quickly as possible, without
pauses. Everybody doing something, helping the others, never
standing idle.
It is well to have a short explanatory story on the programme, so
that the public understand what it is all about. Such as this:

The Explorers.
A troop of scouts, with an advanced scout finding the way, are
exploring a strange country. They halt. A little drill, and then form
camp. While food is preparing they gain an appetite by physical
exercise and indulgence in a war dance.
The alarm is given and signalled. The camp successfully defended.
The wounded cared for, and the expedition continues on its way.

TRUE SCOUTING STORIES.

Interesting examples of the great value of scouting have, of course,

occurred many times. Here are a few—unavoidably omitted from a
previous part of "Scouting for Boys."
Captain Stigand in "Scouting and Reconnaissance in Savage
Countries" gives the following instances of scouts reading important
meaning from small signs.
When he was going round outside his camp one morning he noticed
fresh spoor of a horse which had been walking. He knew that all his
horses only went at a jog-trot, so it must have been a stranger's
horse.
So he recognised that a mounted scout of the enemy had been
quietly looking at his camp in the night.
Coming to a village in Central Africa from which the inhabitants had
fled, he could not tell what tribe it belonged to till he found a
crocodile's foot in one of the huts, which showed that the village
belonged to the Awisa tribe, as they eat crocodiles, and the
neighbouring tribes do not.
A man was seen riding a camel over half a mile away. A native who
was watching him said, "It is a man of slave blood." "How can you
tell at this distance." "Because he is swinging his leg. A true Arab
rides with his leg close to the camel's side."
General Joubert, who was Commander-in-Chief of the Boer Army in
the Boer War, 1900, told me (some years before that) that in the
previous Boer War, 1881, it was his wife who first noticed the British
troops were occupying Majuba Mountain. The Boers were at that
time camped near the foot of the mountain, and they generally had
a small party of men on the top as a look-out. On this particular day
they had intended moving away early in the morning so the usual
picquet had not been sent up on to the mountain.
While they were getting ready to start, Mrs. Joubert, who evidently
had the eyes of a scout, looked up and said, "Why, there is an
Englishman on the top of Majuba!" The Boers said "No—it must be
our own men who have gone up there, after all." But Mrs. Joubert
stuck to it and said, "Look at the way he walks, that is no Boer—it is
an Englishman." And so it was; she was right. An English force had
climbed the mountain during the night, but by the stupidity of this
man showing himself up on the sky-line their presence was
immediately detected by the Boers who, instead of being surprised
by them, climbed up the mountain unseen under the steep crags
and surprised the British, and drove them off with heavy loss.
An officer lost his field-glasses during some manoeuvres on the
desert five miles from Cairo and he sent for the native trackers to
look for them.
They came and asked to see the tracks of his horse; so the horse
was brought out and led about so that they could see his footprints.
These they carried in their minds and went out to where the
manoeuvres had been: there, among the hundreds of hoof marks of
the cavalry and artillery, they very soon found those of the officer's
horse, and followed them up wherever he had ridden, till they found
the field-glasses lying where they had dropped out of their case on
the desert.
These trackers are particularly good at spooring camels. To anyone
not accustomed to them the footmark of one camel looks very like
that of any other camel, but to a trained eye they are all as different
as people's faces, and these trackers remember them very much as
you would remember the faces of people you had seen.
About a year ago a camel was stolen near Cairo. The police tracker
was sent for and shown its spoor. He followed it for a long way until
it got into some streets where it was entirely lost among other
footmarks. But the other day, a year later, this police tracker
suddenly came on the fresh track of this camel; he had remembered
its appearance all that time. It had evidently been walking with
another camel whose footmark he knew was one which belonged to
a well-known camel thief. So without trying to follow the tracks
when they got into the city he went with a policeman straight to the
man's stable and there found the long-missing camel.

CORRECTIONS.

Owing to difficulties in getting out this handbook punctually in

fortnightly parts, I am afraid a number of inaccuracies have crept in,
which I hope you will excuse.
These are some of them:

Page 45.—In the colour for the "Wolf" patrol, for "Yellow" read
"Yellow and Black."
" 171.—For "Mr. Seton Thompson" read "Mr. Thompson Seton."
" 188 (line 19).—For "365 feet" read "365 yards."
" 202.—Sign Y read semaphore
" 259.—For "Self-Employment" read "Self-Improvement."
" 267 (line 19).—Heading "Luck" should be the heading of the
next paragraph, before the words "If you," etc.
" 281 (line 8).—For "we will" read "you must."
" 296 (last line).—For "Two Scouts in Mafeking" read
"Marksmanship." Colonial boys think more of their rifle shooting
than of their games. See page 322.

(Pictures from "Sketches in Mafeking," by the Author. By

permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.)

" 301 (last line).—For "An actual experience of mine" read "An
incident in Kashmir. See page 230."
" 332 (last line but one).—For "made known" read "remedied."
" 334 (line 21).—After "we are" insert "or should be." After King
add "for the good of our country."

READY MAY 1st. IN BOOK FORM.

Scouting
for Boys.

A HANDBOOK FOR INSTRUCTION

IN

GOOD CITIZENSHIP

BY

Lieut.-General R. S. S. BADEN-POWELL, C.B., F.R.G.S.

Price 2s. Cloth Bound.

Published by HORACE COX, Windsor House,

Bream's Buildings, London, E.C.

Copyrighted 1908. All rights reserved.

 All communications regarding Boy Scouts should
be addressed to—

THE QUARTERMASTER,
Boy Scouts,
Bedford Mansions,
Henrietta Street,
LONDON, W.C.

This Part VI. of "Scouting for Boys" is the concluding one of the
Series.
The book has met with unexpected success.
Its work of imparting suggestions and knowledge of Peace-Scouting
will therefore now be continued and amplified in
THE SCOUT,
a weekly newspaper, at One Penny, which will appear on 14th April,
and every succeeding Thursday.
"The Scout" is founded by Lieut.-General Baden-Powell, with a view
to keeping touch among the very large number of those already
interested in Boys' Scouting in every part of the country, and also as
appealing to all British young men and lads of honour, grit, and
spirit.
The founder will write in its pages each week, and the services of a
number of known writers have been secured.
THE SCOUT
will be fully illustrated and up-to-date. Its publication will be in the
hands of
Messrs. C. ARTHUR PEARSON LTD.
Transcriber's Notes:
Archaic and colloquial spelling and punctuation was
retained.
Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SCOUTING FOR
BOYS ***

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