Becoming an Agent of Philanthropy

When I graduated from college, I aspired to be a journalist. I ascribed to muckraking journalist Peter Finley Dunne’s assertion that the role of a newspaper was “to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

Yes, I was that classical “angry young man” determined to take on injustice and deflate the pomposity of power and privilege. But, through a series of unexpected twists and turns, including the birth of our first child, I ended up in university communications. From there, several bosses tried to nudge me into fundraising, which I thought was a ghastly suggestion. I saw it, at best, as cajoling the clubby and, at worst, arm-twisting the reluctant or milking the geriatric. When I was assured that my values and skills were what the field required, I put my toe in the water. It wasn’t long before I began to see what I had not been privileged to see before – the best of humanity. 

What impressed me the most were those living well below their means - often in modest homes, wearing modest clothes and driving modest cars – convinced that they had more than enough for themselves and should be sharing “their good fortune” with others.  The more of them I met, the more I softened and the more I realized how fortunate I was to work with them. 

The worst part of fundraising was not fundraising itself, it was those times and places where I encountered institutional expectations that could be summarized as, “Get as much as you can, as fast as you can, by offering as little as you can from as many as you can.” 

I believed in the institutions I represented and accepted the responsibility of producing results but I chafed at that kind of thinking. I had been changed by philanthropy; I was not about to undermine it. I was not about to hustle those I had come to admire, if not love. It was not just a matter of personal ethics; I knew that approach would produce the most disappointing results.

There are lots of ways to raise money. Some of them appear to work well in some places at some times. But the only true measure of fundraising effectiveness can be found in the answer to this question, “Has it caused good people to want to continue to give again and again, and as their means increase, to give more?” 

If you’re losing donors, you’re doing something wrong and that is often in the way you acquire them – through the fastest, most impersonal, most generic means. 

As we witness a decline in philanthropy and learn the major reason that people stop giving is that they were asked too often by the same organization, I wonder when we ask, “Are we suffering the consequences of asking too much of the best of humanity with too little to show for it?” 

What will cause more and more institutional leaders and fundraisers and board members to say to say to more and more donors, “We’ve changed, thanks to you.  We're not just fundraisers, we’re agents of philanthropy and we want to find ways of working together to reinforce and replenish the immense good we see in you.”