For the past nearly 30 years I have dedicated my career to trying to understand how to move people from passivity to doing something they wouldn’t normally do: give their money to someone else. I have specialized in the early stages of giving because, to me, it holds the greatest challenge and mystery.
When I first started as a student caller at my alma mater in 1997, I was learning how to fundraise like a line worker at a factory: make the call, ask these questions in this order, ask for money at these fixed levels, and follow the structure.
Now, here is the secret I have held for many years—I wasn’t a very good fundraiser. I was a very good line worker. Many of my peers were better than I was, mostly because they were more comfortable varying from the structure and having authentic conversations.
This commitment to the process has served me well for many years. However, embedded in my student caller roots is this idea that we are in a volume business. For nearly three decades, I have been in that volume business: we secure a donor’s gift at the lowest cost point possible. Throughout my experiences, though, I have always worked to bring greater science to the art of fundraising—to shift, in some way, the equilibrium and bring the framework of efficiency to balance the relational art of our work.
Today, I have become concerned that the very nature of what makes me good at this work may be a part of what is wrong with this space. In our pursuit of annual effectiveness, have we created a generation of indifferent alumni?
