Stuart R. Grover, Ph.D., is president and CEO of the Collins Group, Inc., whose motto is “Excellence in Fundraising.” The Collins Group is a fundraising consulting firm in the Pacific Northwest, specializing in capital, endowment, and major gifts campaigns for a variety of non-profits. Grover addressed the Committee on Foundations meeting in Seattle in March 2001, and so impressed the audience with his ability to speak articulately and wittily on a subject that scares or bores most people that he was invited to speak at the APsaA Meeting of Members in December 2004. Here are excerpts from his address.
It is my privilege to talk today about the joy of giving and the joy of asking; the wonders of caritas, or charity; philanthropy, the love of humanity; and tzedakah, the rebalancing of justice. My message is that the reluctance to ask for support of those things you regard as important is misplaced.
Not to give others the chance to help is possibly to deprive them of a joyful experience and, by extension, to deny yourself a chance for a very special type of joy as well.
Your work directly benefits people, as you ease the lives of individuals, smooth relations among families, and allow people to lead more productive, focused lives as workers and citizens. You free people from crippling issues that would otherwise interfere with their ability to function effectively.
Many of you engage in analytically related activities outside of your practices. You pursue research, you offer reduced fee therapy, you offer therapy to special populations, you offer education programs to the broader public.
These activities cannot occur without charitable financial support — without money. This money does not come from nowhere, nor does it come without effort. Most of all it does not come without the involvement of those people who are at the center of these activities. There are three conditions needed to effect the joy of giving:
An activity that benefits some significant number of people — the cause.
A meaningful number of people who recognize the benefit of the activity — the donors.
Individuals willing to witness on behalf of the cause to influence the donors — the fundraisers.
Some of you may doubt the possibility of psychoanalysis and related fields attracting charitable gifts. This is wrong.
The key, however, is community benefit, not guild benefit. Except among yourselves, you cannot raise money to save the profession. You must be able to quantify and qualify how non-analysts benefit from your activities. Who, how, and how much are the questions you must be prepared to answer.
Photo by Jacques Gourguechon
[Cultivation begins with] sharing ideas with people through different forums — lectures, dinner parties, requests to help publicize a program. You are the keeper of the mission in a way the community members never can be. For many gifts, there may be three to five contacts, some in person, some not.
It is a process that, like anything else, takes time and effort.
People generally start with a small targeted gift. Then they may move to a larger gift for a larger project. … The process must be ongoing and repetitive. …
The most important and effective fund-raising is done by volunteers who receive no direct benefit from the support they raise. These are fundraisers who believe in a cause enough to support it and then to ask others they know to join them in this support. They are the leading citizens of each community, the men and women who lead efforts to build museums and theaters, expand hospitals, and develop programs that change peoples lives. These are the people who are working to rebuild lives here in New York. The true fundraisers are social heroes — doing difficult tasks disinterestedly but with passion, offering their time, talent and treasure to make the world better, more caring, more loving, more just.
How does this process work? What can your part be, when you are bound by strict protocols and codes of ethics — how can you participate? It is a four-step process.
[First,] define a project and delineate who it benefits and how. Donors do not contribute to buildings or endowments; they support the programs and the outcomes those buildings or endowments create. They support changed lives and stronger families. They give to help heal.
They support what matters to them and to those things that affect them. … People give to repay, they give from altruism, from devotion, from a sense of responsibility, a need to connect to community, a belief that their gift will leverage major desirable change. They give because it brings them joy and fulfillment.
Whom do your activities benefit?
Individuals who can lead normal lives.
Their loved ones, who benefit from their happiness.
Their employers, who get to utilize their untrammeled talents.
Insurance companies, whose claims go down.
So the first step is to identify a program and its benefit and to define what is needed to bring it to reality and what precisely it will achieve. Work with your foundations to establish a financial goal and clear and compelling justification for the goal.
The second step is for you to give. You already give your talent, your energy.
But for a project to gain support from the beneficiaries, you must show it matters to you. This means that members of the foundation board and of the psychoanalytic association must give first.
How much? From each person, as much as it takes for it to be significant to them related to the scope of the project. If your foundation is seeking $100,000 for a program, the insiders — the family — should probably give 20–30 percent in gifts that will range from a few hundred dollars to $5,000 or more. Your gifts provide you with the moral authority to request support from others — you are not asking them to do more than you did yourself.
[The third step is to] witness. What you can do most effectively is talk about the program you're seeking support for. You can explain how it works, what it does, and why it works. You can provide examples of success with appropriate safeguards for privacy. After cultivation, if you're seeking funds from foundations or corporations, you can actually request the support. If it's with people you find it inappropriate to ask, the members of the foundation can request the gift after you have established the case for support.
Why am I emphasizing personal contact through cultivation and request? Because it works. And it works better and more ethically and with greater integrity than any other type of fundraising.
It allows a donor to have all of his/her questions answered. It is clear and straightforward because it focuses on charitable intent and it is not transactional the way events are, where people get something tangible. True giving comes from understanding and caring.
The other reason[s] face-to-face fundraising is more ethical [are] cost and efficiency.
In general direct mail receives a response of 0.5–2 percent with a cost of more than 50 cents on the dollar. Many mailings cost as much to do as they receive back.
Telephone fundraising is more effective, despite its irritations — but still only 10 percent of calls result in gifts, and the cost is often very high. A recent survey showed a minimum of 30 cents on the dollar, up to a maximum of 90 cents.
Events are fun, but people are having fun, not focusing on your mission. I've been at a Freud's birthday party where eighty analysts and their friends danced to a Klezmer band. And I've attended a fashion show that was followed by a discussion of changing styles from a Freudian point of view. I loved both, but there wasn't much discussion of mission or vision or how analysis helped people.
Face-to-face requests succeed the great majority of the time. My company has worked with more than sixty major campaigns over the past decade, in which the organizations raised more than $500 million. Volunteers have made thousands of calls face to face. More than 80 percent of the relationships engendered in these calls have resulted in gifts. And the cost of the gifts is very modest overall: More than 92 percent went to the projects, with the other 8 percent paying fundraising staff, consultants, materials and for the lunches with donors.
Face-to-face fundraising allows total focus on mission. You are responding to the needs and benefits of the donor. You are telling him/her the core of what your program does.
The last step for you is stewardship. Donors need to know that their gifts have been received, appreciated, and used according to their intent. A cordial thank you note that you write by hand is always good. A receipt from the foundation is legally required for gifts over $250. And a report on outcomes is expected as well. How did the project turn out? How many people were touched? What was the social benefit? Did school dropouts decrease? Did stutterers gain fluency and enjoy greater career success? Did new research get applied effectively to solve a pressing problem?
You are the ones who can communicate these outcomes, whether by a note, a newsletter article, or a phone call, or sometimes by a group luncheon or at a brown-bag workshop.
The more a donor knows about outcomes of gifts, the more likely they are to give again. The more connected they feel, the greater the chance they will continue to support you.
Your work is incomplete until the circle is closed and people can be certain that their gift is well used.