How the Rich Portray Their Lives - The Role of Fundraiser or Advisor as Mirror

What are donors interested in, Jeremy? Helping others? Self-actualization? Honor? Giving back? Making amends? Setting a good example? Doing their duty? Carrying on a family tradition? Responding to those who ask? Expiating a sin? Memorializing a loved one? Repaying a debt? Gaining status? Projecting the self over a wider domain? Doing God's will? Getting measurable results? Getting a tax break? Getting political or social return on investment? For each person, whatever is given, there is a story in which they figure as a protagonist, or sometimes a victim, seldom as a spectator, almost never as perpetrator, or dupe. So too with every con doing a stretch in Leavenworth; so too for every homeless person wandering from out beneath an underpass. So too for every fund-raiser. So too for every busker playing the violin in a subway station. What brought us to this pass? We are always at the crossroads, and as we get older to write the ending so it makes sense of the whole journey becomes more important. All the alibis. Can we get one to stick? The first service a fund-raiser or advisor performs for a donor is to listen to and half-validate the latest alibi, the latest version of "who I am." The hesitation, the deeper question, get the story moving, and the ending has yet to be written.  A major gift may be one of the top 3 or 4 life-actions a person takes, like marriage, or starting a business, or being elected to office.  How can we provide the protagonist a stage on which to act out his or her character and calling or destiny? (So, asks the naked bum, his shoulders shaking with suppressed hilarity. "Lord, what fools the mortals be!" Those who take the vanity of human wishes seriously can read a book on this by Dr. Paul Schervish, The Gospels of Wealth: How the Rich Portray Their Lives. Where is our Goya? A portraitist who so carefully calibrates his satire that his Royal Sitters consider it flattery. )