Fundraiser as Philanthropic Advocate in Our Commonwealth

His eyes alert, though bloodshot, his face red with philanthropic passion and habitual boozing, Phil Cubeta, pro bono Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, pops up naked in his Dumpster to harangue his fellow philanthropic advisors and fellow citizens as follows....

Questions for major gift and planned gift officers:

• Have you ever been close to closing a large gift only to have the donor's advisor kill it?
• When you ask for a large gift do you do so with a full understanding of the gift's impact on the donor's overall financial situation and his or her other goals for self, family, and society?
• Do you always make it a point to engage the donor's advisors early in the gift cultivation process?
• When the donor plans his or her overall financial and estate plan, do you have a seat at the table?

Now, reflect on your answers.   Do you see a pattern? You push on the donor to close the gift. She needs advice. She asks advice from her advisors. The advisors know more about the donor's situation than you do. They have a seat at the table; you do not. They kill the deal to protect the donor, or for some other reason. And you are left frustrated and in the dark.

Why Advisors Kill Charitable Proposals

• "Not invented here." A trusted advisor who is not involved early in the gift cultivation process may by reflex kill a deal simply because he or she did not think of it first, or feels threatened.
• An advisor who has done a good estate or financial plan for the client may clearly see that the gift as proposed will upset those prior plans and leave the client's other goals under funded.
• An advisor may see that while the gift size is feasible, the proposed structure is not optimal.
• The advisor may be paid in part by money under management. The proposed gift may reduce the total money managed by the advisor and hence the advisor's own income.
• (On the other hand, the proposed gift may require redoing the donor's overall plans and may drive significant fee income, particularly for fee-based planners and legal advisors.)

Counsels of Perfection for Fundraisers

• Begin with philanthropic motivation and education.
• Rather than trying to close the gift, suggest that you might contact the donor's trusted advisor to discuss the possibility of a gift and to see how best it might be structured, all things considered.
• Go to advisors with a range of ideas for gifts now and later.
• Seek your place at the table as a team mate.
• Bring to the table not just your own cause, but the overall responsibility to speak for philanthropic motivation, for the benefits of giving for the family, for the positive effect on children, for the meaning and purpose it gives the donor's life.
• Bring to the table whatever specific gift proposals (Charitable Trust, Outright Gift, Charitable Lead Trust, Bequest) you might have, but also listen to other scenarios and ideas from the advisors. (Educate yourself about as many of the tools as possible, and try to learn at least some of the financial and estate planning lingo that goes with them.)
• See as the ideal outcome not just a gift to you. See as the ideal outcome the best possible financial and estate plan that works for the donor, family, and society, by the donor's own best judgment - a judgment illuminated by the noble considerations you have kept uppermost.

Practical Tips

• Do not stop doing whatever works for you now.
• Add this multi-disciplinary approach as a long term project.
• Recognize that the process recommended here can take 12-18 months to close from the time that the donor first sits down with advisors.  (It can be much faster than that, but the larger the case, the longer the planning time, generally.)
• As the larger gifts mature from that process, spend more time on the larger gifts and less time on your current giving process.
• Seek out the best advisors in town. Have lunch. Build bridges. Make friends.
• If you don't have a Board of Professional Advisors, start one.
• Consider events for advisors. In those events elevate the advisor's own vision from tools and techniques to vision, values, meaning, purpose.
• Make referrals to advisors. That is how you get get referrals (or more referrals) from advisors.

Expanding your Donor Pool

• In every town and city there are high profile big money people who are philanthropic. All nonprofits have then on their list of prospective donors. But take a walk down Main Street. Every small business that is successful is worth something. What do you think a lumber yard goes for? A McDonald's franchise? A car dealer? A Roto-Rooter franchise? A plumbing supply store?
• From experience, I can assure you that the most successful life insurance agents, and tax planners in your town are making their living working with Main Street closely held businesses.
• These businesses are not liquid. The owner can't write a big check today. But as the owners consider their exit strategies and their estate plans, they sit down with advisors to plan. In those plans philanthropy can and should play a big role in reducing taxes (income tax and estate tax). Philanthropy can also provide the owner with something productive and fun to do when he or she goes through "the founder's transition," passing the business on to kids, or selling it to outsiders.
• The time to make the gift plan is before not after the business interest is sold. Why pay capital gains tax when it can be avoided by selling the property in a charitable trust, for example?
• So, as you call on the advisors in town, ask them about these Main Street Millionaires. Offer to do client briefings for them or client appreciation nights.
• If you know your business, the advisor will see that together you and the advisor can bring real value to these Main Street clients. You won't push your charity, you will push for wise and inspired planning with an eye to benefits for self, family and society.
• Your nonprofit will surface naturally as the client gets to know you and becomes a small donor, a volunteer, an active participant, and then a major donor as the business goes through its once in a lifetime transition.
• Given that the Boomer are in their fifties, and given how many Boomers need this kind of work, you might find yourself getting in early on a major demographic "wealth wave."

Thought Leaders

• How many of the words in English have you invented? None, right? So too each of the ideas presented here is adapted from those who know more. Below are a few others who are thinking along the lines above, and putting the ideas into practice.
• Charles Collier Senior Philanthropic Advisor at Harvard and author of Wealth in Families (a fine book to give to donors).
• Tracy Gary, "Donor Diva," and author of Inspired Philanthropy.
• Legacy Companies. Started by the late Scott Fithian to whom many of us in this field are deeply endebted. Trains advisors from the financial services businesses. Scott and his brother Todd collaborated on an excellent book just now published, The Right Side of the Table: Where Do You Sit in the Mind of the Affluent?
• Randy Ottinger, son of a Congressman, philanthropist via his family's foundation, Harvard MBA, social venturer, financial services executive, and all round visionary, Randy sees the field of giving from many perspectives, not least of which is that of a human being finding meaning in his own life through active giving and civic leadership.  See his Beyond Success: Building a Personal, Financial and Philanthropic Legacy.
• H. Peter Karoff, founder of The Philanthropic Initiative, and recently the author of The World We Want: New Dimensions in Philanthropy and Social Change, containing stories of many donors whose strategic philanthropy is an example for others to emulate. I blog for Peter here, and am grateful to him for his leadership. He has been a role model for many of us.
• Dr. Amy Kass, a teacher of classic texts at the University of Chicago for many years, now at Hudson Institute. Dr. Kass is editor of the marvelous collection of literary, religious, and philosophical readings on giving, The Perfect Gift: The Philanthropic Imagination in Poetry and Prose. Amy has wisely chosen readings many of which are are only a page to three pages in length. Each could spark a conversation with a donor, or serve as the "text" in a small group discussion that would seque into conversations about what giving means to those present.
• The Heritage Institute. Trains financial advisors and fundraisers in the spirit of this post. See Beating the Midas Curse by Perry Cochell and Rod Zeeb to get a sense of the process Heritage Institute teaches.
• Jay Hughes, without a doubt the leading thinker at the tip of the pyramid where wealth, financial and legal services, and high culture intersect. If hegemony is a good thing, or a new version of aristocracy, here is how the wealthy will accomplish it with our help: James Hughes, Family: The Compact Among Generations, and James Hughes, Family Wealth--Keeping It in the Family: How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations.

Philanthropy and Democracy: The Role of the Fundraiser in This Our Commonwealth

• Speaking of Jay Hughes, I constantly harp on the elitist, dynastic "suck up," or Machiavelian, or Courtier-like, element in his work. (Takes one to know one, really.) I see him as a serious thinker, and also see his ideology and the rapid propagation of it among advisors and wealthy families as a serious threat to democracy. But then again so were Aristotle (Morals Tutor to Alexander the Great), Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and more recent political figures I will refrain from naming.
• Concentrated dynastic wealth with a lock on the language of high culture, or covered in the mantle of religion and patriotism, and with preferential access to those in power, is a nightmare, not a dream to me, though it is a dream I have partly lived (as an over-educated super-prep who figured he would be teaching the rising Jay Hugheses all about moral philosophy around an oak table in some Ivy Classroom) and from which I awakened in a Dumpster, born again, though not necessarily for the better.
• By way of caveat: I prefer a good, well educated Aristocrat, like Jay, to an Oligarch, Plutocrat, or Mafioso Godfather. I don't mean to run down Aristocracy in comparison with Tyranny, or even Anarchy, just to put in a plea for representative democracy, even at this late date, when the game is about over and the victors are dividing the spoils, whether it be the newspapers, the internet, the airwaves, our legislatures, or anything else that can be bought.
• I see philanthropy, that is, social change philanthropy, as does Tracy Gary, as the best in our American tradition - call it largess, or magnanimity, or largeness of soul, or identifying with the underdog, or call it the living ferment of democracy. In stressing Main Street philanthropy in this post, I mean to gesture from within the high-toned thought world of a Jay Hughes or other suck ups to Dynastic Wealth towards giving from the bottom up, not just the top down.
• Giving from peer to peer, and from blessed to those less blessed is central to the Christian tradition ("Faith, hope and charity and the greatest of these is charity.") Who is our neighbor? Not just those in our gated community. Tsedekah in Judaism and the heart of compassion in Buddhism speak to the centrality of giving in making us successful as well-socialized human beings in whatever spiritual tradition we were raised. As we give so it will be given to us. As we seek grace so our gracious giving is rewarded, whether from on high or from the kingdom within.
• As fundraisers working with all kinds of wealth, blue collar as well as preppy, self made as well as inherited,  religious as well as secular, conservative as well as liberal,  Main Street as well as Wall Street, big money and small, you and your peers are stirring the great stew of democracy, as well as serving your particular organization.
• Out of our differences come a resonant order, as from dissonance comes concord in music. (Concordia discors, the underlying dynamism of open society.) Our gifts and giftedness we bring to the hurly burly of the public square to create a culture and a community where there might have been only a society or a market. Nonprofits are at the center of that enlivened experience of our shared humanity.
• As a fundraiser you serve your organization, but also the donors who make common cause with you. Through you and your organization, the donor serves the larger community to which the donor belongs.
• Your organization may be central to a donor's identity and instrumental in sustaining the world donors want for themselves and their heirs, every bit as much as they might want anything sold in stores or brokered (or betrayed) by government.
• Rich or poor, whatever your role in the great game of wealth, love, and power, stop by the Dumpster any time. What do we owe one another in this our Commonwealth?

....A big garbage bag, full of old books, magazines, stale bread, lemon rinds, coffee grounds, chicken bones, cigarette butts, and beer bottles, ends this oration, burying the speaker before he can beg for spare change, as had been his intention in what was to have been the closing section on "giving back to those less fortunate."