Thomas Wolf - How to Connect with Donors and Double the Money You Raise

Foreword by Hodding Carter

A DIVISION OF PALMER WOLF CORPORATION

HOW TO CONNECT

WITH DONORS AND

DOUBLE THE MONEY

YOU RAISE

WolfWorks

8A Francis Avenue

Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

Copyright 2021 by Thomas Wolf

All rights reserved

No portion of this book may be reproduced or used in any form

or by any means, without prior written permission from the

publisher. Exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in

published reviews or in other publications with proper attribution

including author and title.

ISBN Number 978-1-7370016-0-7

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In 2010, Jerry Cianciolo of Emerson and Church publishers asked me to write a book on fundraising, one that was engaging and could be read in an hour. I wondered how I could possibly do it. Fundraising is a vast subject with many technicalities and details. The solution, Jerry suggested, was to tell stories.

Jerry had lots of experience publishing 1-hour books and I knew from my own practice that he was right about stories. Past participants in my fundraising workshops would say things like: I took a workshop with you years ago and I still remember the story you told about Boz and your mother. (That story, by the way, is in this book.)

Writing the book turned out to be fun. I had told many of the stories in workshops and classes but I had never written them down. Now here they were for many more people to enjoy. The publication was well received and I moved on to other more serious projects. So I was quite surprised when the staff of Philanthropy University asked me whether I might be interested in developing an on-line fundraising course based on the book. Students from around the globe would be signing up.

I could hardly believe it. A whole course based on these few stories? Would people be interested? Indeed they were. Tens of thousands of students in over 100 countries have enrolled over the years and as of this writing the course is still available through Philanthropy University, a program of the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley.

So once again, on the tenth anniversary of the original publication, I offer How to Connect with Donors and Double the Money You Raise . For some people, it will be all they will want to read about fundraising. But for others who may wish to go into these topics in more depth, I recommend my textbook, Managing a Nonprofit Organization, with its more extensive chapters on philanthropy and fundraising mechanics or some of my other books listed on the final page. In the meanwhile, sit back and enjoy reading stories about the successes, the trials, and the tribulations of this long-time fundraiser. Then go forth and develop your own. Who knows, in time you may write such a book and I will be one of your enthusiastic readers!

Thomas Wolf

2021

When it comes to money, it is easier to give than it is to seek. You need look no further than my record as a fundraiser to prove the point. Man and boy, I have been very, very bad at it, whether asking local merchants to support my senior class trip decades ago or asking the Ford Foundation to support an international exchange program in the midst of the Cold War. Grinding my teeth with fear and loathing, I failed far more often than I succeeded.

While it is cold comfort, it turns out that I have not been alone. Asking someone else for money is an unnatural act for many of us, a fact of human nature that complicates life for nonprofit organizations. Soliciting money, whether from friends, strangers, or near-anonymous institutions, is what they must do to survive. Doing it well is not something that comes naturally.

To navigate this conundrum, you could not ask for a better guide than the pages that follow. Tom Wolfs distilled wisdom about connecting with donors comes from a man who has been a fundraising professional, a nonprofit leader, and a foundation executive. That could have meant this slim volume would be as boring as dry toast or as stimulating as sermons in an unknown tongue. Instead, it is warm, witty, insightful, immensely practical and engrossing from start to finish.

My one regret is that Tom did not write it long ago, when I was beginning a long avocational career as a man with a tin cup. But its never too late to learn, not even for me, when your teacher is as grounded in his subject as he is passionate about its objectives.

Transparency requires that I say that the Wolfs and the Carters have been friends for over a half century. As a result, I recognize many of the people and stories that stud his chapters and illustrate his points.

But even if I didnt, they would resonate, as they probably will with most of you. Whatever our backgrounds, we are likely to have been in similar situations, to have known our own versions of Tom Wolfs exemplars, and absorbed the lessons of cautionary tales akin to his.

And that is his central point. When it comes to fundraising, what is crucial to the outcome are the human relationships that inform it. His advice begins and ends with a compelling proposition: Fundraising at root is all about human beings and their interests, not mission statements and flow charts. Its about connections established over time and discourse based on mutual interest.

And therein lies the secret of Tom Wolfs accomplishment. A human being talks to us from the pages of a how-to treatise. He shares triumphs and flops, misunderstandings and insights. He does not lecture; he illustrates. He does not detach from complexity; he plunges into it and calmly suggests ways out.

If you pull back just a little from the narrative flow, you understand something else. Tom Wolfs stated mission is to help us improve our ability to persuade people to give money to worthy causes. This, to repeat, he does to extraordinary effect by enlisting a natural storytellers skills to give life to his rare depth of practical experience. But while his talking points are shaped to a vocational end, they are no less a roadmap to perfecting human interaction and human connection. To put it another way, the cultivated civility and consideration that he commends to the fundraiser is the sine qua non for the reconstruction of a truly civil society in our deeply fractured nation.

In all of this, I hear his mothers voice and see her face. Irene Wolf made everyone who met her believe they were of special merit; believing it, they were. And I see and hear no less my own mother, so akin to Irene and so much of the same generation though of radically different background and experience. Theirs was an outward manifestation of an inner reality: each believed in the intrinsic worth of others. Not coincidentally, they were extraordinarily successful in creating, guiding, and sustaining nonprofit organizations, dreaming big dreams and finding the money to give them life.

Few of us can measure up to Irene Wolfs incandescent spirit. Most of us will never have Tom Wolfs wealth of experience. But the fact-based, situation-located advice that he offers, its message arising from his commitment to our shared humanity, is there for the taking. Put to use, it can change fundraising from a chore to an inspired calling.