The Gift of Fundraising

‘Tis the giving season.

Oh not the gift-giving season of Christmas or Hanukkah.

No, all fundraisers know that December is that busy time of year when a wave of gifts wash in before the tax year ends. Better to give where you choose than to give it to Uncle Sam. It can feel a bit transactional at times.

But some days, I am reminded that what I get to do is incredibly important and incredibly meaningful.

I awoke this Christmas Eve morning to an email from the mother of a young woman who lost her life a handful of weeks before she was to graduate from college. Her parents want to create a scholarship in her memory. Together, we will work to establish a legacy that lasts beyond all of our lifetimes to honor this girl whose life was cut too painfully short. To be able to help someone memorialize a child, a sibling, a parent, a professor, a friend is a humbling responsibility. It’s what makes a fundraiser’s job rewarding.

I’m asked from time to time about the most significant gift I’ve ever secured. In some ways, the answer to that is ever-changing. New gifts, new moments happen regularly. But there’s story I tell every time I am asked that question. It’s not about the biggest gift I’ve ever gotten, far from it. But it’s one I will never forget.

Early in my career as a fundraiser, I approached a retired professor about naming an office in honor of his wife. Although it was in a new building, by purpose, the office represented where she worked when they first met decades before. He liked the idea and agreed to make the gift.

We decided that it would be a surprise, that the gift would be announced at a reunion of alumni from the program, people to whom she was very dear. For several weeks, he would stop in my office to chat, to ask how to keep the secret from her… they had never had secrets before. We would agree on what he should tell her that did not cross the line into deception but also didn’t let the cat out of the bag. At the reunion dinner, the gift was announced amid tears and smiles. It was a perfect, special moment.

The next week, she learned she had cancer. A handful of weeks later, she was gone.

On occasion, her husband still stops in my office. Some days, he talks about how happy he is to have made the gift when he did, to have created that memory before illness enveloped them. And he thanks me for bringing the opportunity to him. He thanks me.

People who look at fundraising from the outside in often talk about its similarity to sales. They aren’t wrong; but they aren’t particularly right either. What we do depends upon our ability to build deep, trusting relationships with people, to hear what they say and what they don’t. Donors trust us with something immense, not by virtue of the dollars they are giving but with the intent their gifts fulfill. 

Of course, we work for the organizations that employ us to fill the gaps that plummeting government funding and an aspirational vision for greatness engender. The best among us know that we also work for our donors. Finding ways to help them accomplish their goals, in concert with those of our organizations, allows all of us to create transformative change. It is far from transactional.

At Purdue, and particularly in Liberal Arts, we crack wise about rocket science a lot. As the alma mater to the first and last man to walk on the moon, as well as many other astronauts along the way, it’s not terribly uncommon to bump into a rocket scientist. And we do concede that what we do, fundraising, isn’t rocket science.

But some days, we are reminded that what we do, in a profoundly human way, allows us to reach new heights as well.

Happily Ever ... Whatever

Some people love happy endings.

Not this girl, not so much.

It’s not that I prefer tragic endings, I don’t.

Really, I’m just not a big fan of endings.

When I was little, in elementary school, we went to my grandparents’ home virtually every weekend. My parents would pick us up at the end of the school day on Friday, and we were off. It was about an hour away, and we’d always stay through the weekend before heading home. Every Sunday, as we backed out of the driveway, Mama would stand in the dining room picture window and wave goodbye. And every Sunday, I’d have a painful lump in my throat and I’d fight back the tears, determined that no one else in the car would know I was crying at the end of the weekend. The fact that we would be back again on Friday made no difference. In that moment, the visit was over. And it made me cry.

I was in the sixth grade when I read Gone with the Wind for the first time. It immediately captured my imagination, and I can’t even say how many more times I’ve read it since. There’s a lot to love, but I have no doubt, what I love most of all is the ending… because it doesn’t really end, does it? “After all, tomorrow is another day.” What could be more open-ended than that? It’s perfect.

I’ve wondered sometimes what it means that I love torturous, incomplete endings. In literature, in life, the stories that I can’t turn away from are the ones that make me crazy. They are replete with “what ifs.” What if this moment were different? It changes everything. The challenge of that, of untangling the action, of changing the narrative, that’s what sucks me in. There’s no ending, because in my imagination, it lives on. It twists, it turns, it entertains.

I’m not really a fiction writer. After I read Gone with the Wind for the first time, I wrote a sequel. Why not? The story was begging for it. I still have it. Twenty-something pages of lined notebook paper in cursive… not bad for a 12-year-old. My next foray into fiction didn’t come until a couple of years ago. For more than a year, I wrote a soap opera fan fiction. It was great fun. I had a posse of loyal readers whose feedback fueled my writing. It’s also exactly why I can’t write fiction.

I always thought I was too much of a softie to really write imaginary characters. I knew I wouldn’t have the heart to torture people who I had created and loved to write it well enough. It would make me crazy to make them foolish, to have them do the wrong thing. At the same time, I have no interest in the pablum of happily ever after, of tying it all up with a pretty bow at the end, of not engaging someone’s imagination with something painfully, frustratingly, delightfully entertaining. So, I knew fiction wasn’t my thing.

It’s still not, but now I realize what the real problem is.

I don’t like endings.

The soap fan fic was the perfect thing for me. It’s a soap, a serial, endless. And so I wrote and wrote. I wrote more than 100,000 words. I reached a perfect ending point. For chapter 100, I wrote a beautiful happily ever after. It was great, I was really happy with it. But even wrapped up in that chapter was a promise of more, that it wouldn’t end at happily ever after, because really, what ever does? So I wrote on. It’s dangling now at something like chapter 127. I could write another four or five chapters and put a bow on it. It’s been more than a year now since I touched it. I’m not seeing that bow in its future.

At work, one of my favorite meetings is the post-mortem, the debrief. After an event, we all sit together and talk about what we did. We look back, but it’s really all about looking forward. It’s assessing what we did, so we can decide what to do next. It’s about pushing the bar higher. It’s about a new beginning just ahead. 

It’s continuing the story.

Even though people think they love happy endings, the best ending of all offers the promise of more… because that’s what we all really want most of all.

To be continued…

In Tragedy, Institutions Sustain Us

There was a shooting at Purdue University today.

My alma mater. My employer. My house.

The noon hour had just passed when a text message alert notified us of a shooting in a campus building and told students, faculty, staff, to “shelter in place.” We were in lockdown. Within 10 minutes I confirmed that my daughter, a Purdue sophomore, was in a locked building right next to mine.

Minutes later the calls, texts, emails, Facebook messages began pouring in from Michigan to Florida, DC to California and parts in between. They were more meaningful than I can say. A few were friends, most were members of my family… my Purdue family.

We talk about that a lot in my job. The Purdue family. Boilermaker for life. It has never felt as true as it did today.

Tonight, students will come together for a candlelight vigil across the Mall from the building where the shooting occurred. Tomorrow, there will be no classes, but counselors will be available. It’s a drill that, nationally, feels all too familiar.

I’m generally pretty calm in a crisis; I was conditioned to it at an early age. Today was no exception. But a moment always comes when the crisis is past and reality hits. There was a shooting at Purdue today—in my house, not sadly, tragically elsewhere. Here. My daughter wanted to know why no one was doing more to stop these things from happening. How many more would there be? If it hadn’t been before, today it was cemented as her house. And it had been violated.

There are great debates in this country about higher education, about cost, about value, about MOOCs and online education and cheaper ways of preparing students to be productive members of society. The death of one 20-something at the hands of another 20-something is not the appropriate occasion for a debate about such things.

But there’s something to be said for my house, for why doing what we do, how we do it, is the right thing for preparing students to lead.

Tragedy came into our house today, and tonight we came together as a community in shared sadness, shared horror, shared resolve. On campus or from every corner of the world, over 400,000 Boilermakers stand united in the face of a senseless crime. There are lessons in that no online course will ever replicate—lessons about being part of something bigger than yourself, lessons about shouldering a burden collectively, lessons about sharing sorrow that is not your personal sorrow, lessons about squaring your shoulders and moving forward.

For those who would lead, the lessons to be learned as part of an institution, a community, a family like Purdue are irreplaceable. They remind us of our shared humanity and our shared responsibility, and they will never happen when a student sits in a room alone watching a flickering lecture play out onscreen. I do not doubt that there is an expediency that makes online learning an important and viable option for some among us. That said, it will never supplant the value of being part of an institution that offers lessons around the clock, regardless of how painful they may sometimes be.

In the End, There Are Only Words

Not even a month into the New Year and absurdity hits the fan.

Words don’t matter.

That was the message I received. It was intended, I am aware, to fall into the classic sticks and stones refrain from the elementary school playground. But sometimes, a phrase gets in stuck in my brain and whispers incessantly in my ear until I respond to it. Often right here.

Words don’t matter.

Really. That’s funny.

In the whole of human history, has there been a more steadfast constant in our lives? Words, grunted then spoken, supplanted the pictures scrawled on the walls inside the cave. A picture can break your heart, but the truth of a story gets its depth and connects our humanity in the words that transmit it from one person to the next. Language evolved because in the cave we realized that mere pictures were not enough.

Words, I would argue, are indeed the bedrock of human interaction.

In a world that allows institutions, even civilizations, to fall by the wayside with barely a thought, the flexibility of language, of words, is without parallel. Shakespeare used the language with abandon, stretching beyond the standard usage of his audience and, when the situation demanded, adding to the lexicon to capture a thought, an action, a mood. 

And it seems there is a bit of Shakespeare in all of us. Don’t believe me? Spend a few minutes online with UrbanDictionary.com. You’ll laugh, you’ll cringe. Consider some of the new words added to the dictionary in 2013 alone. Crowdsourcing. Mouseover. E-reader. Redirect. Our willingness to allow language to grow and change makes words the most useful tool of human existence.

While the adaptable relevance of evolving language keeps it fresh and irreplaceable, its continuity may be its ultimate beauty. Throughout time the immutable and evocative nature of words is the unbreakable strand of our shared humanity. Love. Sorrow. Hope. Even the formation of the letters speaks meaning, the open, uplifted “love,” the full weight of “sorrow,” the steadfastness of “hope.” They can be seen, felt, heard just as they have been for centuries, just as they will be for centuries.

Action, memory, intent, failure, all are captured by words. What we do matters because we remember, we record, we guide, we inspire... with words. Well told or well written, words capture our achievements, foibles, aspirations, and move us forward from one generation to the next, informed, forewarned, when we choose to listen, about what came before.

All that we are, all that we do, finds immortality in words. They are the only place in which we can live forever. Because in the end, there are only words.

Technology’s Greatest Gift

A friend pointed me to an article this week, a post by Arianna Huffington detailing her planned holiday week Unplugging Challenge. She outlined a timeout from her “devices,” no TV, no social media, only two email check-ins per day, only when the office is open during the week of Christmas. There is, of course, no small irony in the blog post which also points to the #holidaysunplugged hashtag through which she and her compatriots will keep the conversation going, but of course only before and after the “blackout.”

All irony aside, while I appreciate the notion of being more present with those around us and the need for greater introspection, I replied with no hint of over-the-top drama that I would kill myself before I would do that. In fact, for myriad reasons, I would not kill myself. I also would not commit to turning off my devices for a week, soulless person that I am.

I recognize that the grand gesture makes for a better blog headline, and surely it lends itself to a better hashtag than #balance. But as with so many things in life, balance is the elusive goal for which we should, almost always fruitlessly, strive.

Still, the article and subsequent discussion made me think, and my hat’s off to anyone who does that.

So why would I (not really except in overly dramatic spirit) kill myself before I would turn off, tune out, log off?

In part, because I don’t give the Internet quite as much crap as a lot of people do. Sure, it’s awash in bad grammar, mind-bendingly bad spelling, even more mind-bendingly bad propaganda on every side of the aisle, and pages and pages and pages of pornography that would make even Hugh Hefner shout “enough!”

But because we are so enamored with decrying the evils of contemporary society (a fascinatingly consistent cry regardless of what point in history marks a person’s particular relationship to what is contemporary), we forget what the Internet does. It opens a world of ideas to us with an ease that is so remarkable we already take it for granted. It opens a world of people to us as well. At the end of the day, it’s the people that always will keep me from pushing my devices aside.

I joined Twitter just over a year ago for a single silly reason but with no thought that I would enjoy it. Me? Expressing myself in 140 characters… it seemed beyond the pale of what might be possible. But I did enjoy it. I consume the articles that no longer escape my notice because @parisreview, @TIME, @Variety, @nytimes, and a host of others are in my newsfeed. In fact, they are from time to time a catalyst for the introspection some would say only a break from technology allows.

But the opportunity to connect with people in far flung corners of the globe with whom I share an interest or two is why I delight in my Twitter account.

There’s a brilliant, funny, broken, fierce girl in Canada with an honesty of spirit that is quite simply beautiful and whose path would never cross mine in the “real world.” There’s a lady in Atlanta with a courage and serenity that left me speechless for much of this year as she cheerfully faced one unbelievably absurd obstacle after another. I adore them both and look forward to the day when our real worlds collide.

At times, while using my devices, I am encouraged to “talk to real people,” but it is the very real people in my life--but unfortunately not often enough in my eyesight--who make my devices essential to me. There are dear friends whose presence in my life is quite simply greater by virtue of the ease with which we can connect in today’s plugged-in world. There are relationships, some stretching back decades, which are profoundly enhanced by the ability to communicate daily about things of great import and those of almost no consequence at all.

Because, at the end of the day, when we share our thoughts with others, whether it is in person or electronically, we enrich our lives. Connections with people who matter to us broaden our humanity, illuminate our hearts and minds, and feed our souls. The people who make us laugh, cry, think, and dream need not only sit with us in the room. It is the people who are a delight to me. The people. And the manner in which we are able to connect is only background noise. Embracing absent friends, as well as those in the room, is a gift enabled by our technological age.

And that’s not something I’m willing to turn off.