Audubon’s Effort to Broaden Its Network of Support Appeals to Big Donor

Maggie Walker has a thing about numbers. “My pet peeve is when a charity comes to me and seems to be fixated on a particular dollar amount,” she says.

Instead, she prefers what she thinks of as a problem-solving approach to fundraising: “I’m much more interested in how a charity sees the whole picture and how we can find a whole bunch of people to help realize that vision.”

That’s precisely what drew Ms. Walker to get more involved in the National Audubon Society (No. 318 on The Chronicle’s Philanthropy 400), to which she gives $50,000 annually. Soon after David Yarnold took the helm of the charity in 2010, he met with Ms. Walker and convinced her that Audubon was poised to reach a far broader base of support than it had in the past.

“I really liked where he was going and that he saw Audubon’s potential to unleash and create energy within its networks,” says Ms. Walker, a businesswoman and civic leader in Seattle whose husband, Doug, a tech entrepreneur, is also active in philanthropy.

It matters to her that charities expand their constituency, rather than serving the same people or relying on the same donors year after year. She previously served on Audubon’s board in Washington State and worked on a campaign to create a nature center in a diverse Seattle neighborhood.

“Audubon has a vision for diversifying the base of people who care about the outdoors, and that’s what resonates so deeply with me,” says Ms. Walker, who joined Audubon’s national board last year. She also chairs the board of the Seattle Foundation (No. 309 on The Chronicle’s list) and sits on the University of Washington Foundation board (The university is at No. 54).

Like many donors these days, Ms. Walker says she likes to see firsthand the kind of impact her giving is having.

“It’s really powerful when a charity goes to the trouble to show a donor what their support has meant,” she says, adding that it’s “so much more rewarding than getting stuff from a charity.”

Such efforts are especially important as donors increasingly see themselves as investors in charitable causes.

“People want to see that there’s a return on their giving, that it’s doing what they hoped it would do,” says Ms. Walker.

There’s something else she enjoys seeing from the charities she supports: profiles of donors in charity publications.

Telling donors’ stories not only pays tribute to their generosity, she notes, but also holds them up as models for other would-be supporters to follow. “When a charity writes about a donor, it sends a message that ‘you can do this, too.’”