Fund Raisers Offered Advice on Soliciting Donations From Diverse Range of Donors

Baltimore

Drawing on his experiences as a gay man born to a Polish mother and raised by an African-American family, Joe Steele urged fund raisers at the Association of Fundraising Professionals annual conference here to learn how to build stronger relationships with donors of different ages, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and race.

Mr. Steele, who has consulted with charities and companies including AT&T and Johnson & Johnson, emphasized the importance of making others feel comfortable sharing information about their own cultures.

“You don’t have to be a cultural anthropologist,” he told the audience. But he said that fund raisers needed to show interest in other people’s cultural backgrounds while respecting how much information individuals want to share-and what they want to keep to themselves.

Mr. Steele also said that if fund raisers are going to ask others to discuss their backgrounds, “you need to really think about what aspects you’re going to share about yourself.”

His guidelines for navigating cross-cultural relationships included “trying on” strategies without being wedded to their outcome.

To illustrate a point about how to avoid placing blame on others, he described a recent fund-raising dinner held by a charity he advises. Several people at the dinner complained that there were no gluten-free meals.

Mr. Steele said his first reaction was to blame the people who complained; he wondered why they had not spoken up in advance of the dinner. But after closer consideration, Mr. Steele and others recognized that they ought to have considered asking people about their dietary preferences, perhaps on the event’s invitation.

Among other suggestions he had for fund raisers:

* Use “I” rather than “we” in speech, to avoid speaking for others and making people feel uncomfortable bringing up divergent points of view.

* Don’t let stereotypes cloud people’s visions of men and women. Women ought to be allowed to get mad without being called a five-letter word, he said, while men who experience fear aren’t “sissies.”

* Offer support to donors whose financial situations have limited their inability to give as much as they once did. Telling a donor that it’s okay not to give as much works a lot better than saying, “Well, we’ll drop you down to a lower category then,” he said.

Mr. Steele also talked about “insider/outsider” dynamics — relationships between people who are often dominant (men, whites, people with formal educations) and those who are not.

He talked about his experience joining a board that had clearly chosen him in part because its members were looking for minority trustees. The board had a requirement that trustees contribute or raise $5,000.

It soon became clear to Mr. Steele that the white trustees didn’t think he and other minority trustees had the money or connections to come up with that kind of donation. As a result, they weren’t holding the new board members to the same standard.

“If $5,000 is the expectation, the question is how do we make that work for all board members?” he said.