Phone Calls and Cocktail-Party Pressure

Trustee’s tenacity pays off in capital campaign as San Francisco museum opens its doors once more

This month, a San Francisco institution for more than a century, closed for five years, opened its doors once more.

The de Young Museum, which houses a diverse array of art and objects from nearly 30 countries and native cultures in its permanent collection, representing the 17th through the 20th centuries, first opened its doors in 1895. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake grievously damaged the building, located in Golden Gate Park; temporarily reinforced with steel girders, it stayed open for more than a decade until the city shut it down in 2000 in preparation for reconstruction. And the museum might have never reopened if it were not for the efforts of one determined volunteer: Dede Wilsey.

By her own estimate and that of the museum, the Bay Area philanthropist, president of the Board of Trustees of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (which includes the de Young), raised more than $159-million of the more than $188-million collected to support the museum’s redesign and reconstruction. (The campaign’s final goal is $202-million; the rest will be raised through a private bond issue.)

Mrs. Wilsey also contributed more than $10-million from the fortune she inherited from her great-grandfather, the founder of Dow Chemical, and from her late husband, the real-estate and dairy-foods mogul Alfred Wilsey. Mr. Wilsey reportedly left a $300-million estate.

All told, the new de Young Museum may well be the largest privately financed cultural gift ever donated to the city of San Francisco.

The funny thing is, Mrs. Wilsey says, she never expected to raise millions for the de Young. In fact, when she was first recruited to be the top volunteer in the museum’s capital campaign, she wasn’t even sure she should take on the project.

“It was my third capital campaign in a row,” she says. Before the de Young project, she had served as the top volunteer in capital drives for the Immaculate Conception Academy, a school in the city’s Mission district, and for the $17-million restoration of Grace Cathedral.

But something about the de Young Museum renovation ignited her imagination. “I love buildings, and I love building buildings, and I love remodeling projects, and especially big remodeling projects, and I thought, well that would be great, and what a challenge,” she says. “So the only thing to do is not think about it, and jump out of the frying pan into the fire.”

The fire, however, turned out to be a little hotter than she anticipated. At first, the project was to receive money from the city government, and so when Mrs. Wilsey first signed up in 1996, the target amount she was to raise was $25-million. But the number immediately crept upward. “My husband and I were on a trip in Southeast Asia, and I received a phone call: What if it was $30-million, or $35-million? And I said, Oh that’s fine, in for a penny, in for a pound.”

Then, in 1998, the city’s voters turned down a proposal that would have allowed the de Young Museum to float a bond to pay for the renovations.” Then I had to raise $44.1-million from the private sector, with the remainder of the money to come from public funds,” Mrs. Wilsey recalls. When the museum lost its second bond initiative on a narrow margin in June 1998, “I said to our director, that does it, I’m not going to do another bond issue and I will raise the money myself.” But that meant raising at least four times as much as originally expected.

Despite the challenge, she maintained a bright outlook. “I thought, this is much better, now we’ll go at our own pace,” she says. Raising the funds privately also meant that the museum would have more control over design and other decisions, says Mrs. Wilsey: “It was a great blessing in disguise.”

Her optimism would prove helpful, as the decade she spent fund raising for the de Young was also the most personally difficult of her life. Her husband succumbed to illness in 2002, in the midst of the campaign. And in the months leading up to the triumphant opening of the museum, Mrs. Wilsey was pilloried in a nationally acclaimed memoir by her stepson, Sean Wilsey. The book painted her as scheming and materialistic; through a spokeswoman, Mrs. Wilsey declined to comment on it.

‘A Piece of Cake’

To reach the campaign goal, Mrs. Wilsey concentrated on landing donations of more than $1-million, and so conducted much of her fund-raising work at cocktail parties and dinners — “which is why no one wants to sit next to me anymore,” she jokes.

At the first such soirée she attended after she agreed to lead the capital campaign, she spotted a trustee of the museum, and decided to make him her test case. She says she walked over to him and said, “‘I would like to talk to you about the campaign to build the new de Young.’ And he said, ‘OK, why don’t you send me the pyramid?’”

In other words, he wanted to see how many donors she hoped would give specific amounts. Even though many capital campaigns rely on so-called fund-raising pyramids to show how many donors they need at each level of giving, she decided that talking to the trustee about the pyramid was not wise, so she said, “You know, that’s very interesting. However, I don’t think that’s of any use whatsoever, unless you want to fill in the names of those people, unless you want to tell me who the $10-million donors are, the $5-million donors are, the $3-million donors are. Otherwise, it’s nonsense.’”

Mrs. Wilsey continued: “I know that the building has to be torn down, that it’s been badly damaged. I know that art needs to be preserved. I know that you’re a trustee of the institution, so I know you care about the building and the art. I know that you’re a person of considerable means, so I know you have money, and I know I need some of it. So what I want to know is, will you give me some of that money for the campaign?’ He was absolutely shocked. And then he said, ‘OK, I’ll give you a million,’ and I said, ‘OK, I’ll write you a note in the morning.’”

And with that, she says, she walked away, thinking, “This is going to be no problem. It’s a piece of cake.”

Working the Phone

Not all major donors fell into line so quickly.

One of the biggest challenges to overcome was that prospective donors could not visit the de Young since it was under construction while funds were being raised. While architectural renderings were available as a representation of the finished work, Mrs. Wilsey didn’t care for them.

The building’s copper exterior, she says, features a pattern of leaves, and the leaves of the trees in the park surrounding the museum cast shadows on top of that. The effect, she notes, is very difficult to render accurately in a computer simulation. “In the rendering, the building looks like a lobster,” says Mrs. Wilsey. “It was frightening. I couldn’t show [donors] that.”

So instead, she described the building to donors, and “I had to say, ‘Trust me, I’m not going to build something ugly.’”

Once the building was partially completed this year, she could take donors through it, and that made gift solicitations much easier, she says. However, she says, she also had to overcome donors’ nostalgia for the older building.

Follow-up conversations to overcome donors’ objections would often take place late at night, between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. While Mrs. Wilsey maintains an office in her home (and also an office at her late husband’s real-estate company, Wilsey Properties, during the day), she prefers to do her fund raising in her dressing room at home. There, she sits in a pink-and-white checked chair that she bought at a garage sale in 1966 for $35, and talks on the phone, with a well-worn pink velvet address book next to her.

“It’s dirty because I’ve used it so much,” she says, “and because I write in pencil, because people die and divorce.”

She jots down her thoughts on pink Post-its, which festoon the file cabinet beside her, the wash basin, and the mirrors. Her constant companion for much of the fund raising was her Maltese, Serena, who died this year.

Mrs. Wilsey has made a donation to the de Young in Serena’s name, as well as one to honor her husband’s Jack Russell terrier, who also died recently. Indeed, there is what Mrs. Wilsey refers to as a “doggy wall” at the museum, where donors can make donations in their pets’ names.

Small Gifts

This combination of phone calls and cocktail-party pressure worked. As of last month, the museum had 47 donors who gave $1-million or more; government, foundation, and corporate support totaled $8-million. The rest came from smaller donations: More than 4,000 names grace a donor wall for those who gave $1,000 or more, while direct-mail drives that included the sale of books and magazines raised about $7-million.

In addition to the Wilseys, donors who gave $10-million or more to the campaign included Nancy B. Hamon (whose donation was in her name and that of her late husband, the Texas oilman Jake L. Hamon); the financier Bernard Osher and his wife, Barbro Osher; the art patron Phyllis Wattis; and Nan Tucker McEvoy, a part owner of the San Francisco Chronicle.

The secret to Mrs. Wilsey’s success at landing big donors? “Don’t be afraid to ask,” she says. “All you have to do is ask, and when you do it, remember you’re not doing this for yourself. I said to a fellow trustee the other day, ‘You know, I’m not asking them to pay my Saks bill, I’m doing this for charity. It’s not for me.’”

Another reason she has been successful, she says, is because she is also a big donor — not just to the de Young, but to other causes as well. She has contributed heavily to other campaigns she was worked for, and that is one of the keys to her success, says Jim Chappell, president of the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, a local organization that gave Mrs. Wilsey a lifetime achievement award for her philanthropic activities in 2000. “She steps up first, and has a history of giving enormous gifts,” says Mr. Chappell. (Other than her gift to the de Young campaign, Mrs. Wilsey, through her spokeswoman, would not disclose the amounts she has given to other charities.)

Setting an example is “enormously helpful” in selling a cause, Mrs. Wilsey says. “You can go to people and you give to them, and they give to you, and some cases that’s the way you get these funds.” There have been cases, she notes, “where people are not interested in the museum, but they [donate] as a personal favor, because my husband and I gave to their organization or something like that.”

But it’s not just Mrs. Wilsey’s personal fortune that makes her so effective, says Mr. Chappell. She is fiercely committed and determined, and did not shy away from the less glamorous aspects of the de Young project, he says.

“We sat together in hearing after hearing in city hall as people were opposing the building of the museum, and here she is someone of tremendous wealth and social stature, and she’s sitting around city hall for hours at a time in these painful hearings, while the organization is being berated,” he says. “She doesn’t have to do this, she could be, you know, off at the beach at the Riviera, or the fashion shows in Paris, and she’s down in the trenches slugging it out. That’s pretty unusual. San Francisco has a lot of wonderful philanthropists, but she’s the only one of that stature who’s just out there in the trenches.”

And then there’s the matter of her powers of persuasion. “She is so compelling,” he says. “After one speech she gave at city hall, I made my pledge on the spot.”

Harry Parker, director of museums at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, attributes that persuasive ability to Mrs. Wilsey’s bravery. “She has a smile on her face when she asks you for twice as much as you’d ever think anyone would have the gall to ask you for,” says Mr. Parker.

He also believes that Mrs. Wilsey’s own donations to the cause make her more credible with donor prospects.

‘A Great Big Baby’

As she waited for the museum to open, Mrs. Wilsey admitted to feeling “prepartum blues.” “It’s a great big baby and it’s about to be born and it’s not going to need me anymore pretty soon,” she says wistfully.

“As happy as I am about it, I have to admit that it’s sad. This project has sustained me through horrible periods of my life,” she says, referring not only to the death of her husband, but also to the loss of her house, which burned down during the campaign.

The fund-raising work kept her busy, she says, and kept her spirits up. When things were bad at home, something good would happen with the de Young campaign that would keep her going — and vice versa.

Which does not mean, however, that she is ready for another capital campaign. She says she is not eager to lead a fourth campaign in a row — but perhaps there’s some wiggle room in her decision.

“I don’t do anything that I’m not passionate about,” she says. But if something came along that ignited her passion, “as long as I didn’t think about it and just jumped in — I might.

“You know, I would hope that I wouldn’t be that stupid,” she says with a laugh. “But I wouldn’t guarantee it.”