March 20, 2008 | Read Time: 6 minutes
When my son the college student told me that he had taken a part-time job, visions of drab jobs danced through my head.
Pizza delivery? Perhaps lawn maintenance? Sitting at the info desk in the library and looking bored?
Wrong again.
“Dad, I’m a fund raiser,” he said.
Allie’s task at Wesleyan University would be simple: Make cold calls to alumni and parents of current students and hold out the net.
He would sit in a boiler room two evenings a week, stoked by free pizza (or occasionally Thai food). He would get $8.50 an hour plus a flat commission on every yes he dredged up.
Three months in, he has raised thousands of dollars. He has also demonstrated one of the best-known truths about fund raising — that it’s all about relationships — and one of the least-known: At a university, it’s also about how much personal, current information you can accurately supply (not just collect).
When Allie calls parents of current students, he will be greeted more than half the time with Helicopter Anxiety.
Do you know my son Bert? You do? Is he eating regularly? Is he dressing warmly enough? Is he still dating that girl with the blue and orange hair? Is he (pause for emphasis) happy?
Most of the time, the parent who asks such questions has a son. Female college students are apparently much better about staying in touch, Allie says. Male students are deep into you-never-call-you-never-write.
One mother in Sharon, Mass., spilled out her anxieties on a recent Thursday night. She hadn’t heard from her son, a senior, in weeks.
Did Allie know him?
As it happens, he does. They have had a class together for each of the last three semesters. Allie could report that the son is engaged, engaging, bathing regularly, and making a whole lot of sense in class discussions.
The mother told Allie she was so grateful that she might even stop worrying about him for an hour or so.
My son decided the moment was right to ask for a gift.
The mother hemmed and hawed. She trotted out the first line of defense that Allie estimates he hears 90 percent of the time:
“I spend $50,000 a year to send my kid to this school and you’re asking me for money?”
Allie said yes, ma’am, I am indeed asking for money, because tuition covers only a small amount of the true cost of a Wesleyan education and because we depend on money from other sources, including grant makers that require high percentages of giving from alumni and parents before they will award us money.
This usually wears down even the most troublesome quarry, my son reports.
But this mother had an extra arrow in her quiver.
Her credit card had been stolen recently, she said. It was being used to construct a false identity. So the woman was unable to make a gift. Gee, she was awfully sorry. She agreed to accept another fund-raising call somewhere down the road.
Allie marked his contact card accordingly. Then he, too, sighed.
“Fund raising,” he later announced to me, “can be so frustrating.”
A call to Vermont was equally frustrating.
Allie recognized the family name right away because he plays on the soccer team with the son. He reached the mother.
They chewed over wins, losses, and corner kicks for a while. Then the mother said she’d be glad to make a gift, but, gosh, she and her husband were about to go play tennis and she wasn’t dressed.
She screamed out his name and told him to get on the extension. The father picked up. He and Allie chewed over wins, losses, and corner kicks for a while. Then the father said he’d be glad to make a gift, but, gosh, he and his wife were about to go play tennis and he wasn’t dressed. He screamed out her name and told her to get on the line.
The mother picked up a second time. Allie asked for a $50 gift. Without any push-and-pull, the mother agreed to give $250.
Not so fast. The mother couldn’t find her purse, so she couldn’t find her credit card. Could someone please call her back in a few days? Tennis time. Gotta go. Bye. Click.
Alumni are much easier targets, Allie says, because most want to relive the glories (and occasionally the excesses) of their youth.
Here again, information is king. If Allie can say from his own knowledge that a rock band formed in the mid-1990s is still “the bomb” on the CD players of Fauver Hall, he will bat close to 1,000 with alumni of that era.
If he can tell an older alumnus who’s a lawyer that he too wants to be a lawyer, that alumnus will feel that maybe the future isn’t destined to be a wreck.
If Allie happens to reach a former soccer player, and lets drop the fact that Wesleyan has been to the NCAA tournament two of the last three years, well, you can start the ka-chinging.
What Allie has learned is that emotions drive the process harder than generic pleas or sermons about general excellence. Donors will not give because Wesleyan needs new Bunsen burners in the science lab or a higher ranking in U.S. News & World Report. They will give if their heartstrings are plucked by memories or current anecdotes from a current student.
Of course, the system isn’t perfect. Here are some fixes I would recommend based on my son’s experience:
Allie says that when a return call is made to the tennis players in Vermont, he will not necessarily be the caller.
“Not the way the system works, Dad,” he told me. Should be. If Caller Two doesn’t know anything about corner kicks, the good will of Call One might evaporate.
Similarly, more attention should be paid to whether a caller knows the child of the person he or she is calling. When Allie told the mother in Massachusetts that he knew her son, it was sheer chance. In a database world, it doesn’t need to be. Cold calls to parents would stand a much better chance if a pathway were identified ahead of time.
My son is not about to pledge his heart to fund raising as a career. Law school is beckoning. But now that he has been on the showroom floor, he knows that human juice is what makes money flow. It’s a lesson that will last longer than moot court.
Bob Levey teaches journalism at the University of Memphis. He spent 36 years as a columnist and reporter at The Washington Post. He has also been a senior development executive and a longtime volunteer fund raiser for colleges, arts groups, and health-care institutions.
