In honor of my mom’s birthday this month, I am sharing an excerpt from my forthcoming book, which is about fundraising but is also very personal. Mothers always influence who we become, and my Mom Wanda continues to inspire and encourage me in my career and in life. Later this year, I will release Fundraiser’s Companion – A Reference to Demystify Major Gifts and the Fundraising Process. I hope you enjoy this sneak peek.
Most fundraisers I know never set out wanting to do fundraising. Not because it’s not a desirable career but because it is a poorly understood career. Hundreds of television series and movies portray police officers, doctors, detectives, and lawyers. Almost none feature the lives of nonprofit fundraisers. I feared and disliked my first fundraising job tremendously. But the prize for selling 100 boxes of Girl Scout cookies helped me overcome my trepidation and, though I didn’t know it at the time, set my career in fundraising in motion.
Troop 159 of the Joshua Tree Council in rural Inyo County, California, motivated its Girl Scouts to sell 100 boxes of cookies that year using a variety of incentives with an Australian theme. The kookaburra stuffed animal award was all I needed to motivate me to do something I dreaded: going door to door with boxes of Thin Mints and shortbread cookies. My Mom drove me around our small town of Bishop, California, population 2,000, encouraging me to walk up to the men in the auto parts store, the women at the insurance agency, and small business owners up and down Highway 6 and Main Street, and deliver my prepared pitch, short but pithy. I felt like a vacuum salesperson though I’d never met one as my childhood marked the end of the days of traveling salespeople hawking wares door to door. Some folks declined, saying they didn’t have the money. But to my astonishment many people did buy a box or two.
I firmly believed then, and find myself thinking today, that other people are better at asking for money than I am. But that stuffed animal with its deep brown eyes, thick pointed beak, and soft furry variegated feathers pushed me to continue through the rejections and the apprehension I felt as I opened the door to each business. I was, after all, a shy and quiet girl.
Mom kept telling me that I could do it, that folks would buy the cookies because of my being a young Girl Scout. Other girls had parents who could afford to buy most of their quotas, but Mom wanted me to learn how to do it myself, to give me the rare gift that arises from parenting — resilience and self-reliance.
“You’re cute,” she would say, bolstering my confidence. I wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t figure out how people who could buy cookies for less at Joseph’s grocery store would want to buy mine. I failed to understand a key component to fundraising – people who share your values want to align with you, your energy, and your organization’s mission.
After several weeks of hauling around cookies in our trunk and visiting businesses and homes we hadn’t previously tried, we exhausted the possibilities. But I still needed to sell a few dozen boxes to earn the kookaburra. It seemed impossible. We went back to some of the folks who had bought cookies the first time around. My mom waited in the car while I asked business owners if they would help me reach my goal of 100 boxes sold. So many other Girl Scouts had already met their goals and saturated our small town with cookies. Who else could we really ask? I was ready to give up, but Mom was not. She drove down to the turn-off to Highway 6 once more and encouraged me to go back into the auto repair shops, auto parts stores, and gas stations, noting that different people could be working that day.
In the end, I sold my 100 boxes and proudly received my kookaburra. In the process, I learned about Australia and its wildlife, experienced doing something that scared me to death, and raised my first dollars for a cause. I kept that stuffed animal during my entire childhood and eighteen years later I heard real kookaburras for myself in a forest outside Sydney, Australia.
In fact, I was called on to raise funds throughout my childhood – for my elementary school, my softball team, my Civil Air Patrol squadron, and extra-curricular clubs in middle school and high school via bike-a-thons, jog-a-thons, and magazine and candy bar sales. I started out feeling the same way every time – scared to ask people to give up their hard-earned cash for my charitable activity but motivated by competition with the boys in class, winning a prize, and qualifying for a special field trip. And in college, I earned money for textbooks and entertainment through a work-study position in the annual fund office at Lafayette College in dialing-for-dollars call-a-thons asking alums for gifts.
Though I consequently had quite a bit of experience doing direct fundraising, I didn’t think about it as an appealing potential career as an adult. Ask for money for a living? Heck, no! That wasn’t for me.
My first job out of college was as a journalist reporting on electricity deregulation, brownfields and toxic waste site clean-ups, supercomputing, and environmental regulations, law, and policy on Capitol Hill. I thought being a reporter would be fulfilling and dreamt of becoming a staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine or a beat reporter for arts and film reviews, human interest stories, travel, and music on the staff of a prestigious newspaper. However, it turned out reporting was a profession less about beautiful writing and craft and more about having an aggressive, determined personality, asking tough questions, physically following elected officials down streets and halls asking for quotes, and constantly hounding sources for information. I didn’t feel like myself while I was a reporter.
Toward the end of my short journalism career, I covered a supreme court case about which entities were responsible for cleaning up toxic waste – the company that actually dumped the chemicals long ago or the parent company that purchased the original company as a subsidiary? It was a complex case, and I knew I needed to obtain some good quotes to bring it to life. After the hearing adjourned, I spotted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator at the time, Carol Browner, leaving court. She walked at a fast clip, practically jogging to her next appointment. I would never catch her. I decided to let her go. But my fear of my editor’s wrath – he was known to publicly castigate me for not obtaining enough quotes from legislators and other key officials – changed my mind, and I dashed down the street, calling her name. She did not hear me or pretended not to. I shouted her name again. She eventually stopped, I caught up, and she gave me a quote for my article. Then she did an about-face, leaving me standing there with my notebook in hand. Well, I reminded myself, it wasn’t about being liked on Capitol Hill and at least I wouldn’t be humiliated back at the newsroom.
In those days, I would walk through the streets of D.C. after attending press conferences and think, “It’s so flat here.” I missed the Sierra Nevada Mountains and my family, longed for craggy peaks and redwood forests. I was reckoning with my desperation to do something professionally that made me feel a sense of purpose and satisfaction. I felt stupid running after people for my articles. Though my reporting was slowly improving and I was becoming more of a detective, the editors changed most of what I wrote anyway, rearranging my paragraphs to make the points they thought needed making even when I believed that the sources said no such thing.
One afternoon in the newsroom, I admitted to a colleague how unhappy I was. I love writing, so why didn’t I like being a reporter?
She enjoyed absolutely everything about being a reporter after leaving her successful career as a lawyer. She was the most satisfied employee I knew at the company – passionate about the topics that arose and the people with whom she talked every day. She asked me a few questions about how I spent my free time to tease out what my passions were, starting with “What do you like to do on weekends in your free time?”
“Visit animal shelters,” I immediately answered. “I want to see all the cats and dogs and calm them down.” She then asked if I had ever considered working for a nonprofit animal welfare group. “They are always looking for grant writers, you know,” she said. But I replied that I had never done grant writing or taken any courses in it.
“Kristine, you can write. You can learn how to put together a grant proposal to help the animals,” she said. Her confidence in how capable I was and that I could be happier in a new career just as she had done buoyed me. They were the words I needed to hear and were delivered at just the right time.
Later that year, I obtained my first nonprofit job as a grant writer for the San Francisco Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (San Francisco SPCA). I arrived with no experience, but a supportive co-worker had done the job for years and offered guidance plus lots of templates from previous folks in the position and prior years’ proposal applications to review. I could edit and update the material and put the new budget numbers and programmatic goals into the grant proposals without too much trouble. I walked around and talked to program staff and ran everything by my new supervisor for accuracy. I wrote my first proposal to a singer-songwriter’s private foundation for general operating support of our no-kill shelter. The grant came through, and I was hooked.
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