The Mission Demands Fundraisers (of All Persuasions) Come Together
When your father is a fundraiser, and that fundraiser is Doug Lawson who wrote Give to Live, you are definitely going to have a bias towards major gifts. I don’t believe it is just pride talking that my father is one of the best face-to-face askers on the planet, and I’m sure as you read this he is either asking or on a plane to an ask. In this environment I grew up thinking if you needed a million dollars for your cause then you found a person with a million dollars to support it. This simple idea led me to create a series of donor profiling and screening companies the last 25 or so years.
Early in my career I met Roger Craver who can write direct mail copy which almost puts the money in the envelope all by itself. For Roger if you need a million dollars get 50,000 to give $20 each. Then you have 50,000 supporters who...