We all have something that people say that annoys us.  Most of the time it is personal, like certain words or phrases that may come from our parents or the culture of our youth.  Our economic crisis has evoked a word that I find very annoying.  Beyond annoying, the word is misleading.

The culprit?  “EVERYBODY.” 
 
Ever meet Everybody?  Ever see Everybody do anything?  Ever see Everybody not do anything?  What about Everybody’s sister, NOBODY?  Ever see Nobody do anything?  Yet we and others say it all the time:  “Everybody likes the President.”  “Everybody looks great.”
 
“Everybody lost money because of the economic downturn.”
 
Hey, wait a minute, did everybody?   “Everybody lost substantial money in the market.”  Everybody?  “Nobody is giving money away?”  Nobody?  Give it some thought.
 
I am only 61 years old and haven’t seen everything (another one of those words) or Everybody do anything!  Nor have I witnessed Nobody doing anything.

Well, the statistics vary about Everybody losing money in this market.  But if you listen for it, you can hear of success.  The contractor who has been building specialty office buildings for years and didn’t believe in the stock market.  He has been making millions and invested all his money in CD’s.  Everybody (there’s that word again) called him a fool, but what a smart fool he is today.  Or the CEO of one of America’s largest privately held companies, who moved all their foundation money out of the market in 2007 and was able to double and triple his foundation’s giving in 2008.  Everybody?  I suppose “everybody” doesn’t include the company that is facilitating bankruptcies or the safety glass group who made a fortune following 9/11 because of the run on improving safety. 
 
I could go on and on, and maybe you have an example of someone doing well.  I saw a statistic that said nearly 40% of the country has not been directly affected by the downturn.  Where and who are they?  Well, first you have to know they are there before you can find them.  You have to listen to people talk about their lives.  For fundraisiers that is sometimes a challenge—we have so much to talk about, listening is hardly something we have time to do.  After all, EVERYBODY wants to know what we know.

By the way, HARTSOOK is having a banner year.  Sales are up over 200% and our company continues to grow while many individual consultant practitioners out there are unable to attract clients.  This is because serious fundraising organizations don’t want to trust their fundraising plans to a single individual that might go out of business.  At the same time, our larger competitors have large office spaces and big payrolls that help them sink in hard times.

HARTSOOK is a large, virtual company, agile to move from market to market.  I am not bragging—I’m just pointing out not EVERY business, nor EVERY consultant is doing poorly.

Of particular interest to fundraisers is a key finding of the Charlotte-based Bank of America (BOA) Study on giving patterns of high net worth individuals. In this study, we discovered who these individuals consult with when they think about giving.  It’s not, as we might have guessed, their lawyer or accountant (or, as BOA would have liked to hear, their Trust Officer).  Shared wisdom would say they would consult with a peer—but that answer was second on the list. 

The first person high net worth individuals consult with when thinking about giving is the fundraiser or staff of the organization that is going to get the gift. 

Read that again.  The fundraiser is the critical piece in closing the gift.

Certainly, I knew this instinctively after watching it happen repeatedly over 36 years in the field.  But now this gut feeling and experiential knowledge is validated through research that can be used to improve the field. 

Read the rest of this entry