Fundraising’s soul: Touching the donor’s heart with a vision

“The Fund Raiser’s Guide to fund Raising”
By Mayan G. Quebral
Venture for Fund Raising, 2002


Have you received news from the mail lately that Unicef cards are being readied for the Christmas Season and asking you to firm up your orders now?

You open a bulky envelope one morning, and you find a handcrafted card from children of Tuloy sa Don Bosco. You recall that Tuloy is a highly successful center for streetchildren.

You get two tickets to play golf in the Aoki Golf Course in the Eagle Ridge, with the added request that you please be a “hole sponsor,” so you can support mission work.

If you still have those cards or tickets – outdated they may be – hold on to them, as we tell you about fundraising – and about this book that has expressed the “soul” behind philanthropy..

Question: Is philanthropic giving alive and well in this country of 7,600 islands, mired in poverty, shaken by pockets of violence and marked by a lackluster economy?

Aren’t donor funds being re-channeled to new independent states freed from the Soviet monolith, to Latin America and to most of Africa. Earlier on, non-profit organizations – global, regional or national – knew what this meant: They must now rely more and more on local philanthropy.

Is the future for non-profits, starved for funds, bleak? Or is there a sunny side to this seeming darkness?

The book, “The Fundraiser’s Guide to Fund Raising,” is just the shaft of sunlight non-profits need – not only to brighten hope once again, but to light their way to labyrinthine ways leading to the donor’s heart.


Don’t expect just a quick reading of a “nuts-and-bolts” manual on fundraising in this book. While it has tips in abundance in every chapter, you may miss the soul of such a worthy human enterprise. Striking just the right note for the book, author Mayan Quebral speaks in the imperative: “Realize that fundraising is NOT about money.”

She adds: “ Fundraising is about a human need that has to be met. It is about the ability of your organization to make a contribution to the alleviation of that need.” She is actually saying that, if you are just interested in money, this book is not for you. She wants to address those non-profit organizations which have latched on their efforts to higher goals “money cannot buy.”

She volunteers “seven success seeds for growing your non-profit organization” – beginning with the very first seed: “Believe.” She says: “Believing establishes the credibility of your cause … Now tell us, would you buy insurance from a salesman who is not insured, a Ford car dealer who drives a Honda, or a lung cancer foundation fundraiser who smokes?” Touche, Mayan!

The next six “success seeds” guide the reader through concepts, principles, success stories, tables and, yes, generous quotes from the Scriptures and renowned thinkers. Heartwarming stories abound in this book – which gives you the feeling you are in the midst of a seminar listening to every motivation speaker whose “cup runneth over” narrating one successful campaign after the other.

Is this book comprehensive? Reading from first page to the last, one gets the impression that the author and contributors did not hold back any “trade secrets”. Isn’t this self-defeating? If they have given their all, no one would approach them anymore. Their desire to share a “good thing” seems to be greater than the anxiety over outliving their usefulness. They are what they stand for: generous. Look, at the end every chapter is a treasure trove of website addresses for current and would-be fundraisers.

A parallel thought builds up while one moves on to more complex subjects on targeting small and big donors, planning for myriad events, creating an efficient organization, selecting a working board, building a data base – and it is this: The book is telling the organization leader to revisit his reason for existence.

The last chapter asks the reader/leader to “face the mirror.” While the author intends it to remind the fundraiser to evaluate his/her fundraising plan, the sense to this reader is for the NGO leader to go back to the fundamentals: What moves your organization?

The book overflows with quotes, but the one used by the book captures the central message of the book telling organizations to have, first and foremost, a vision. The statement comes from a famous blind person, Helen Keller: “The only thing worse than having no sight is to have sight but no vision.” That, dear readers, is the soul of fundraising. And that keeps this worthwhile effort aflame in the hearts of donors – big and small.

21st Century e-Leadership: new wineskins for new wine

“E-Leader”
By Robert Hargrove
Perseus Publishing, 2001


You hear contradictory phrases these days. For example, you have “chaordic organization,” meaning a combination of “chaos and order,” an oxymoron at first glance: Isn’t an organization supposed to install order? This was coined by Dee Hock, founder and CEO emeritus of Visa International, the same firm that grew phenomenally. Of course, he was antedated by Alfred North Whitehead who defined progress as “the art of creating chaos in the midst of order, and preserving order in the midst of chaos.”

“Lateral leadership” is another phrase that assaults our time-tested concept of leaders who preside from the top over everyone else below him. This phrase talks about a leader who steps down from his elevated position and deals with his people as his “equals.” The latter, in turn, leave a slight concession to their leader by accepting him as primus inter pares (first among equals).

Another phrase, “spontaneous CEO,” unsettles our widely held view that a CEO is steeped in strategic planning and thus hardly acts on impulse at the spur of the moment.

The above three are only part of a wide range of new vocabulary that now punctuates third millenium leadership books. It delivers an earthshaking message: We have really such a deeply altered world that the old leadership formula longer works, and leaders, if they have to thrive -- if not merely survive --must change.

This is the startling message of the book “E-Leader: Reinventing Leadership in a Connected Economy.” It is rightly called a “brilliant flash of light on the new emerging leadership paradigm of the 21st century.”

Author Robert Hargrove, leadership coach of many CEOs, declared at the outset that CEOs in this century must move quickly from being stewards “conserving what has been built” to being revolutionaries engaged in a balancing act of “maintaining equilibrium and creative destruction.”

Is this the domain of young emergent leaders, ruling out retirable fiftyish and sixtyish CEOs? Not necessarily. Mr. Hargrove was generously quoting Dee Hock of Visa, Jack Welch of GE, Lou Gerstner of IBM, Carly Fiorina, all of whom preached – then practiced – re-branding their companies thus propelled them to new growth platforms and unheard of efficiency and profitability.

“People’s horizon of possibilities,” he points out, “is limited.” What he is saying is that the connected economy presents possibilities that are so infinite but traditional leaders’ visions are so finite. The profoundly transformed environment demands a deeplly-altered CEO mindset.

This truth is actually both timely and timeless. One ever timeless advice actually came from “Jesus the CEO” who said: “For new wine, you need new wineskins.” New ideas require new strategies and structures.

The book thus recommends Triple-Loop Learning” which asks three fundamental questions dealing with three verbs: to be, think, and do.

First question: How do I need to be different? (Begin seeing yourself differently.) Second: How do I need to think differently? (Start to question what you take for granted.) The third question: What do I need to do differently? (Jump into action – the eEconomy waits for no one.) The book templates on exercises that involve the transition from … to, with the useful insight that these have worked in many coaching tasks by the author.

Does this mean that the old reliable leadership and management concepts are passe? Not really. The author still quotes Peter Drucker’s “classic question” (his words): “What is our business and what should it be?” You still have to ask the question: What is the logic of our business? But logic, according to Asian Institute of Management Associate Dean Sonny Coloma, has given way to the fashionable question: “What is your business model?”

Actually, the book offers four steps by which CEOs can build a super-successful “business Internet model”. First, start with some customer reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. Second, create a strategy of pre-eminence, assuming the mantle of leadership. Third, choose partners wisely so as to leverage your strategy. Fourth, enable your business design with relationship technology.

One message stands out in this book: Even in the midst of rapid changes in technology requiring leadership style transformation, some things remain constant – that the logic of business – listening to and reaching the customer (improved version: anticipating the customer) remains the most important function of business.

The difference is technology. The book cites the “clickable corporation,” a phrase popularized in a book of that title, which enumerates in a table eight success strategies to successful customer relationship. Get the book and click away.

The book is not only one’s road map to look yourself and your company over for needed transformation. It is wondrously keyed to liberating the CEO from the strictures of the past. The leadership coach concludes with, perhaps, his favorite theme – which could be the conclusion of the reader when he is through with the book: “Release the human spirit.”