‘Tis the season… For the last three years or so…
admin December 19th, 2006
‘Tis the season…
For the last three years or so, I have worked in close proximity to University Advancement. I currently work for Alumni Relations; before that I worked for one of our colleges, but assisted the development officer. In case you don’t know what “development” really means, it means “fundraising” – money and in-kind gifts are their raison d’être. They want your money, they want my money. That’s what they do.
Mind you, I don’t have some sort of fundamental problem with fundraising. It’s necessary. I think that’s unfortunate, but I don’t have some deep-seated disdain for fundraisers or their profession. (I do have a certain distaste for some fundraisers I’ve met, and for some tactics I’ve seen…but that’s a whole different story.)
Anyway, I was looking for our membership manager a little while ago, and got to talking to some of our Annual Giving staff while I was down that way. They got a request to do a year-end appeal last Friday from one of the smaller units on campus, one to which I have a particular attachment and at which I know several people – well, really the whole full-time staff, since it’s only about three people.
They’re a great program. But I’m not particularly a fan of the director. She’s not a bad lady; she certainly means well. But here’s the thing. Last Friday was December 15. You don’t start thinking about a year-end appeal on December 15. Your year-end appeal should be in the mail by December 15, and that’s really pushing the envelope as it is (excuse the pun). The reason is, basically, that you are competing with who-knows-how-many other organizations for very few donor dollars. You do NOT want to be the last one to arrive. Worse, she just got the list to the AG office yesterday (December 18), and it was RIFE with problems. As of this morning, the poor AG woman and the director were still hashing out the list. That means that the letters and labels probably won’t be printed today, which means, in essence, that our Annual Giving woman is going to be scrambling to get everything done and into the mail before the university closes Friday afternoon. Then there’s the holiday. So these won’t be hitting mailboxes until at least December 26 or 27.
I currently have about half a dozen year-end appeals from various organizations sitting in my mail basket at home, as well as a few e-appeals. That’s not counting the ones I threw away outright. Shortly after Christmas, I will sit down, balance my checkbook, and decide what I can afford to give and to whom I will give it. I don’t have a lot money to go around, and if this appeal were to appear in my mailbox on, say, December 26 (which is optimistic), the best they can hope for from me is consideration. They are very unlikely to be a priority, when they arrive that late.
But here’s the punch line: I’m not on the list. I volunteered with this unit; I got pledges for a walk-a-thon for them; I used to donate to them via payroll deduction (until contract issues froze my paycheck and I responded by cutting back dramatically on my donations to the university). So really, timing of the appeal aside, I’m a very likely prospective donor. But for some reason, I didn’t make the cut. My parents and boyfriend, on the other hand, DID make the cut, and their only connection to the unit is having pledged me for that walk-a-thon. In fact, my boyfriend’s only connection to the university is through me, and he recently asked me to put him on the ‘do not mail’ list because, as he observed, it’s a waste of postage for them to mail to him in Canada when he’s not going to give them money. My father, at least, earned a degree here, though I don’t think he’s particularly interested in giving the university any money. Furthermore, because the director does not use the centralized university database, she does not have my parents’ most current address. So, since they moved about nine months ago, the mail is probably just going to get returned undeliverable anyway.
If the director were new, I could easily explain all this away. But she’s not. She’s been the director there since at least 2004, because that’s when I remember volunteering there…and according to the AG rep I was talking to, she did the exact same thing last year.
Oh well – more money for Right to Life (one of the appeals currently in my basket). I think I know what I’ll give to that unit this year: a 2007 calendar, with prominent dates marked: “BEGIN LIST FOR ANNUAL APPEAL”; “DISCUSS YEAR-END APPEAL WITH ANNUAL GIVING”; “ENSURE ANNUAL APPEAL IS OUT”…
