Closing the Deal

A multimillionaire creates a new guide to help charity trustees ask their friends and peers for big gifts

Lewis B. Cullman, a New York philanthropist, and his wife, Dorothy, have given away at least $250-million — and helped charities raise millions of dollars more.

Sometimes raising money is a lot tougher than just writing a big check. But Mr. Cullman says he tries to keep a sense of humor about the inevitable gaffes that he and other volunteers make in asking for charitable donations.

One memorable mistake, he says, occurred when he and his wife attended a Manhattan party held by Bernard L. Schwartz, the head of Loral Space & Communications. Dorothy asked their host to donate his company’s products as door prizes at a charity fund-raising event she was organizing.

“Naturally, Bernard’s jaw dropped in disbelief,” Mr. Cullman recalls. “Who is this crazy woman who wants rockets for door prizes? I had told her that Bernard was head of Loral, but she thought it was L’Oréal, the cosmetics maker.”

Mr. Cullman put that story in his new guide, “How to Succeed in Fundraising By Really Trying,” a brochure intended to help charity board members and others who solicit gifts of $1-million or more in capital campaigns or other big fund-raising projects.

“When I talk about fund raising,” he says in an interview, “I’m talking about the big money, which is where most people have trouble.”

This isn’t the first time that Mr. Cullman, who was an early promoter of the leveraged-buyout concept, has put pen to paper to help other wealthy people navigate the charity world.

The author of Can’t Take It With You: The Art of Making and Giving Money, Mr. Cullman, 87, has devoted himself full time to philanthropy since 1999 (The Chronicle, June 10, 2004).

That was the year he parlayed the $13-million he spent to acquire At-a-Glance, the calendar corporation, into $550-million by selling the company.

Mr. Cullman says he intends to give away much, if not all, of his remaining wealth during his lifetime. He currently serves on 10 nonprofit boards, including those of the Environmental Defense Fund, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New York Botanical Garden.

‘Drop-Dead Challenge’

Mr. Cullman says he got the idea for his new brochure after being asked to make an impromptu speech at a breakfast meeting for arts organizations. One of his acquaintances asked if he could fill in for the speaker — who was stuck in traffic — by saying a few words about approaches he has used to raise large sums of money.

So Mr. Cullman told the arts leaders about the “drop-dead challenge” that he and Dorothy occasionally use to spur large gifts in a relatively short amount of time. Such a challenge goes beyond the usual requirement that a charity raise enough to match a donor’s pledge.

Mr. Cullman says that he first used the drop-dead challenge when the Neurosciences Institute, in San Diego, where he was a trustee, ended an agreement with a pharmaceutical company that had provided $5-million annually.

He told the institute that he would donate $2-million annually for five years, but only if the organization came up with at least $3-million on its own for each of those years, with all board members and the institute’s highest-ranking staff member making annual gifts toward the goal. If the institute failed to meet those conditions in any given year, he would yank his entire $2-million annual commitment.

“The beauty of it is, if you flunk anything, you get nothing,” says Mr. Cullman. “It’s the urgency of all or nothing.”

The institute’s fund raisers, Mr. Cullman says, used his challenge to win donations they would not have obtained otherwise. He recalls: “The development guy told me that he went to a foundation and they gave him the usual answer, ‘Sorry, we are fresh out.’ He told them, ‘If I don’t get it this year, I get nothing.’ He got the grant.”

And the institute met all of Mr. Cullman’s conditions, raising $15-million on its own over the five years of the challenge.

Sprinkled among the more obvious instructions in Mr. Cullman’s brochure — “Persevere! It works!,” “Do your homework” — are lessons gleaned from a lifetime of closing the deal.

For example, Mr. Cullman says solicitors should never leave a meeting with a potential donor without having another argument for making the gift up their sleeve. The reason: “Body language is an important thing,” he says, “and your last argument shows up on your face.”

So, as long as solicitors always know they have at least one more comeback, it is less likely that a potential donor will feel that it is safe to say No.

In another section of the brochure, entitled “The Ask,” Mr. Cullman says it is wise for a trustee to complete the arrangements under which a big gift is made, rather than turning the final negotiations over to another person such as a fellow board member, the chief executive, or even a development officer.

“There are a lot of people who can make a good sales pitch and talk about the institution, but seem unable to get a signed document,” says Mr. Cullman.

He says he suspects that people who cannot pull off a final deal are not sufficiently convinced or confident about the charitable cause. And when a potential donor senses that, he or she might scale back the gift or alter it in other ways that are not advantageous to the charity.

In his own fund-raising calls, Mr. Cullman is not shy in his efforts to overcome donors’ excuses. When a wealthy person says, “That’s all I can afford,” he counsels, consider a comeback that only a peer can make: “You should be embarrassed.”

In such cases, Mr. Cullman says, he has sometimes won a big gift by citing donations from a charity’s own staff members to a fund-raising drive. Those gifts, he says, are “a great weapon.”

For example, when Mr. Cullman was soliciting gifts for the Museum of Modern Art’s campaign to raise $858-million, he learned that key staff members had collectively donated some $522,000 toward the goal.

As a result, he says, he was inspired to double his initial gift, to $10-million, and he persuaded key trustees to increase their own donations. (The campaign ended in January.)

“I feel that I can leverage my gifts by peer pressure,” says Mr. Cullman, noting that he gets personally involved in fund raising at any organization to which he makes a large gift.

Straightforward and Brief

While Mr. Cullman has aimed his brochure at wealthy trustees, it also contains lessons for other fund raisers.

The pamphlet’s tone is straightforward and brief, the same qualities Mr. Cullman appreciates in the solicitations he receives. It is practically designed to tuck in the inside breast pocket of a suit — the same place where Mr. Cullman says fund raisers should keep a list of “naming opportunities” that a charity can offer to big donors in exchange for gifts of specific amounts.

He says keeping such a list helps solicitors avoid quoting different prices for the same project. “Doing so will backfire,” he warns.

Mr. Cullman also offers tips about fund-raising letters, describing himself as “one who receives many bad letters.”

Fund raisers, he says, should “keep it to one page” and “use short paragraphs.” He also has posted on his Web site examples of good and bad fund-raising letters he has received — with the names of the charity changed.

“Imagine receiving many letters in one day and having to wade through this!” Mr. Cullman writes about one missive that’s nearly three pages long, with the requested donation amount buried on the last page.

In another letter, a charity that received a grant from the Lewis B. and Dorothy Cullman Foundation wrote to acknowledge the gift and ask for more money. But the charity named another foundation in the body of the text, an error that Mr. Cullman chalks up to “sloppy word-processing.”

He did not support that group again.

According to Mr. Cullman, fund-raising mistakes, even his own, are not in vain if they can help others.

“Many missteps have brought me to a place where I can speak with confidence about raising money,” he writes in his brochure. “And since so many people have urged me to write down the tricks of the trade, I decided to take a crack at it.”

The text of Mr. Cullman’s brochure and sample fund-raising letters may be downloaded from his Web site. Multiple copies of the brochure may be ordered in exchange for the cost of postage by sending an e-mail message to Mr. Cullman’s assistant, Denise Peppas, at denise@cvi.cnchost.com.