A Textbook Case

Kathleen Kelly challenges myths about fund raising in her new tome — and hopes to transform the way the profession is taught

In a Thursday afternoon class at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Professor Kathleen S. Kelly is decrying what she sees as the evils of paid solicitors who pocket most of the money they raise in the name of charity.

Good fund raisers, she shouts, “don’t raise money from strangers.” But, she adds in a much softer voice, “that is all that these paid solicitors do.”

By now, the nine students in Ms. Kelly’s “Principles of Fund Raising” course are used to impassioned attacks on conventional fund-raising methods such as mass direct-mail appeals. They have read plenty of them in Ms. Kelly’s new textbook, Effective Fund-Raising Management, in which she marshals reams of studies and theories to argue that many, if not most, fund raisers go about seeking donations the wrong way.

The 663-page book, which was released early this year by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, has already won a prestigious prize for new publications: At next week’s annual meeting of the National Society of Fund Raising Executives, it will be honored as the year’s most important contribution to the knowledge and understanding of fund raising. Experts are hailing it as a landmark achievement, the first textbook on fund raising to go beyond a traditional how-to manual.

Ms. Kelly, a 54-year-old former fund raiser turned tenured professor, has one goal above all for the volume. “I want this book to transform the way fund raising is taught,” she says.

Dwight F. Burlingame, associate executive director of the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, says it may do just that. “This is one of the most important books that’s come out in fund raising,” he says. “It has the potential to change the way we think about fund raising.”

Ms. Kelly says she is concerned that many people still view fund raising as a vocation, like plumbing, which is learned on the job, and not as a profession requiring academic training. In her book, Ms. Kelly uses her scholarly expertise to contest many assertions about giving and raising money.

For instance, fund raisers like to say that tax considerations are not the reason why donors give, but Ms. Kelly’s analysis of research on giving leads her to assert that tax incentives are indeed a powerful motivation for giving — and one that unscrupulous fund raisers may cause Congress to take away.

She blasts several prominent organizations that she says are damaging the credibility of the fund-raising profession, or not living up to their responsibility to advance the field.

The National Society of Fund Raising Executives comes under the gun for not including a single question about fund-raising laws or regulations on its certification exam. Ms. Kelly believes that, in many cases, fund raisers’ ignorance about the law has caused them to violate regulations and helped prompt state and federal officials to tighten laws governing solicitations.

As a researcher, Ms. Kelly says that she has learned much more about such issues in the field and can speak more objectively about them than she could as a practicing fund raiser. As director of development at the University of Maryland at College Park in the mid-1980s, Ms. Kelly says, she realized that an advanced degree would improve her chances of becoming a chief fund raiser. But as she worked to obtain a Ph.D. in mass communications from the university, a new goal emerged: to study and teach fund raising full time.

Even though she is an expert on fund raising, Ms. Kelly says that her colleagues at the University of Southwestern Louisiana rarely ask her to help out with their own fund raising, and she is happy to be rid of the day-to-day worries of running a development office.

“I don’t do it anymore. I’m paid to think about it,” she says.

“As a fund raiser I was judged by my peers, and I proved myself,” she adds.” This is where I belong now.”

Ms. Kelly says she hopes that more scholars will join her in studying fund raising. “This is a serious field worth serious study, given its importance to the non-profit sector,” she says. But academicians, even in degree programs in non-profit management and philanthropy, do not regard it as deserving of their research and analysis.

As a result, fund raising gets short shrift in many study programs at colleges and universities, says Ms. Kelly. Fund-raising classes, she notes, are often not required in the programs and are sometimes left out entirely.

When fund raising is taught at the university level, Ms. Kelly says, the instructors of choice are practicing fund raisers rather than scholars. That, she argues, has led to an unfortunate situation in which students are taught by case study and anecdote rather than by a critical analysis of existing fund-raising methods and principles to figure out what works and why.

In many instances, she says, students copy techniques that are not necessarily appropriate to the institutions that hire them. Without a firm grasp of principles, they are unable to apply what they have learned to find alternatives.

The problem, Ms. Kelly and others say, has been exacerbated by a lack of scholarly literature on fund raising: Most of the published material consists of how-to manuals or studies by part-time graduate students, most of whom are employed as fund raisers and conduct less-than-rigorous studies on fund raising at their own institutions.

The lack of sound academic courses in fund raising, Ms. Kelly says, means that many fund raisers don’t know how to question traditions that have been passed on over the years — and may be in need of change.

In her book, she traces the evolution of fund raising, from the informal efforts run by volunteers in the early 1900s, through the 1940s and 1950s when fund-raising consultants started traveling from non-profit institution to non-profit institution running short-term campaigns, to today’s system, where most charities have their own fund raisers.

Ms. Kelly says she doesn’t understand why some of the fund-raising methods adopted largely to suit consultants’ needs haven’t changed, now that their role at many institutions has been diminished. Capital campaigns in particular, she says, were designed to last for set periods of time because it suited the timetables of consultants.

“What is surprising, given the evolution of the fund-raising function,” she writes, “is that charitable organizations with established internal staffs continue to use a strategy developed for the convenience of consultants.”

Undue pressure on fund raisers and growing criticism from the public over huge dollar goals are two reasons why Ms. Kelly says that capital campaigns should be replaced with continuous efforts by fund raisers to bring in large donations. Capital campaigns, she concludes, “have outlived their usefulness.”

Ms. Kelly spent five years writing her treatise — which was supported by a $35,000 grant from the Lilly Endowment — after budgeting 18 months for the project. She worked on the book every weekend and wedged writing time in between teaching two or three classes weekly.

On campus, Ms. Kelly’s office overlooks a patch of Louisiana swamp, a fitting metaphor for the many times she says she felt hopelessly bogged down as she attempted to accurately portray such complex and ever-changing topics as the regulatory climate for fund raising.

The going was easier, she says, when it came to writing about principles that explain good fund raising. Her text relies on communications, systems, and other theories from the social sciences.

For example, Ms. Kelly uses public-relations theory to outline four models of how non-profit organizations interact with donors, providing illustrations of specific charities’ use of each.

The first three methods, which Ms. Kelly says dominate fund raising, consist of propagandistic appeals that stretch the truth, factually based portrayals of need, and appeals based on research into donors’ views. All are designed to fulfill one overriding goal — obtaining gifts — and can be done without the charity making any real changes to respond to donors’ needs.

The fourth method, in which charities couple solicitations with a two-way, more equal partnership with donors, is the goal that fund raisers should pursue, says Ms. Kelly. Using that method, non-profit groups promptly respond to donors’ requests for financial and other information, routinely adapt programs to match community needs, and change in other ways that incorporate donors’ views. Despite charity leaders’ paying lip service to the idea of partnerships with donors, Ms. Kelly says, “it still doesn’t happen very much in actual practice once you scratch the surface.”

While Ms. Kelly’s new book has won high praise from fund raisers who have read it, it is likely to draw strong criticism as well, once it becomes better known in the field.

Many fund raisers will probably disagree with many of Ms. Kelly’s arguments, including her contention that fund raising should be taught by scholars like herself who are paid to critically analyze and teach fund raising, rather than by those who simply do it.

“We would not use a person who is not a practicing fund raiser,” says Tim Seiler, who directs the Fund Raising School at Indiana University. “We consider the practitioner qualification essential.”

But the biggest drawback of the book, according to some readers, is its bulk, which is likely to discourage people who work full time from reading it.

“The size of this book will turn many fund raisers off, although they may buy it with every intention of reading it,” says James Gregory Lord, founder of Philanthropic Quest International, a Cleveland company that teaches fund-raising and management strategies to non-profit groups.

So far, according to the publishing company, the book has sold close to 400 copies since its release.

While using the textbook with her own students, Ms. Kelly is encouraging them to do more than just read: She wants them to base ideas about fund raising on their own research. One young woman, for example, gives a report after examining materials used by paid solicitors, including a training manual for door-to-door canvassers.

Pointing to a page in the manual that tells the solicitors how to overcome objections that people offer when asked to give, she concludes: “You say No, but they’re trained not to hear that. These people bring down fund raising.”

Ms. Kelly tells her students that, if they take her principles to heart, they will never find themselves accused of bringing such harm to fund raising. “I promise you this,” she says to them. “You will have a real advantage.”