Aiming High

With a small staff and a $1.7-billion goal, a conservation charity looks to volunteers to help snare big gifts from donors

Ducks Unlimited, a wetlands-conservation organization, is engaged in a daring endeavor: running a campaign to raise $1.7-billion with a staff of 25 fund raisers. Most other charities that have embarked on billion-dollar campaigns employ at least 100 development officers to secure the large gifts that make or break any big campaign.

“If I had the budget, I would dramatically expand our major-gift staff and include people who didn’t do anything but make calls,” says Dan Thiel, chief fund raiser at Ducks Unlimited, which was formed by hunting enthusiasts in the 1930s. Conservation staff members looked at projects they deemed urgent around the country to come up with the total figure for the campaign.

With $763-million raised since the campaign began seeking money quietly in 2004, he says, the charity is pushing hard to meet its $1.7-billion goal by 2010.

Ducks Unlimited has plenty of affluent supporters to court as donors. At least 2,000 of its members are wealthy enough to give at least $1-million or more, according to research it has conducted, and another 175 could give $10-million or more.

“We found numerous individuals who were sending in their $25 membership payment each year but have the ability to make gifts in the eight-figure range,” says John S. McConnell, a Minneapolis fund-raising consultant who is advising Ducks Unlimited on the campaign. Among the charity’s members, he says, are venture capitalists and top executives in the technology, banking, and energy industries.

But in reaching out to those members, Ducks Unlimited has had to go beyond its traditional methods of raising money.

Until now, most contributions from individuals have been produced at 4,000 fund-raising dinners every year across the country. The events bring in $5,000 to $100,000 apiece and are the main source of the $60-million the organization receives annually from individuals.

Another challenge is that, even though so many of its members are wealthy, Ducks Unlimited has not been as successful as other large conservation groups in persuading donors to put the organization in their wills or make other planned gifts like charitable trusts and annuities. Only 5,000 people have made a planned gift to the charity in the last decade.

“We work pretty hard at it, but it’s still a small percentage,” says Mr. Thiel.

A key reason is that 95 percent of Ducks Unlimited members are men in their 40s and 50s, most of whom have spouses who are statistically likely to outlive them — and are far less passionate than their husbands about hunting and waterfowl. The charity hopes the campaign will garner $100-million in planned gifts but so far has reported $40-million, about half in bequest promises that will not materialize for many years.

35,000 Volunteers

Instead Mr. Thiel and other fund raisers are betting the campaign’s success on the continued expansion of efforts to obtain gifts of $100,000 or more from wealthy people. Such gifts totaled $22-million last year, up from about $10-million in 2003 before the campaign began, and Mr. Thiel wants them to reach $35-million annually by the end of the campaign.

To achieve that goal, Ducks Unlimited is turning to the 35,000 volunteers who organize its fund-raising dinners each year.

Mr. Thiel says that he gets about 10 calls every day from volunteers who want to talk to him about potential donors with the ability to make sizable campaign gifts. More often than not, the volunteer is willing to visit the donor, along with Mr. Thiel or another fund raiser, and ask for a campaign donation. “No one goes alone on a call,” he says.

Mr. McConnell, the consultant, says that the volunteers and members of Ducks Unlimited are more comfortable than supporters of other charities about asking each other for money.

“We talk about peer-to-peer fund raising in other organizations,” he says, “but it’s really true here.”

Members from the same geographic area have often hunted together, he adds. “They share that passion,” he says. “It’s easy for them to solicit one another.”

Another key ally for fund raisers at Ducks Unlimited is its conservation staff, which has become increasingly involved in campaign solicitations. The charity’s 250 hydrologists, waterfowl specialists, and other experts work with landowners nationwide to encourage them to turn properties into duck-friendly terrain, and they engage in other projects to preserve and restore waterfowl habitats.

What has impressed Mr. Thiel, whose fund-raising background is in higher education, is that many conservationists have been eager to help with campaign solicitations.

He recalls college deans telling him that it was his job, not theirs, to raise money.

“Nobody has said that to me here,” he says. “They understand that to fund their work, they’ve got to do major gifts.”

Craig R. LeSchack, director of conservation programs in the charity’s South Atlantic regional office in North Charleston, S.C., and a waterfowl biologist, says that he was surprised to learn that he likes raising money for Ducks Unlimited.

“If you said I’d do this, I’d never have believed you,” he says. “But I’ve found I really enjoy it.”

It was Mr. LeSchack and Brett Baker, the fund-raising director of Ducks Unlimited’s South Atlantic regional office, who together came up with a way to help local donors understand why they should contribute to restoring nesting habitats in faraway North and South Dakota and Canada, one of the nine projects to be paid for with contributions to the campaign.

They started taking small groups of Ducks Unlimited members to North Dakota, where they stayed free at a member’s hunting lodge over a long weekend.

Under the guidance of the organization’s conservation staff, the groups have learned about how the North American population of mallard ducks, as well as other birds, depend on their ability to breed on the swath of grasslands known as “pothole prairies,” which are dotted with small ponds.

The trips, which have since been emulated by Ducks Unlimited directors in other regions of the country, attracted more than $2-million in gifts in their first year.

“These people are familiar with what goes on in their backyard,” Mr. LeSchack says. “But until you can get up there on the breeding grounds, you don’t know. It’s a really eye-opening experience.”