June 16, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Jewish organizations are stuck in antiquated fund-raising practices dating from the 1970s, and that’s why they are losing donors and contributions, according to Robert P. Aronson, president of the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life, in New York.
Mr. Aronson offers four lessons in a new essay picked up by The Fundermentalist, a blog about Jewish philanthropy. The essay is one of a dozen pieces about Jewish fund raising to appear in the spring issue of Contact, a quarterly journal published by the Steinhardt Foundation.
Recalling his early days as a fund raiser 35 years ago, Mr. Aronson describes how Israel was the trigger for giving, and fund raisers believed that the cause was so important that they were entitled to their donors’ money — an attitude he says continues to this day. Which brings us to Lesson No. 1: “Just because they have the money doesn’t mean you’re going to get it,” he writes.
Lesson No. 2 is that Jewish fund raisers need to build affinity with donors, Mr. Aronson continues. “Non-Jewish organizations solicit funds better than we do,” he writes. “Jewish fund raisers are too busy focusing on themselves and what they want as opposed to what the donors want. Non-Jewish oragnizations don’t make this mistake.”
Lesson No. 3 is simple enough: “Listen. You might actually find out what the donor wants,” he writes. “Listening depends on face-to-face appointments and the development of long-term relationships of trust and mutual respect.”
Finally, Lesson 4 is that big events honoring someone important, a time-honored Jewish fund-raising strategy, “don’t work anymore,” Mr. Aronson writes. “Most people, especially today’s new donors, simply don’t like them.”
“As Jewish fund raisers, we must continue to follow our hearts. But to be successful, this is simply no longer good enough,” Mr. Aronson concludes. “It is imperative that we adapt, change our organizational goals, and train our professionals differently, or we’ll face a future of increasing anachronism and irrelevance.”
