New Professorship Created to Bolster Fund-Raising Research

When the Indiana University Center on Philanthropy asked Bob Hartsook for a big gift to endow the first fund-raising professorship at the university, he was intrigued.

Mr. Hartsook, a Witchita, Kan., consultant with more than 30 years of fund-raising experience, says he has long been frustrated

that, despite the best efforts of fund raisers, giving in the United States has remained stubbornly fixed at about 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

He says one way to increase giving would be to improve fund raisers’ knowledge and skills through better education.

“I’ve got a lot of respect for the fund-raising profession, but frankly there is a lot of crap out there,” says Mr. Hartsook. “As the profession has evolved, we are creating a bunch of mechanics, but we are not teaching them the foundation of why philanthropy occurs and the best ways to make it happen.

“I am a lawyer by training, and my profession is built on solid research. Fund raising is based on anecdotal stories.”

So Mr. Hartsook agreed to give $1.5-million for the new fund-raising faculty position, which is now occupied by Adrian Sargeant, a British scholar selected by the Center on Philanthropy.

Mr. Sargeant, who holds a doctorate in marketing from the University of Exeter, in England, began his new appointment in Indianapolis last month. Under the arrangement, his faculty position may be renewed at three-year intervals.

The author or coauthor of numerous books about fund raising and marketing, Mr. Sargeant has also conducted dozens of studies on fund raising, as well as nonprofit and corporate marketing practices, in Australia, Britain, and the United States.

In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Sargeant described how he hopes to help advance fund raising and what he has observed about the profession in the United States and abroad.

What do you hope to achieve in this position?

My interest is in applied research, research that fund raisers can actually use. I want to help expand the body of knowledge around fund raising. We like to think of ourselves as professionals, but we do not have an underpinning of research-based knowledge that you find in other professions like medicine.

For example, what are the three key factors that fund raisers can influence to build donor loyalty? I doubt that fund raisers could agree on an answer to that question.

We have a professional qualification here called the Certified Fundraising Executive, the CFRE, but it is more skill-oriented. We need to underpin that with knowledge.

My working hours will be a third research and writing, another third teaching, and the remaining third in giving presentations and talking to fund raisers, in hopes of helping them improve what they do.

Certainly the goal is to get out there and meet as many fund raisers as possible and disseminate information.

What sort of fund-raising research will you do?

The problem with nonprofit organizations is that they do not have the money for research. And given that this is the only fund-raising chair, it is incumbent on me to find the most pressing research needs and fill them.

To that end, it only makes sense to ask the profession what gaps they perceive in the knowledge around fund raising. So I’m inviting senior fund raisers to tell me what the research agenda should be.

Having said that, I do think we need to look into the things that drive donor retention, such as commitment to a cause, and how we can build on that.

People haven’t grasped the difference that even small changes in donor retention can make to the bottom line. You ought to know, as a nonprofit, what the effect on net contributions would be if you could hold onto 1 to 5 percent of the donors you’re losing every year.

The smart corporations can tell you this about their customers. Our research with nonprofits and companies suggests that a 10-percent improvement in donor retention can increase returns by up to 200 percent.

What differences do you see between American and British fund-raising practices?

In the United States, you are light years ahead in major-gift fund raising, and your concept of stewardship is amazingly developed.

But some, not all, direct marketing in the U.K. is of a higher quality. We are better at building relationships with the masses in fund-raising databases.

Here, giving is really concentrated on a tiny few. You are better at looking after the top end, and we are better with the lower end. In our country, all the money tends to come from lots of people giving comparatively little.

In the U.K. now, we have Codes of Fundraising Practice, which stipulate detailed professional practices that fund raisers should follow for special events, direct mail, and other forms of fund raising. The codes are much more detailed than the Association of Fundraising Professionals’ Standards of Ethical Practice here. AFP emphasizes that you should be ethical, but not so much how.

On the other hand, your Donor Bill of Rights is an amazing document. You can be really proud to put that on solicitations to donors, because it stresses the positive things donors can expect.

We have a Fundraising Promise, which is a poor cousin to the Donor Bill of Rights. Our Fundraising Promise talks about not causing an unnecessary nuisance to donors, but that is a negative, not a positive. It is not stated in terms of a right that donors can expect.

What has your marketing research taught you about fund raising?

We need long-term relationships with supporters, which means managing the quality of service provided to donors and seeing if we are improving from one year to another. But few nonprofit organizations examine or measure their service to donors, even though they look at how many clients they serve or how many hot meals they deliver.

And this whole notion of the annual fund as a fund-raising program does not help. That term focuses you on once-yearly transactions rather than on relationships with donors. I do not like this label.