April 12, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute
Baltimore
As more than 3,000 fund raisers gather here for the Association of Fundraising Professionals annual conference, many of them are being asked to give money as they pass through the exhibit halls to meeting sessions.
The solicitors, who wear badges bearing the association’s logo, work for Fundraising Initiative International, a company in London that specializes in person-to-person fund raising to seek modest gifts.
Instead of their normal practice of soliciting pedestrians on the street, the solicitors are asking conference goers to sign up to make monthly donations. The money would be automatically deducted from a donor’s checking account and sent to the AFP Foundation, the association’s fund-raising arm.
Jamieson Jackson, the solicitation company’s chief executive, said that the five employees working here are doing so as volunteers, donating their time in part to get exposure to other fund raisers. “There is a much higher standard here, because everyone here asks for money for a living,” he said.
Mr. Jackson said that the solicitors do not have goals for how much money they will raise or how many donors they will recruit. Instead, their goals are more general: to build monthly giving and to reach every person possible.
While he said he could not provide any totals for how much has been raised so far, Mr. Jackson said that the solicitors have told him that they are having “a wonderful time,” and that the fund raisers at the conference have responded well to these pitches. And why not? “This is the Super Bowl of fund raising,” he said.
Keep up with all the coverage of the fund-raising meeting in The Chronicle’s conference notebook.
