The Secrets of Her Success

Veteran fund raiser works to raise the field’s professionalism

When Naomi Levine was making weekly visits in the 1980s to see her mother at a retirement home in the Bronx,

she could count on getting a special request just before they encountered the other residents. “Now, look, Naomi,” her mother would say, “if the ladies want to know what you do, say you are a lawyer, not a fund raiser.”

In fact, Mrs. Levine did hold a law degree. But at age 55, she turned to fund raising and became one of the nation’s most-respected development officers, playing an instrumental role in helping New York University move from an institution that raised $32-million a year, when she started in 1978, to $354-million last year.

Now 79, Mrs. Levine retired in February as the university’s chief fund raiser, and is embarking on a new career expanding NYU’s center to train nonprofit officials in the art of winning money from private sources. She also continues to meet weekly with the university’s president and new chief development officer to discuss fund-raising strategy, and still courts about a dozen donors with whom she has worked in the past.

Lack of Formal Education

Although much has changed in the two decades since her mother forbade her daughter from talking forthrightly about her career, Mrs. Levine worries that too many people still hold fund raisers in low esteem. “My own mother looked at fund raising as something that bright professional women and men didn’t go into,” she says. “She thought about it like selling Girl Scout cookies or running a [fund-raising] dinner, and the more sophisticated aspects of fund raising were unknown to her.”

One reason Mrs. Levine thinks so few people see fund raisers as professionals is that relatively few development officers have received formal training. She says she worries that too many people stumble into fund raising as a profession and never get the grounding in ethics, donor psychology, board development, and other topics they need to do the job well.

A solution, she hopes, lies in the Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising, at New York University. She hopes the three-year-old institute, which she oversees and where she teaches, will draw more talented people into fund-raising careers while also improving the quality of training available for those already in the field.

However, a key challenge may lie in the makings of her own success. Nearly everyone who knows Mrs. Levine says her fund-raising prowess comes from her natural intelligence, charm, and savvy ability to size people up. They suggest that Naomi Levines are born, not made, and now it is up to Mrs. Levine to prove them wrong.

Growing Up Poor

Although Naomi Levine now lives in a spacious two-bedroom apartment with an office overlooking Washington Square, and earned $362,000 last year as NYU’s senior vice president for external affairs, her origins were humble.

She grew up poor in the Bronx and credits the free education she received at two public institutions for top students, Hunter College High School and Hunter College, with opening doors for her.

She tried to become a schoolteacher but flunked a city oral exam for teachers. In the long run, however, that failure sent her on another path to success: a Hunter professor who thought she had excelled in undergraduate courses on the law suggested a legal career.

Mrs. Levine won a full scholarship to Columbia Law School, where she was one of a handful of women in the class of 1948. She made the law review and went on to become a lawyer at the American Jewish Congress in 1949, working her way up to executive director, a position she held from 1971 to 1978. When she left that job, she said, “Everyone said I was crazy since I had such a great job.” But, she says, after spending so much of her career at one place, she had a “29-year itch.”

Believing in a Cause

Moving to New York University, she says, was easy because she is passionate about the way higher education helped improve her own life. “I don’t have any trouble selling programs, scholarships, faculty chairs in higher education because I believe in the product with all of my heart,” she says. “I always tell anyone that in order to be a good fund raiser, you have to have a good product, and you have to believe in it.”

That passion seems to have made a clear difference in her ability to increase fund raising and oversee a $1-billion campaign that ran from 1984 to 1994, concluding five years earlier than expected, and was one of the first billion-dollar drives attempted by any nonprofit group. A second campaign to raise that same amount, completed in 2000, took in more than $1.2-billion. University officials and others say that money Mrs. Levine was instrumental in obtaining helped to raise the institution’s academic profile from a low-budget subway school that mainly served New Yorkers to an institution that today has a $1.17-billion endowment and attracts students from all 50 states and more than 140 countries.

“She has been one of the key people in the creation of the modern New York University,” says Martin Lipton, a New York lawyer who chairs the university’s board of trustees.

Mrs. Levine herself is more modest. She says the presidents of NYU she worked with, plus many of its trustees, made fund raising a high priority and were good at it. “With that combination, it’s very easy for a senior vice president,” she says. “But without the team, it couldn’t be done.”’

‘A True Intellectual’

Mrs. Levine’s colleagues, friends, and donors to the university all agree that the fact she “lives and breathes” New York University is what helped make her a successful fund raiser who comes across as sincere, not slick. She has lunch and dinner regularly with many of the university’s deans and professors and frequently attends campus lectures and performances. In addition, colleagues and donors say, her knowledge about a wide range of topics makes her someone that philanthropists gravitate to, and want to get to know as a personal friend.

“She is a true intellectual,” says Mr. Lipton. “People are drawn to her because of her extensive knowledge and her broad interests.”

Many donors and co-workers point to her extensive reading habits. Every morning she pores over several newspapers and magazines, and her secretary clips articles from dozens of other publications for her. She also tries to read at least two to three books a week, often on historical topics or issues in the news.

“You have to be a well-read human being to be an interesting person that people want to talk to,” she says. “I know when I go out to lunch with someone, I like them to be interesting and well read, and know what is happening in the world.”

Moreover, she says, it’s just not her modus operandi to say, “Nice to meet you. Now, do you want to give me $100-million for the hospital?”

“It’s not my style,” she says. “I have to get to know you, you have to get to know me, and that I am interested in other things.”

Instead, she will often spend three-quarters or more of a meeting talking about other issues. “I get to the fund-raising aspect sooner or later,” she adds — usually later rather than sooner.

Not a Sales Approach

Donors and others say that approach has paid off.

“One rarely feels from her the sense that one feels from many fund raisers, that one is ‘selling,’” says Jeffrey R. Solomon, president of the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies, and a member of the Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising’s advisory board. “With Naomi, it is really much more: People see the privilege of participating in the project.”

H. Dale Hemmerdinger, a New York real-estate executive who chairs the fund-raising committee of the university board, says it is not just Mrs. Levine’s enthusiasm for a project that works, but her willingness to figure out what it is that a donor finds most appealing.

While other fund raisers do a lot of the talking, he says, Mrs. Levine asks more questions and listens to the answers. He says most fund raisers take the approach a car salesman might, promoting a gift to a particular academic program or building the way a salesman might press a particular car on a potential buyer. More effective, but he says more rare, are the salesmen who try “to figure out if you want a convertible, a sedan, a two-door, or a station wagon.”

“It’s a very clear difference in my mind,” and Mrs. Levine succeeds, he says, by doing a lot of probing about what makes a donor tick.

All too often, Mr. Hemmerdinger said, he has been pitched by fund raisers who don’t have the slightest clue what interests him. “So many fund raisers go right to the meat so fast, so there is no romance,” he says. “You have to have a little foreplay.”

Donors and colleagues say Mrs. Levine doesn’t fawn on wealthy people, and instead has an ability to make them open up to her. Many of the university’s biggest donors say they consider Mrs. Levine a personal friend, not just someone they know as part of their university involvement. In the days after Mrs. Levine’s husband died last year, for instance, one donor called her secretary daily to check whether Mrs. Levine had plans for dinner that evening. If not, the donor sent over a prepared meal.

Brusque Moments

While many donors find Mrs. Levine approachable and a good conversationalist, she also has a tough side. Colleagues recall how she yelled at King Hussein of Jordan “to hurry up and get in line” at a gala dinner and once had a shouting conversation with Ed Koch, when he was mayor of New York and she was exasperated that the city wasn’t providing enough police patrols in the Greenwich Village neighborhood where NYU’s campus is located.

Steven T. Dhondt, the university’s director of corporate and foundation relations, says, “Many people would think she is kind of a curmudgeon, and to an extent, it’s a style she may cultivate.”

But while some people she works with mistake her manner as brusque, Mr. Dhondt says, those who get to know her find that she “is one of the most caring and wonderful people on the face of the earth.”

He and others say she also has a sensitive side that few see, such as when she gets nervous before giving a speech.

Jane F. Karlin, who worked at NYU before becoming national development director at Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization, says Mrs. Levine’s standards “are very high and you work at a fast pace.” While not everyone fits in with her management style, says Ms. Karlin, those who do feel tremendously loyal to her.

“You either really love her or you don’t love her,” says Ms. Karlin, who credits Mrs. Levine with helping her define her own fund-raising and management style, and encouraging her to pursue the top position at Hadassah.

Making a Transition

The past year has been one of change for Mrs. Levine.

She says that she assumed when John Sexton took over as president of the university in May that he would want to name his own chief fund raiser — although she has worked under three other New York University presidents — and that it would be a logical time in her own life to make a transition.

Mrs. Levine has also been searching for ways to get over the death of her husband of 53 years.

She says loneliness prompted her to seek a roommate to live with her in an apartment that the university subsidizes, as it does for many of its top officials.

The roommate, Sarah Abdallah, 24, recently completed a master’s degree in higher-education administration at the university and now works in its office of student affairs.

Despite differences in age and religion — Ms. Abdallah is Muslim and Mrs. Levine is Jewish — the two have become good friends, says Ms. Abdallah, and they enjoy cooking together and watching movies from Mrs. Levine’s personal collection of more than 600 videos.

Ms. Abdallah says what has struck her the most about Mrs. Levine is her knack for sizing up people accurately. Each time one of her friends visits the apartment, Mrs. Levine gives her a complete debriefing, she says.

“She can tell you if that person is smart, and what their faults and strengths are very quickly.”

Sizing Up Donors

Colleagues say Mrs. Levine applies that skill whenever she walks into a room of potential donors, figuring out quickly who has money to give away — and who doesn’t.

It is that kind of skill that even Mrs. Levine admits is hard to teach, but she is not deterred from her pursuit of turning out top-notch fund raisers at the Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising, which is aimed largely at working professionals.

“You can’t teach someone to be a Hemingway,” she concedes. “But you can teach someone to be a great writer.”

She says she has a lot of work ahead of her, fretting that “there are very few people in the field that I can say are first-rate.”

Part of the problem, she says, is that few people enter the profession deliberately. “It is the kind of place you go when you haven’t been able to find a job in the area of your training,” she says. “And that troubles me.”

Good fund raisers, she says, should be capable of wearing many hats: that of teacher, salesperson, entrepreneur, psychologist, lawyer, accountant — and even Ph.D. student, because they must be smart, literate, good at research, and able to write well.

Colleagues say they have no doubt she will succeed in building the center. David Finney, dean of the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, where the center is based, says that since Mrs. Levine began to play a more active role over the past year, course enrollments have nearly doubled, largely due to her stature in the fund-raising world, and the center now has about 700 students.

Larry Silverstein, a New York University trustee and the president of Silverstein Properties, expects Mrs. Levine will manage to achieve her goal of improving the fund-raising profession. “This is a woman who does everything with full heart, with full soul, with full conviction. She brings a passion to whatever she does — and she chooses very carefully what it is she does.”

And if anyone is worried that Mrs. Levine plans to slow down in her retirement, they need only listen to the answering-machine message that played at her house in the Adirondacks this summer: “Sorry, Naomi Levine is out waterskiing, sailing, swimming, and riding her mountain bike to Lake Placid, which is only 102 miles away,” said a male voice on the tape. “On her return, she’ll call you at once.”