Worry-Free Fund Raising

As the global financial crisis erupted this fall, it might not have seemed like the ideal time to publish a fund-raising primer guided by the premise that philanthropic resources are abundant and available to anybody who understands how to ask for them.

But Reynold Levy, a veteran fund raiser and former grant maker whose new book is called Yours for the Asking: An Indispensable Guide to Fundraising and Management, argues that even in a troubled economy, a lot of people still have the resources to give generously. And in his job as president of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, his optimism has not flagged, even though his organization benefits significantly from Wall Street donors.

Besides, he says, “worry is not a fund-raising technique. I’ve never known those who brood and worry to be effective.”

Diplomatic Skills

Experience also tells him not to fret. He headed the staff of a committee that persuaded New York City officials not to make devastating cuts in social services when the municipality faced a financial collapse in the mid-1970s, and he joined Lincoln Center soon after the 2001 terrorist attacks had sent the economy — especially in New York — into a tailspin.

In this new book, Mr. Levy, 63, draws on that experience, which includes leading the International Rescue Committee and New York’s 92nd Street Y, as well as heading the grant-making programs at the AT&T Foundation.

While he is highly regarded for his fund raising, his chief accomplishment at Lincoln Center has been as much diplomatic as financial. He brokered consensus among the dozen arts groups that make up Lincoln Center as it completes a $1.2-billion renovation of its 16-acre campus.

Before he arrived, the project had stalled for several years, but now the organizations are working together to raise money. And he has led Lincoln Center’s effort to contribute the major portion of the construction bill, which will be split among the other organizations and government sources. So far, Lincoln Center has raised $600-million — two-thirds of the money it is supposed to raise. And while the view from Mr. Levy’s office is still more a construction site than a world-class arts complex, several new spaces, including the renovated concert venue Alice Tully Hall, are slated for completion during the center’s yearlong 50th-anniversary celebration, which begins this spring.

A Pitch From Beverly Sills

Framed as a primer on seeking donations, Mr. Levy’s new book is a compendium of fund-raising fundamentals, as told by a self-styled master to a novice. It covers topics such as how to manage generational gaps between donors and fund raisers, the importance of a well-written direct-mail appeal, and how to plan memorable special events.

He intersperses his advice with statistics on giving and adds anecdotes from his years in fund raising, including an unusual technique by the opera diva Beverly Sills that worked when she pitched a proposal to him at AT&T.

“When I hesitated,” he writes, “she asked whether, since her dancers, singers, and chorus members were without costumes, would it help if she disrobed then and there?”

He declined, he recalls, but “Beverly left with a $100,000 pledge.”

Mr. Levy’s fund-raising experience dates to 1973, when, as a third-year law student at Columbia University, he volunteered to assist Jerome Kretchmer, a former New York City government official, in his shortlived mayoral campaign. Mr. Levy was charged with accompanying Mr. Kretchmer on his morning breakfast meetings with potential supporters, a duty that required Mr. Levy to begin his commute from his Brooklyn home at 3:45 a.m. After his first breakfast meeting, Mr. Levy says, he was surprised when the campaign manager asked how much money he had raised.

“No one told me to raise money,” he recalls. “I thought I was there to have a conversation.”

From that awkward beginning, Mr. Levy says, he gradually arrived at the realization that inspired him to write Yours for the Asking: Most leaders find asking for money awkward, intimidating, and distasteful.

“CEO’s spend all their lives hearing the phrase, ‘Yes, sir, I’d be happy to,’” says Mr. Levy. “They rarely get, ‘I can’t do that,’ so they are unaccustomed to being in the vulnerable position of asking for something that might be refused.”

His new guide seeks to reverse their discomfort and create an army of solicitors with the gumption to go after the stockpiles of money that Mr. Levy says are readily available.

For his part, Mr. Levy has never been bashful about asking for money for a good cause. And he receives handsome compensation for it: Last year his salary at Lincoln Center was $836,500, not including retirement and other benefits. But the job has other personal rewards. For one thing, he says, soliciting donations satisfies his desire for instant feedback.

Getting a “yes” in response to asking for a large gift is “what applause is to an artist,” says Mr. Levy, who has an artistic bent of his own. After winning a school competition at age 11, he tap-danced on a local television show and he confesses to ambitions of performing stand-up comedy.

Mr. Levy says that his confidence in asking for large sums is also bolstered by his conviction that a charitable donation is as much a gift for the giver as for the recipient. Given the satisfaction a large gift brings to the donor, he says, it would be downright rude not to ask for contributions.

“My friends would be very angry it I didn’t ask them for money,” he says. “If I don’t, I’m depriving them of an opportunity to link themselves to a cause I deeply believe in.”

Expensive Breakfast

One of Mr. Levy’s many maxims is that “no” is just the beginning of the conversation with a potential donor.

“When people say no, they don’t mean no,” he says. “They mean, ‘Ask me later,’ or ‘You didn’t do enough homework.’ They mean ‘I didn’t have a good year financially — come back another time.’”

According to Rita E. Hauser, president of the Hauser Foundation and a member of Lincoln Center’s board, Mr. Levy’s dogged approach has worked on her. Most recently, she says, Mr. Levy’s clear and comprehensive descriptions of the renovation plans for Alice Tully Hall helped turn her initial pledge of $1-million into a $5-million gift.

“When he takes me to breakfast, I know it’s going to be costly,” she says.

Mr. Levy says that he learned many fund-raising skills by observing his father, an insurance and mutual-fund salesman in Brooklyn. As a child, says Mr. Levy, he and his father would watch Art Linkletter’s House Party, a television show during which audience members would pick telephone numbers at random from a phone book and compete with each other in trying to keep a stranger on the phone for a two-minute sales pitch.

After the program, says Mr. Levy, his father would re-create the competition at home: Reynold would choose a number and keep time as his father made the call and tried out the Linkletter sales script. He always made the two-minute mark, says Mr. Levy.

Mr. Levy remembers that his father kept notes about sales calls on index cards. If someone rebuffed him, saying, ‘Don’t bother me now, my daughter is getting married,’ says Mr. Levy, his father would make a note to call back several weeks later and ask, ‘How was the wedding?’

Donors never think of themselves as donors, says Mr. Levy. The key to a successful appeal, he says, is finding an interest they can connect with, which requires persistence and extensive research.

“I call him relentless Reynold,” says Bart Friedman, a New York lawyer and a childhood friend of Mr. Levy’s.

Mr. Friedman — who has been asked by Mr. Levy for money and who, during Mr. Levy’s years as president of the AT&T Foundation, solicited grants from him as a board member of the Paul Taylor Dance Company — attributes Mr. Levy’s success as a fund raiser to his genuine belief in the causes he represents and the thoroughness of his preparation.

“He knows more about you than you do when he’s asking you for funds,” says Mr. Friedman.

Other donors note Mr. Levy’s directness. “He starts off a meeting saying, ‘I’m here to persuade you to make a large gift to Lincoln Center,’” says John C. Whitehead, the former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs who is chairman emeritus of the International Rescue Committee. “There’s not much small talk about golf or the weather. He comes right to the point.”

Small Charities

While Yours for the Asking draws upon Mr. Levy’s years of heading large institutions, the book’s precepts, he insists, apply just as well to tiny, new nonprofit groups.

As an example, he offers small organizations the same advice he gave to his wife, Elizabeth Cooke, in the 1990s when she became president of the Bronx Museum of the Arts: Emphasize the group’s low overhead, large number of volunteers, and impact on the community to grant makers that focus on strengthening disadvantaged neighborhoods; reach out to local schools, churches, and businesses that might have an interest in collaborating with the museum for educational and other programs; and conduct research on the names of affluent individuals from the area who might want to help the neighborhood.

These are the strategies Mr. Levy developed during his seven years as president of the 92nd Street Y, an organization he describes as the only community center with a diving board above a world-class concert hall.

When Mr. Levy joined the 92nd Street Y in 1977, he says, its fund-raising efforts were narrowly focused on supporters of local Jewish organizations.

During his tenure there, he said, he broadened the Y’s group of donors by reaching out to people and organizations who were less interested in its Jewish identity but cared deeply about its highly regarded educational, literary, and performing arts, as well as its recreational services for youngsters and elderly people.

Similarly, in his six-year tenure as president of the International Rescue Committee, which aids refugees, Mr. Levy was able to quintuple the organization’s annual donations and create a $40-million endowment by going beyond the obvious refugee-oriented foundations to solicit donors with economic interests in specific countries, international organizations that focus on health, and other organizations that deal with women’s and children’s issues.

Mr. Levy is a believer in big boards as a way to diversify and expand an organization’s fund-raising potential. Lincoln Center had 44 directors when he arrived. Now there are 68.

Mr. Levy, who has made charitable donations exceeding $2-million himself, expects not only considerable financial support from directors but also their help in opening doors to wealthy peers and taking a visible role in Lincoln Center galas and other special events.

When he joined Lincoln Center, Mr. Levy increased the amount that board members are expected to give, asking all new directors to personally contribute or help raise $250,000 a year and to also make a gift of $1-million or more to the capital campaign. That has helped increase financial commitments from veteran board members, whose annual gifts have grown by more than 50 percent since the new standard was established, says Mr. Levy.

Mr. Levy is the chairman of the executive committee of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in Washington. The institute’s director, C. Fred Bergsten, says Mr. Levy has used the fund-raising techniques in his book to benefit the institute.

Two years ago, says Mr. Bergsten, Mr. Levy not only talked him into holding a gala dinner in New York to celebrate the Peterson Institute’s 25th anniversary, but he also persuaded him that the event would be a good way to kick off a $50-million capital campaign.

Although reluctant, Mr. Bergsten was persuaded by Mr. Levy’s argument that the event, with guests such as Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and the president of the European Central Bank, would attract notice and support from New York’s financial executives.

The gala, says Mr. Bergsten, succeeded, netting $1-million from the evening and providing a glittering opening to the campaign, which ultimately quadrupled the institute’s endowment, just as Mr. Levy had promised.

Says Mr. Bergsten: “He’s a guru.”