This is a point that bears repeating: Asking someone you know for money in person is the most effective way to raise funds. If you ask all the people who give away money to give a gift they can afford to a cause they like, half of them will give something. (People who fit this description—you know they give, you know they can afford to give, and they believe in the cause—are called “prospects.”) Of the half who say yes to your request, half of those people will give you the amount you asked for; the other half will give you less.

The response rate you receive from personal asking is much higher than you can get from any other kind of fundraising. Moreover, you can ask for much larger amounts in person. It is rare to ask for a $5,000 or $10,000 gift by email or phone because a substantial gift needs to be requested respectfully and responded to thoughtfully, which is best done in person. It is appropriate to ask for such a sum in person if you think the prospect is someone who gives away money, can make such a gift, and has an interest in your cause. Personal solicitation is also used when asking a current donor for a larger gift or when asking a major donor to consider a capital gift in addition to an annual gift.

Studies show that 80% of people made their most recent donation “Because someone asked me.” Of course, millions of smaller fundraising requests are done in person—canvassing, Girl Scout cookie sales, raffle ticket sales, Salvation Army buckets, panhandling, and so on all have a strong element of personal asking. These forms of personal solicitation will not have the 50% success rate unless the solicitor is known to each potential donor, but they will have a higher success rate than methods that don't use a face‐to‐face approach. Strategies to raise more substantial gifts for nonprofits, including major gifts programs, capital campaigns, and endowment drives, rely on personal solicitation for success.

Despite these facts, personal solicitation is one of the most difficult strategies to implement. It requires that we engage in an activity—asking for money—knowing that at least half the time we are going to be told no and risk feeling rejected as a result. Moreover, it is an activity many of us have been taught is rude or just not done. For organizations that are serious about fundraising, however, and particularly for organizations that would like to increase the number of people in their donor base who give at least $1,000 annually, learning how to ask for money in person is imperative.

WHY WE ARE AFRAID TO ASK FOR MONEY

If the idea of asking for money fills you with anxiety, disgust, dread, or some combination of these feelings, you are among the majority of people.

To identify the sources of our fears, we must look at both the role of money in American society and the attitudes about asking for anything that are the legacy of the strong Puritan ethic that is our American heritage.

Most of us were taught that money, sex, religion, death, and politics are all taboo topics for discussion with anyone other than perhaps one's most intimate friends or family.

The taboo on talking about money, however, is far stronger than any of the others. Many of us were taught that inquiring about a person's salary or asking how much they paid for a particularly large purchase, such as a house or a car, is rude. Even today, it is not unusual for one spouse not to know how much the other spouse earns, for children not to know how much their parents earn, or for close friends not to know each other's income.

Many people justify their aversion to dealing with money by misquoting from the Bible, saying, “Money is the root of all evil.” In fact, the correct quote is, “For the love of money is the root of all evil. Some people, in their passion for it, have strayed from the faith and have come to grief amid great pain” (Timothy 6:10, Inclusive New Testament). In another part of the Bible, the letter of James to the Apostles makes a very different case: “You have not because you ask not” (James 4:2, English Standard Version).

In truth, money in itself has no good or evil qualities. It is a substance made of paper or metal. It has no constant value, and it has no morality. It can be used well or badly. It can buy guns or flowers. Good people need it just as much as evil people do. It is simply a means of exchange.

People will also say, “Money doesn't buy happiness,” but of course, poverty doesn't buy anything. How much money you have and how long you have had it denotes class distinctions and helps each of us place ourselves in relation to others—even while we maintain the myth that our country is a classless meritocracy. Consequently, people speculate a great deal about the place of money in others’ lives. Money is like sex and sexuality in this regard: kept in secrecy and therefore alluring. But just as much of what we learned as children and teenagers about sex turned out to be untrue, so it is with money. The comedian Kate Clinton says she was raised to think about sex like this: “Sex is dirty. Save it for someone you love.” Most of us can relate to that, and can see much of what we learned about money in that same light: “Money is evil. Get a lot of it.” Financial concepts that we really don't understand have entered our vocabulary and leave us feeling increasingly helpless to comprehend how money moves in our society: venture capital, IPOs, selling short, buying debt, SPACs, hedge funds. Ordinary people know that their lives may be made more difficult because of these money‐related activities, but they have less and less idea of how that might be changed because the language of finance is obscure and arcane.

One major effect of financial illiteracy—even at the mundane level of everyday financial transactions—and of money being a taboo topic is that only those willing to learn about money can control it. In the United States, an elite and fairly hidden class controls most of the nation's wealth, either by earning it outright or through successful investing, having inherited it, or both. It serves the interest of this ruling class that the rest of us not know who controls money and how to gain control of it ourselves. As long as we cannot ask about other people's salaries, we will not be able to find out that someone is being paid more because they are white or less because they are female. As long as we do not understand basic economics, we will not be able to advocate for or even know what the most progressive tax structure is, how to finance our nonprofits adequately, or how to create a society in which wealth is more fairly and equitably distributed—which is, after all, an underlying goal of social justice movements.

Political activists and participants in social change must learn how to raise money effectively and ethically, how to manage it carefully, and how to spend it wisely. In fact, activists who refuse to learn about money, including how to ask for it, wind up collaborating with the very system that the rest of their work is designed to change.

The idea of asking for money raises another set of hindering attitudes, which are largely the inheritance of a predominately Protestant culture infused with a Puritan ethic. This culture is, sometimes unwittingly, adopted by most Americans, including those who are not Protestant. These attitudes convey that if you are a good person and you work hard, you will get what you deserve. They further imply that if you have to ask for something, you must be a weak person, because strong people are self‐sufficient; thus, most likely, you have not worked hard enough to deserve whatever you are asking for. Rounding out this series of beliefs is a general deep distrust in the ability of government to solve social problems and a conviction that the government wastes our money in unnecessary and inefficient bureaucratic red tape.

All of these beliefs can be found among people in the United States on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum, as well as across ages, races, and religions. Where these beliefs tend not to be found is in other countries and among children. Although many countries have their own taboos related to money, only the United States has so many and such contradictory taboos. Our “issues” about talking and learning about money are not universal.

Children have no trouble asking for money. They do not subscribe to the idea that self‐sufficiency means not asking or that polite people don't ask. They ask, and they ask again and again. Our taboos about money are not innate.

As we can see, then, our beliefs about money are learned, and therefore they can be unlearned.

The wonderful writer Ursula K. Le Guin once said in a lecture, “I never learned much from my teachers, but I learned a great deal from my un‐teachers: the people who said to me, ‘You shouldn't have learned that and you don't need to think it anymore.’”

Fundraising for social change is in part about raising the money we need, but viewed over a longer period of time, it is also about creating healthy attitudes toward money. Many people find that aspect of fundraising to be most fascinating. To get over your own anxieties about money, it is helpful to reflect on how you were raised to think about money and about how you want to relate to money now that you are an adult. It takes time and work, but you can adopt new and healthier attitudes toward money.

SPECIFIC FEARS

With these very strong taboos operating against asking for money, it is a wonder that anyone ever does it! Understanding the source of our discomfort is the first step toward overcoming it. The next step is to examine our fears of what will happen to us when we do ask for money. When people look at their fears rationally, they often find that most of them disappear or at least become manageable.

Fears about asking for money fall into three categories:

• Those that will almost never happen (“The person will hit me”; “I'll die of a heart attack during the solicitation”)
• Those that could be avoided with training and preparation (“I won't know what to say”; “I won't know my facts, and the person will think I am an idiot”)
• Those that definitely will happen sometimes and maybe as much as half the time (“The person will say no” or “The person will keep putting off making a decision, saying ‘I'll think about it and get back to you’”)

In the last category—things that will happen—most people's fear goes beyond the possible outcome that the person will say no; many also fear that asking will have a negative effect on a friendship or that a gift from a friend will obligate them to give to the friend's cause in turn.

Let's look at each of these fears more closely, starting with how the anxieties around asking friends are different from those around asking strangers. In many informal studies we have asked people to imagine they have two names in front of them. One is the name of a friend—someone they know and like; the other is the name of a stranger, but this name has been put forth by someone close to the organization. Both prospects could be asked for $1,000. Which one will you ask? Generally, a little under half the people would rather ask their friend and a little under half would rather ask a stranger. The rest don't care. It is important that you know which camp you are in so you can balance your team.

Now, here is a look at the most common fears in more detail.