Asking someone you know for money in person is the most effective way to raise funds. If you ask all the people who you know 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 are called “prospects.” Not everyone you know will meet all three criteria.) 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. (For example, you can expect 1 percent of people to respond to a direct mail solicitation and 5 percent to give when asked by phone.) Moreover, you can ask for much larger amounts in person. It is rare, and usually silly, to ask for a $5,000 or $10,000 gift by e-mail or phone, because a substantial gift needs to be requested respectfully and responded to thoughtfully. So although an e-mail request for such an amount without follow-up is not a good idea at all, 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 donor to increase his or her gift or when asking a major donor to consider a capital gift in addition to an annual gift.

In studies in which people are asked why they made their most recent donation, 80 percent will say, “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 percent rate of success unless the solicitor is known to each potential donor, but they will have a higher rate of success 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 for success on personal solicitation. The success of “street canvassing” (stopping strangers on the street to ask for donations for a cause, usually with an opening line such as, “Got a minute to save the planet?”) speaks to how important face-to-face solicitation is.

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—when we are going to be told “no” and feel rejected as a result and an activity many of us have been taught is rude or just not done. However, for organizations that are serious about fundraising, and particularly for organizations that would like to increase the number of people in their donor base who give at least $500 annually, learning how to ask for money in person is imperative.

WHY WE’RE 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. If asking for money does not cause you any distress, either you have let go of your fear about it, you grew up in a household of unusually liberated attitudes toward money, or you may have come from a country or a culture that does not consider talking about money taboo.

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. Mental illness, age, race, and related topics are often added to this list of inappropriate topics, and are broached with more or less discomfort in some parts of the country or among some generations.

The taboo on talking about money, however, is far stronger than any of the others. Many of us were taught to believe that inquiring about a person’s salary or asking how much he or she 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. Further, few people really understand how the economy works. They don’t know the meaning of things they hear and read about every day—the stock market, for example, including the difference between a bear and a bull market or what a progressive tax structure actually is or why the dollar rises and falls against currencies from other countries. In the past thirty years, more and more social justice groups have recognized that economic literacy is a key component in community organizing, but it will take decades to reverse the general ignorance about how the economy works and, more important, how it could work better for all.

Many people justify their aversion to dealing with money by misquoting from the Christian New Testament, saying, “Money is the root of all evil.” In fact, the correct quote from Paul’s letter to Timothy 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. Moreover, we listen to stories of unhappy rich people and secretly think we would be happier if we had their money! Most people are curious about the salary levels of their friends, how much money their neighbors have inherited, how the super-rich live. 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.”

Over the past two decades, our concepts and understanding about money have been changing, giving us more mixed messages than ever. For example, people are often told they must have at least a million dollars saved in order to retire with any degree of comfort, even though putting away that amount is completely unrealistic for the majority of the population. People who have very high incomes compare themselves to people with even higher incomes and feel disadvantaged. They never compare themselves to the more than one-third of the world’s population who live on less than $2 a day. Concepts about money that we really don’t understand have entered our vocabulary and leave us feeling increasingly helpless to understand how money moves in our society. Newscasters excitedly tell us what “the Fed” is going to do, even though few people could give a coherent explanation of the Federal Reserve Bank or explain its relationship to the government. We hear that someone is a hedge fund billionaire, but what is a hedge fund? Venture capital, IPOs, selling short, buying debt. . . . Ordinary people know that their lives may be made more difficult because of these money-related activities, but have less and less idea of how that might be changed because the language of finance is obscure and arcane.

One major effect of money being a taboo topic and learning how money is handled being out of bounds—even at the mundane level of everyday financial transactions—is that only those willing to learn about it can control it. In the United States, an elite and fairly hidden class controls most of the nation’s wealth, either by earning it, having inherited it, or both. It serves the interest of this ruling class for the rest of us not to 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 she is white or less because she is a woman. 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, finance our nonprofits adequately, or create a society in which wealth is more fairly and equitably distributed—which is, after all, the main 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 that affects most Americans, including those who are not Protestants. For example, a Puritan ethic implies that, if you are a good person and you work hard, you will get what you deserve. It further implies that if you have to ask for something you are a weak person because strong people are self-sufficient and that most likely you have not worked hard enough and you probably don’t deserve whatever you are asking for. Rounding out this series of beliefs is our deep distrust in the ability of government to solve social problems and a general conviction that the government wastes our money in unnecessary and inefficient bureaucratic red tape.

All of these beliefs can be found among people on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum, as well as across age and race lines and different religious orientations. Where these beliefs tend not to be found is in two places:

• Other countries. Although many countries have various taboos related to money, none have as many or as contradictory ones as the United States. Our taboos about talking and learning about money are not universal.
• Children. Children have no trouble asking for money. They do not subscribe to the ideas 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 natural—we are not born with them.

Our beliefs about money are learned, and therefore they can be unlearned.

The wonderful writer Ursula 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 over a longer period of time it is also about creating healthy attitudes toward money, and 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, 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: “I’ll think about it and get back to you”)

In the last category—things that will happen—most people do not fear only 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.

I will examine each of these more closely, but first I want to look at how the anxieties around asking friends are different from those around asking strangers. In trainings I often say, “Imagine you have two names in front of you. One is the name of a friend—someone you know and like, you hang out with from time to time. The other is a stranger, but someone close to the organization has given you this person’s name. Both prospects should be asked for $2,500. You need to ask one of them.” Then I say, “Which of you would choose to ask your friend? Show of hands.” Generally, a little under half the people in the workshop raise their hands; the same thing happens when I ask how many would choose to ask the stranger. Some people do not raise their hands at all. The fact is that a little under half of all people would prefer to ask friends and a little under half would prefer to ask strangers. Over time, many of us cease to have a preference, and sometimes preferences change. But you need to know which camp you and the other people on your team are in and balance the team. The people in the exercise who don’t raise their hands for either asking option would, in real life, need to be assigned to another fundraising task not related to personal asking.

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