#archvie

Kirk Kerber

Henry Hudson Hotel 1984

Self Portrait. 

I work for a not for profit organization in the Development (fundraising) department, in what’s usually called Prospect or Development Research. It’s a very weird and interesting job.

Essentially, most people only ever experience the low-amount donation solicitation – letters in the mail from Save The Children or phone calls from your alma mater asking for a donation. And those matter, they’re important, but for high-amount donations there is an entire team of people who work to identify and solicit wealthy people for massive amounts of money. We employ professional fundraisers whose job it is basically to travel around meeting with rich people, explaining to them what we do, and asking them for support for it. 

“Massive” is scaled to the organization – in other words, a small local org might consider ten thousand dollars to be a major gift, and have a team of three or four people, with only one researcher who also serves other functions. A large org like mine has a core pipeline team that is probably about a hundred people; my research team alone is bigger than the entire fundraising team of some smaller orgs. We focus on people capable of giving a hundred thousand dollars or more, and we have some people in our files who are capable of giving over a hundred million dollars. And some people in our files who have. 

So our job, as researchers, is to a) find people capable of giving that much money to us, b) (sometimes) find a way for a professional fundraiser to get in touch with them, and c) provide that fundraiser with information about the person they’re meeting with so that they can have a successful meeting, and eventually make “the ask” for a major donation. 

Which means that aside from being part-time data wonks, we have also developed methods of finding out stuff about people, like where they live and what they do and who their family is, and then use that stuff to calculate how much money they’re capable of giving (whether they’re inclined to is another story). 

And rich people, you guys, lead wild and bizarre lives. So they’re a lot of fun to study, though on the other hand NOTHING has radicalized me against capitalism like working in the not for profit world. Oh my god, my wrath is mighty.  

But it also means I get to learn stuff like how to evaluate the net profit yearly of a golf course*, what a vineyard in California is worth per acre (hint: IT’S A LOT), and how to estimate someone’s net worth based on their past philanthropic giving OR the fact that they own the largest pistachio company in the world. I have personally studied all of these. 

* FWIW Donald Trump has reportedly consistently lied about the valuation and yearly income of his golf courses, not that this is going to be news to you guys, and he is a running joke in the golf-course-ownership community. Which is brutal considering the community is mainly made up of really terrible rich white men. Imagine being the kind of person shunned by all the bad guys on Leverage, and then imagine that person becoming president.

Anyway, that’s what I do for a living: I research the wealthy, pick out the finest and shiniest and most accommodating to our cause, and send the fundraisers off to ask them for money with a book report on the wealthy person’s life tucked in their briefcase.