Secret Millionaire In Your File
Over the weekend Tom sent me a link to an ABC News piece entitled “Secret Donor”.
Diane Sawyer sets forth an absolutely charming and moving story about a Lake Forest College alumna named Grace Groner who died in January at age 100 and left the college $7 million. According to Lake Forest’s president the College never had a clue.
For fundraisers this is also a cautionary tale about over-reliance on traditional methods of screening, just what information is available and helpful and what is not. Had Ms. Groner’s name passed through a traditional wealth screening process the search would have drawn a blank.
- Because 80% of most wealth screening depends on real estate values Ms. Groner’s modest home valued at $152, 356 (here’s her property assessment sheet)
- And certainly there would be no SEC insider shareholder information because Ms. Groner owned 3 shares of Abbott Labs, purchased in 1935 at $60 a share. Today worth $7 million!
But, as Tom and I have preached over and over, often mega-gifts spring from the well of loyal, year-after year giving regardless of the size of those loyal gifts.
Bingo!
I went into DonorTrends TrueGivers database and found that indeed Ms. Groner was a loyal donor to a variety of causes in her community. Here’s a slice of the TrueGiver record that may have tipped off a fundraiser or researcher focused on alumnae with loyal giving habits.
The generosity and loyalty of Grace Groner is more than a beautiful and moving story. It should serve as a reminder to all of us that actual giving, loyal giving, more than artificially induced ‘screening’ using massive databases of unrelated information, can help find the needles in the haystack.
Roger
4 responses to “Secret Millionaire In Your File”
Behavioral Science Q & A
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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I have no doubt but that your intentions are to honor Grace Groner, but I wonder if Ms. Groner would have approved of your research into her assets, then publishing of them in this blog, if she were alive today. It seems to me she went out of her way to keep this information quiet in her lifetime, and I suspect she did so in part because she abhorred the wealth screening, ratings and identification tactics you’ve employed upon her passing. I don’t think the lesson here is that these tactics need to be altered to account for donors like Ms. Groner. I think the lesson is they need to be abandoned entirely so that donors like Ms. Groner can feel free to engage fully and publicly in their charitable pursuits– in their lifetimes– without fear that professional fundraisers will use this information to badger them with additional solicitations and falsely conflate material wealth with maturity relative to a charitable cause.
I have several experiences with situations like this. I cite them again and again, as recently as last week when a neophyte online fundraiser assumed that large planned gifts came from major donors. There was once a scrawled note on a renewal form that mentioned a million dollar revocable trust which the data people handed to the major gift officer, who tossed it away since it came from a $10 donor. Her secretary pulled it out of the trash and the Exec Dir called the donor. The major gift officer was terminated before the end of the day. And then there was the $20K CGA established as a result of the acknowledgment of the first gift, which was of a frequent buyer coupon, not even the donor’s cash. The donor then did annual CGAs for the rest of her life.
There is gold in them thar files!
Here is where I agree with Matt. It’s important to preserve a donor’s anonymity.
That said, it’s also important to try to get to know each donor. If someone had taken the time to realize Ms. G.’s age, and done a planned giving visit, they might have realized, then, what she was capable of giving.
Know your donor.
http://wldwomanfundraising.com
I believe that in Ken Burnett’s book The Zen of Fundraising there’s a similar story, except that the donor made the gift before dying. When asked why the donor hadn’t let the non-profit know years earlier that he was planning on making such a gift the reply was a 3 word answer that Mr. Burnett identifies as one of the most important lessons for any fundraiser,
“May change mind.”
Regards and thanks to Ms. Groner for her generosity.
Bill Huddleston
http://www.cfcfundraising.com
BillHuddleston1@gmail.com