Call Me Naive

A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were having a friendly disagreement about a donor.

He argued that this donor's philanthropic priorities were carefully calculated to promote his professional ambitions.

I said I thought the donor was just giving money to the things he cares about.

And it occurred to me that I'm pretty naive by nature.

It also occurred to that to be a fundraiser, one has to be a bit naive.

We have to be naive because we have nothing to gain by being cynical.

Cynicism, of course, is tempting.  (Especially for a naturally sarcastic person like me.)  What's great about being cynical is that you run very little risk of being embarrassed.

Imagine someone offers you a great-sounding deal and you have to guess whether they are being nice or trying to rip you off.

If you guess they are trying to rip you off, and you're right, it shows you are worldly and smart.  If you're wrong -- well, it just means that this was an exception to the rule.

Now imagine you guessed they were just being nice.  If you were right, you got lucky.  If you were wrong, you're an idiot with terrible judgment.

That kind of skepticism probably serves people very well in a wide range of professions.

But it doesn't help us fundraisers.

Because we have nothing to gain by guessing people aren't going to respond to our appeals, attend our dinners, join our membership programs, say yes to our major gift requests, approve our proposals or sponsor our events.  It just makes us hesitate to ask them.  And the less we ask, the less we get.

And so we sally forth with slightly ridiculous expressions of wonderment on our faces, expecting acts of selfless altruism from everyone we encounter, impassively disregarding waves of counter-evidence and feeling enormous satisfaction each time we are right.