By Franklin W. Robinson

This article was published in Museum News, March/April 2001.

The director of today’s museum must recognize some basic, fairly depressing facts about his job. These concern museum fund raising, an activity vital to the survival of the institution. In fact, the director’s most important staff relationship is with the museum’s head of development. This is the one person who can help him accept those facts.

Fund raising is not just one of the most important parts of the director’s job; it is the part for which he was hired and the part that will take the majority of his time. In fact, today’s museum director has two jobs: running the organization and raising money. More than 50 percent of my office time—and close to 100 percent of my travel time—is spent on some aspect of fund raising, from cultivation to solicitation to maintenance.

The relationship to the development person is the director’s most crucial, most intimate professional relationship. There has to be absolute trust and mutual loyalty and respect. Ultimately, the director must make the decisions, but he’d better listen closely to the development person. And the latter better learn—first, to speak up and disagree, and, second, to accept the director’s decision. Half the time, when hiring a development person, the director will make the wrong decision. I certainly have made that mistake. And I’m afraid there is only one solution to that kind of mistake. Both sides must accept that, on occasion, there will be a turnover.

The director must realize that he, rather than the development person, does most of the actual fund raising, the actual solicitation. Sometimes the development staff, a trustee, or a volunteer is present, but usually the director is alone, especially when a big donation is being solicited.

There is a seamless flow, a continuous spectrum, from cultivation to solicitation to maintenance, from cradle to grave, so to speak, and even unto the grandchildren. There is nothing worse, morally and practically, than “dropping” a donor after you accept his gift. The director must pay attention to the donor at every step of the way; a misstep will never be forgotten, even if that mistake is made by someone far down the chain of command. For example, sometimes a fund-raising letter, signed by the museum director, is sent to a husband and wife, using their first names in the greeting. But the husband has died long ago, and the widow never forgives the museum and never renews her gift.

The donor “family” of any nonprofit is just that—a family, a benevolent Mafia, where everyone knows everyone else. The director’s reputation is quickly made or destroyed. For example, Cornell University has more than 180,000 alumni. They don’t all know each other, but most of those in the smaller subset of alumni who care about the university and regularly donate to it are closely acquainted. They automatically give Cornell’s staff members the benefit of the doubt, but that precious resource can just as easily be dissipated.

The director must be patient. He must accept that half of his time is wasted; he just never knows which half. And he has to accept that, often, he is raising money for his successor, soliciting planned gifts that won’t come in for another 10 or 20 years, money he’ll never be able to use. Planned giving is probably the strongest area of growth in American philanthropy, and the director and his staff should feel, and be made to feel, as proud of those future gifts as they are of anything that comes through the door today. I arrived at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design in July 1979. That September I commissioned an architect to do a schematic drawing of an addition to the museum on its north side. We broke ground for that addition on April 1, 1992, almost 13 years later. Patience is a virtue.

Both the director and the head of development often have to put up with a donor’s rudeness. Often, that rudeness comes out of insecurity. One has to forgive the rudeness and relieve the insecurity. If you do, you have a friend for life. Just the willingness to be polite in the face of rudeness is enough to ease the situation; everyone has bad days. If there is a serious issue in contention, a long, sincere letter might solve the problem. Then, there are the people who like being rude to those they consider subordinates. No matter what their giving level, those people should not be permitted to be trustees.

One of the director’s most difficult jobs is to return or say no to a gift. This process should be handled, step by step, by the director himself. Let us say that a group of paintings was given—before your tenure—to the museum. The tax deduction has been taken, but the works themselves were kept in the donors’ house. Let’s hypothesize even further: the museum has signed a contract agreeing to the donors’ right of physical possession for 25 years, and the donors now refuse to ship the works to you. In other words, the museum has the moral and legal responsibility for the art, but cannot show it or “use” it. And this arrangement violates the law.

If such a situation were to arise, the director would have to accept that he must drive the process of returning legal possession to the donors, i.e., the endless phone calls, letters, consultations with trustees, lawyers, and staff, apologies and thanks to the donors themselves and their many friends on the board of trustees and elsewhere. Even though the gift was “given” and the contract was signed long before his own tenure at the museum, the director is now responsible not just for returning the works but, even more important, for preserving the reputation and integrity of the institution.

This rule applies equally to swampland in Florida, decaying Victorian mansions, and many other kinds of gifts of widely varying quality.

In this situation, the development person must insist on doing the right thing, quietly and confidentially, not solely to live up to her own professional and ethical standards but also because the only justification for a tax-exempt charity is its integrity, its most precious asset, the public acceptance that it is doing what is right. Once that perception is damaged, the charity—whether a small museum or the United Way—will have great difficulty in fulfilling its mission or raising money.

Compromise, of course, is the essence of life in the real world, but the director and the development person should know when the limits of compromise have been reached, even at the risk of losing the big gifts or one’s job.

The director also must accept that he is through conducting significant research in his field, writing books, or doing whatever got him into this business in the first place. His job now is to raise money. If he fails to raise money, he has failed in his job. And yet he has to remember his job is not limited to fund raising. He must keep current in his field; donors expect him to be interested, knowledgeable, and up to date. He must have a deep knowledge and love of the “subject” of the institution, whatever it happens to be, and be able to talk inspiringly about it. He must keep the mission of the institution at the front of his mind and relate all functions and activities—every letter, every solicitation—to that mission. Ensuring that the public restrooms are clean relates to the mission just as surely as the selection of an architect for the new wing.

The director has to be willing to write letter after letter, most of them fairly mindless, and sign them in a timely fashion. Gratitude delayed is gratitude diminished. The same is true for trip reports and memos on donor visits; communication is everything. You can’t say thank you too often, in letters, flowers, dinners, medals, and the like.

The development person also should remind the director that he should make a substantial gift every year to the institution, and that gift should be listed, quietly but clearly, in the annual report. If the director doesn’t stretch, he can’t ask other people to stretch.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge in fund raising, as we all know, is to ask friends for money—for your own organization, for your own salary. Even more difficult is to make friends with someone in order, ultimately, to ask him or her for money for your salary. There is no easy way to deal with the embarrassment and self-doubt that we sometimes feel at such moments, and the director and development person have to accept this moral and emotional unease, this feeling of ambiguity. In fact, the real difficulty would arise if we ever lost that twinge of conscience. Fortunately, most people know that you ask not just for your salary but for all the services the organization offers. And they understand that you could make a lot more money in another profession. The wonderful thing is that so many of your contributors—the nicest ones—do become your friends.

The director has to accept that he has no visible political affiliations, at least most of the time. (When asked, I say I’m a founding member of the Art Party.) By the same token, no matter what church, synagogue, temple, or mosque he attends, the director should be ecumenical in his openness to religious affiliation. My mother was Jewish, my father was Protestant, my wife grew up in the Church of England, and, at one point, our son was a Buddhist. If only we had a daughter who sacrificed goats on altars.

The director’s spouse must accept all of this and give parties for people she’s never met before, hear about tensions and frustrations every day, and, above all, be the “minister’s wife,” with everyone watching her every word. In a few institutions, the spouse’s contribution is recognized with a salary, but my guess is it will be a long time before that becomes a universal practice, if only because of the resentment it creates and the internal precedent it sets.

In short, the director is a traveling salesperson, P. T. Barnum with a Ph.D., infused with optimism and enthusiasm, offering the chance for the donor to be part of an institution that stands for something important, something that will survive us all.

This brings us to the most important requirement for a director. To be sure, enthusiasm, practicality, attention to detail, patience, forgiveness, integrity, knowledge, dedication to the institution—all of these qualities are vital, and they add up to a whole person worthy of the institution. But when it comes to fund raising, there is another step the director must take.

As development consultant David Dunlop has so eloquently pointed out, there are three kinds of gifts that can be made to an institution. The annual fund gift is a vital part of our institutional (and personal) budgets, but usually fairly modest in size. It’s the gift we make on Sunday at church, or quarterly to our alma mater, or annually to the local museum where we take our children on Saturday mornings. Then there is the “temple needs a new roof gift,” the response to a special need. Typically this is much larger than the annual fund gift. Even so, just as most people give to several annual funds, many people will respond to the need of the rape crisis center this year and the parish church next year, and so on.

The director must pay attention to both kinds of gifts, but he also must reserve enough time in his schedule to cultivate the third kind of gift, which only he can bring in. This is the gift of money, of course, but it really represents a life. In this case, as Dunlop says, it is a major part of what the donor’s life adds up to, why she works hard and earns money in the first place. As this donor looks back on her life, she doesn’t say, I gave to a lot of annual funds. She says, I built the new wing of the local museum. This gift of a life, or a big part of a life, is not a transaction, but a relationship. In my quarter-century as a museum director, seven-figure cash gifts have come in four or five times; in not one of those cases had I asked for the gift. The director and the donor slowly become partners, equally committed to understanding and solving the institution’s deepest long-term needs.

So what it’s finally all about is not money but mission, and the director’s vision of that mission. That is the first step and the most important one.

Directors may not know all of this, or we’re new at the job, or we’ve forgotten, or we’re tired or discouraged. The development person is there to remind us of what it’s all about. In addition, she must be realistic, absolutely honest with and critical of the director. She must straighten his tie and make sure he goes to the right dinners. She must be his conscience. At the same time, she must be completely loyal to him. Without him, she can’t begin to do her job, and she has to protect his time, that precious asset, and his enthusiasm and commitment. (By the way, I say “he” for the director and “she” for the development person only because it’s less confusing for me. I’m a man, and the museum’s development director is a woman.)

She has to be willing to do endless drudge work, and at the same time, she has to be genuinely warm and friendly and helpful. She has to be better organized than the director; she must be full of information and able to keep extremely good files. The databases on her computer, in her filing cabinets, and in her head are precious assets. Cornell University has careful and complete files, and they make all the difference. Those files show when the president of the university sent a Christmas card to a donor; incredibly enough, that bit of information can be useful years later.

Finally, the director and the head of development are Siamese twins, joined at the hip. The Johnson Museum’s director of development and I have adjoining offices, and we visit with each other every 15 minutes. That is the only way the relationship can work and the goals of the institution be served.

Why would anyone become a director or a development person? For me, there are two reasons. First, when it all comes together—the exhibition, the music, the flowers, the food, the weather, and the people—a fund-raising event, and the museum itself, is a thing of beauty. To see 1,000 people at an opening, eating, dancing, having fun, and looking at art is an inspiration. Second, we can change the direction of an institution, revitalize it, repair it, maybe even save it. And that is the most deeply satisfying way to spend a professional life.

Franklin W. Robinson is the Richard J. Schwartz Director, Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. This article is adapted from a speech he gave at the annual meeting of the Rhode Island chapter of the National Society of Fund Raising Executives (now Association of Fundraising Professionals), in Seekonk, Mass., Oct. 5, 2000.