tocourtdisaster replied to your post “persian-slipper replied to your photo “If you go to the Berkshire...”
Wait, so does that mean Warren Buffett owns GEICO? Do I pay Warren Buffett ninety bucks a month for car insurance?
Pretty much. If it helps, he spends it on cherry coke and Utz potato sticks.
lnsybird replied to your post “How rich does someone have to be for your company to decide to...”
Do you research the high winning lottery winners or is that a no-go since they often have so many randoms begging/demanding money?
It’s less that they get a lot of randoms and more that their wealth is usually not what we’d think of as sustainable -- it’s a one time event, and unless they invest it unusually well, they don’t have ongoing wealth the way, say, a hedge fund manager does. Combined with the fact that they usually aren’t in the habit of philanthropy and they’re hard to get to (because of the randoms approaching them for cash) and they’re a low return on investment for us. Plus I think the average lottery winning is something like $15M which is kind of smallish potatoes for us. We have people earning $15M every year, they’re much higher priority. (This is what I mean about this job messing up your sense of proportion.)
If someone who had given to our organization before did win the lottery we would certainly note it, and we would send them a congratulations card, maybe assign a gift officer/fundraiser to them, just in case. But in general unless they had a connection to the organization, we wouldn’t bother.
dpdmstla replied to your post “How rich does someone have to be for your company to decide to...”
sorry if you've already answered this before, but what kind of information do fundraisers usually need? also would you ever write a fundraiser/researcher AU
Setting aside what is really the bulk of our job, which is finding new people for fundraisers to consider or visit, when a fundraiser is going to talk to an individual person or going to be meeting a series of people at an event, we really have only a few basic documents we prepare.
For events, we do one-page documents that are very basic: a single paragraph biography, whether they’ve given to our organization and how much, who their spouse is, whether they have children, and where their other philanthropic giving is. This is just basic contextual information so that they know, you know, what’s going on. Like the other day there was an event and I was preparing documents for it which included a guy who founded a CLEANING PRODUCTS EMPIRE, and also his friend, who was convicted of financial fraud in the late 1990s. Both good things to know!
When someone is about to visit to either “qualify” a donor for a major gift (make sure they can give and have an inclination) or actually ask them for the gift (which is usually a separate visit from qualification) then we sometimes prepare a much longer document, usually between five and seven pages. That document has a detailed biography, information on their parents and siblings, more detailed information on their spouse and children, detailed information on their giving to us in the past and their current financial situation, information on other people they have relationships with who support us (like say, they sit on a board of directors with someone who also gives to us, that’d be noted), and more extensive information on their other philanthropic giving. This is to help the fundraiser figure out the best angle to come in at, and also ensures that they have a lot of context they can rely on in conversation with the donor.
Oh and re Researcher/Fundraiser -- nah, it’s my work, I’m not sure I’d want to do a story about it. Plus it’s not exactly an action-packed job -- it’s interesting, but very internal.
