Raising the Bar
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Bob Hartsook’s been a successful fund raiser for years. Now he’s trying to grow more of them.
Hartsook drew national attention in October when he gave $1.5 million to Indiana University’s Center on Philanthropy to establish the nation’s first academic chair in fundraising. He said his hope is that by studying the theory behind fundraising, the methods of raising money can be made more effective.
“Philanthropy has been 2 percent of the gross domestic product since they started counting in 1949 and it’s never increased that percentage,” said Hartsook, the brother of Emporia’s Roger Hartsook. “I’m embarrassed by that 2 percent. I consider it a failure of our profession.”
Hartsook, who now lives in Wrightville Beach, N.C., is the founder of Hartsook Companies in Wichita, a fundraising consulting firm. Just last year, he sold the company to his employees but remains president and chief executive officer.
Hartsook’s family came to Emporia when he was 5, shortly after his father died. He graduated from Emporia State University and was later acknowledged as a distinguished alumni in 2003. But over time, he received an equally valuable education as he began to meet and talk with successful businessmen.
“When you raise money, frankly, you’re around people who have money,” Hartsook said. “I had no exposure to wealth, so when I encountered people of wealth, I was curious. I would ask them why did they do this or why did they do that ... and I found that successful people enjoy talking about it to someone who’s interested. And I was very interested.”
He came to the fund raising field while working as a lobbyist more than 30 years ago. An engineering association hired Hartsook, but its head warned him that the group had a cash flow problem.
“I called him 24 hours after I took the job and said, ‘Gayle, you don’t have a cash flow problem — you don’t have any cash!’” Hartsook said, laughing.
That began the first campaign, a relatively small one by today’s standards since the group had a budget of about $100,000. But within a few years, he was working with Wichita State on a $100 million effort. His friends encouraged him to make it a career. He did.
Since its creation in 1987, according to the company’s Web site, Hartsook Companies has conducted more than 1,700 campaigns ranging from half a million dollars to more than a billion. He’s also written six books on successful fund raising, the most recent of which, “Reality Fundraising,” was released in paperback in 2005.
You’d think that would make him an expert. But Hartsook wouldn’t agree. While he knows what works practically, he said, he still has a lot to learn about why it does. Even his books, he said, don’t reflect a rigorous scientific approach but rather a collection of anecdotes about what’s worked for him.
“There is no basis to this fundraising approach,” he said. “It is ‘Bob’s stories.’”
That was brought home to him by a doctoral student in Indiana. During Hartsook’s presentation, she asked him why people gave money. He replied with his stock answer: “People give to change lives.”
“I know you think that, because it’s in your books,” she responded. “But frankly, my research doesn’t bear that out.”
“She stunned me,” Hartsook said. “I walked away thinking ‘If we had concrete evidence of why people give, not just Bob’s stories, you could replicate that and add to it.’”
After that, the Indiana endowment was practically a given. It was the least he could do for a field that had given him so much.
“This profession has been good to me and I’ve been very blessed in it,” he said.
These days, Hartsook is widening his focus from finding money to finding people. This summer, he’s helping to create a search firm for non-profit executives. Over the next eight years, he said, 60 percent of the nation’s non-profit heads will be leaving and most groups aren’t ready for it.
“We’re beginning to get people in place,” he said.
Meanwhile, he still gets to do what he loves most — meet people, find out what they need and help them out.
“I’m an optimist,” he said, “so I see the world as half full.”