Navigating Protocol and Courting Big Donors

By Jennifer C. Berkshire

Melissa Donham, a fund raiser, bids her fiancé, U.S. Air Force Capt. Christopher Welch, a fond

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farewell, climbs onto her bicycle, and pedals off through the narrow streets of Cambridge to the train station. If she's lucky, her train to London's King's Cross Station will be on time; switching problems and a deteriorating infrastructure have led to record delays in the British rail system in recent years. On this sunny fall day, though, the train is on schedule. Ms. Donham finds a seat and settles in.

During the hourlong ride south to London, the 27-year-old Pine Bluff, Ark., native, who had previously raised money from major donors for the Red Cross in her native state as well as for the United Way of Central New Mexico, will have plenty of time to prepare for the day's work. She has spent the last 15 months seeking big gifts -- those at £5,000, or approximately $9,200 and up -- for the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, a British charity that advocates for human rights and provides medical and therapeutic services to people who have been tortured.

One bike ride, a train trip, and three stops on the London Underground later, Ms. Donham arrives at her destination: the foundation's headquarters in Kentish Town, a lively, diverse corner of London. The aging office building on Grafton Street has served as the charity's home since 1990, but it is soon to be vacated. The organization is leaving its cramped location for a sprawling new facility in the Finsbury Park area of North London.

The move marks a major step up for the charity. Its Kentish Town offices are actually spread among three buildings, making it hard to keep track of the group's 150 full-time staff members and nearly as many volunteers.

Some clients have complained that the tiny consulting rooms bear an unfortunate resemblance to prison cells. But the foundation's move to bigger digs is also bittersweet. Growing demand for the charity's services reflects a tragic upswing in torture cases worldwide. In the 25 years since the group was founded as an offshoot of Amnesty International, its caseload has grown from roughly 500 clients a year to more than 5,000.

A New Home

Today, Ms. Donham is under a time crunch because she is preparing to take a holiday: She and her fiancé are leaving for Nairobi in a few days to visit his parents.

Before she departs, though, she has a major fund-raising event to plan: a legal reception at the Inner Temple, one of London's four Inns of Court, the legal societies that control admission to the bar in England.

The event is her biggest challenge so far. A dozen potential major donors have been invited to attend a gathering in the smoking room of the Inner Temple. There will be drinks and hors d'oeuvres, and the donors will have an opportunity to learn about the foundation's work. Ms. Donham hopes that the event will lead to the charity's raising tens of thousands of pounds.

The host of the evening, Queen's Counsel Allan Levy, a lawyer who specializes in human-rights advocacy, offered to coordinate the reception after attending another event organized by Ms. Donham: a dinner for 17 potential donors at the offices of Britain's most famous lawyer, Cherie Booth, better known as Cherie Blair, the wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

"I would tell my American friends that I had just talked to Cherie Booth on the phone and they'd be like, 'Who's she?' Working with her was really amazing," says Ms. Donham.

She says that she is also proud of the event for another reason: "It was the first event that I organized that was really up to me. It was definitely a challenge, but I like a good challenge. If I didn't believe in the cause, I couldn't do it."

When she joined the staff of the foundation in September 2002, Ms. Donham pledged to raise the equivalent of $739,700 over the course of two years, a goal she believes she can meet. She is also on track to reach a longer-term goal: amassing a group of 100 foundation supporters who have agreed to give the charity the equivalent of $9,300 per year. It is an improbable success story, given that Britain's strict employment laws almost kept Ms. Donham from getting the position in the first place.

"Don't do what I did," she says. "Don't just come to England and think you can get a job."

Soon after she moved to Cambridge from Albuquerque in 2002 to join her fiancé, she began looking for work. She started with recruiters that specialize in finding employees for charities.

"I'd tell them about my background, and they'd get all excited," recalls Ms. Donham. "Then they'd ask if I had a work permit. That was the end of that conversation."

She persisted, and quickly learned that she held an important advantage in her quest for work: Major-donor fund raising remains a relatively undeveloped specialty in Britain. And while help-wanted ads for such positions abound, few native Britons have the experience to fill them.

"I ended up getting a lot of interviews, but the Medical Foundation was the organization that really felt right. And they were willing to deal with the hassle of arranging for my work permit," says Ms. Donham, who had to go and stay in France until the employment paperwork was completed. (British employment law requires that non-British citizens who plan to work in Britain have a work permit in order to enter the country.) "If I'd known how difficult it was going to be, I would have started my job search stateside."

Though demand for major-gifts fund raisers is high in Britain, that does not mean that American fund raisers can expect higher pay. Ms. Donham says she is paid about the same as she would be in the United States, though she wouldn't specify her salary.

Navigating the System

Much of Ms. Donham's work involves details, managing the immense amount of personal data -- names, histories, likes, and dislikes -- upon which successful interaction with potential donors depends. Today she is waiting for RSVP's to filter in for the Inner Temple event, and is already compiling detailed biographies of the guests who have accepted.

Eventually she will share that information with the foundation staff members who are attending the event. By the time she is finished, the employees will be fully prepared for the gathering: They will know who is attending, their histories and interests, and the agenda for the evening, down to the minute.

After each event, Ms. Donham holds a debriefing session for the staff members, during which the gathering is reviewed in detail. Did they have a chance to mix and mingle with the honored guests? What did they think of the agenda? Was the description of the foundation and its work effective? Could it be improved? "I tell them to write down every detail, any bit of information," she says. "It may seem totally meaningless to them, but it's all important to me."

While Ms. Donham seems completely at ease in this world (though she says that her Southern accent has a tendency to become more pronounced when she's meeting with the foundation's poshest supporters), she insists that her job here has involved learning more than just how to translate dollars into pounds.

First up: Negotiating the differences between American charities and their British counterparts. The foundation's board of trustees, for example, functions very differently from the boards she has worked with in the United States.

"At home, there is an expectation that board members are going to be really involved in the work of the organization. That's not really the case here," says Ms. Donham. "Boards here follow more of a patronage model, where a trustee might lend their name to the cause but not necessarily do anything else."

Although she anticipates that this state of affairs will change as new trustees join the board and the governance guidelines evolve, she acknowledges that the current system makes it difficult for her to ask the board for much help.

Then there is the British class system, a veritable maze of titles, privileges, and potential protocol disasters that can add incredible complications to an act as simple as addressing an envelope. Ms. Donham learned that lesson the hard way while preparing the letters of invitation to the Inner Temple event. With the help of Debrett's People of Today, a guide to titled Britons, she composed each address. "Dear Rt. Hon. Lord Justice," read one such invitation. It sounds impressive, but according to British protocol, it is also hopelessly inaccurate.

"It turns out that you can't put 'dear' in front of 'right honorable,'" explains Ms. Donham. "I showed the letters to the barrister who was helping me, and the first 10 were all wrong. I was so embarrassed, but he couldn't have been nicer about it. His attitude was, 'You couldn't have known.'"

While she certainly doesn't relish the prospect of yet another lesson in basic protocol, Ms. Donham also recognizes that what is embarrassing for her can be downright mortifying for Britons. "The class system is bizarre, but as an American, I'm outside of it," she says. "I may make mistakes, but I'm not afraid of the people I'm approaching. For my colleagues it's different. If they make a mistake, they get put in their place."

A Cultural Exchange

The day is almost over, but Ms. Donham is still worrying about a major piece of the Inner Temple event: the program. Malcolm Smart, the foundation's director, will introduce the charity's work, while Juliet Cohen, senior medical examiner, will discuss the charity's therapeutic services. But the evening is still missing an essential component: a celebrity host. The British actress Juliet Stevenson, of the film Bend It Like Beckham, has been invited to play that role, but has yet to respond. Ms. Donham had hoped to nail down this particular detail before she left for Nairobi. (Ms. Stevenson eventually declined the invitation, citing professional obligations.)

"If it doesn't work out, we'll just have to find another celebrity," she says, pointing out yet another difference between Britain and the United States. British celebrities are far more likely to embrace charitable and political causes, particularly human-rights issues. In the year that she has been working for the foundation, Ms. Donham has already rubbed elbows with the likes of the actress Emma Thompson and the writers Nick Hornby, Julian Barnes, and Ian McEwan, all of whom have participated in fund-raising events for the charity. She is still hoping to catch a glimpse of the singer Phil Collins, who is one of the organization's patrons.

Ms. Donham smiles as she recounts her time working in Britain. "It's just been an amazing experience," she says. But she concedes that it hasn't always been easy. The British public overwhelmingly opposed its government's collaboration with the United States-led invasion of Iraq, and anti-American sentiment has been running high. "It's not directed at you personally," she says, "but you still feel it." And while feelings about the war ran strong across the country, Ms. Donham had an immediate connection to the conflict: Her fiancé flew a C-130 cargo jet during the war. "That was not an easy time," she says.

Still, Ms. Donham is convinced that her Americanism has only helped her work as a fund raiser overseas. "I noticed right away how different fund raising is here," she says. "People here are much more reserved when it comes to asking for money, even a little nervous. That makes it hard to raise money."

Are the foundation's potential donors surprised that an American is wooing them? "Not at all," says Ms. Donham. "They love my accent, and they want to know where I'm from. When I tell them Arkansas, they always say, 'That's where Bill Clinton's from.'"

As much as she loves it here, Ms. Donham does not plan to remain in Britain indefinitely. She agreed to work for the foundation for two years, a term that will end roughly at the same time her fiancé's stint is up at the Royal Air Force base at Mildenhall. The couple plans to marry somewhere in England before returning to the United States later this year. She says she intends to continue major-donor fund raising when they eventually return to the States, but isn't sure she'll be able to find another overseas position if her future husband gets a Japan assignment. Still, she feels her British experience has aided her long-term career plans. "I wasn't an expert when I got here," she says. "I've learned a lot from the mistakes I've made."

Today, though, the future seems a long way off. Ms. Donham has an event to finish planning, canapés to order, and many phone calls to make. And she will have to hurry if she's going to catch the 5:15 train back to Cambridge.