The phone rings in Eileen Heisman’s office. From across the room, she listens.
“I don’t think the phone should ring more than once,” Ms. Heisman says with a smile after a colleague answers on the second ring. She misses the days, early in her career here at the National Philanthropic Trust, when she would pick up the phone with anticipation.
“Every phone call is like a focus group to me,” she says.
In nearly 16 years as chief executive of the trust, Ms. Heisman has overseen its rise to become one of the nation’s fastest-growing charities. Her organization offers one of the hottest ways for affluent people to give: offering to set up donor-advised funds, in which donors establish a charitable account, receive the tax benefit, and then later decide which causes get the money.
When she joined the trust, Ms. Heisman says she sensed a changing marketplace for donor-advised funds. But she had no idea so many wealthy Americans were poised to pour their assets into those funds. In the years since, says one fellow nonprofit leader, her “entrepreneurial efforts” have contributed to the funds’ growing popularity.
Today, the trust has 3,500 donors and so far has distributed nearly $2-billion of its $4-billion in assets.
In the 2013 fiscal year alone, the trust’s donors channeled $277-million in grants to charities in the United States and abroad to hurricane victims in New Jersey, paralyzed veterans in Kansas, and adult learners in Trinidad and Tobago.
Ms. Heisman’s route to a corner office here in this leafy hamlet north of Philadelphia has been a roundabout one. She has worked as a psychiatric aide and a political fundraiser and cut her teeth in the charitable world at a community foundation and a hospital.
But she has drawn skills from each that help her work with wealthy donors: Build relationships. Listen and learn. Communicate what’s possible—and what isn’t.
Petite and energetic, with spiky blond hair and inquisitive blue eyes, Ms. Heisman doesn’t hide her enthusiasm for the quotidian tasks—like answering phone calls—her 29-person staff is well equipped to handle. She compares her job to conducting an orchestra without playing a single instrument.
As conductor, she makes a point to wander around the small office, checking in with senior managers. She likes to ask them: “Have we raised a zillion dollars yet?”
‘There’s Something Here’
Growing up just a few miles away from the trust’s office, Ms. Heisman dreamed big.
She was the editor of her high-school newspaper, an outspoken student, and a dancer who aspired to perform on Broadway. She vowed to become a household name by age 25.
Her parents were city people—her father an optometrist from the Bronx and her mother a nurse from West Philadelphia—who settled in Horsham, then a rural community just a few miles from here. They were the only family she knew who subscribed to The New York Times.
At Carnegie Mellon University, she studied cognitive psychology and after graduation worked as an aide at a psychiatric hospital. It was a hard job: She cleaned up feces and restrained patients, but she also became a close observer of human behavior.
After being laid off from a later job as an emergency-services coordinator at a community mental-health center, Ms. Heisman landed a position in 1980 working for Philadelphia City Councilwoman Joan Specter, the wife of U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. (“I apparently told her, ‘You won’t regret hiring me,’” Ms. Heisman recalls.) Within a couple months, she became Ms. Specter’s chief legislative aide.
The job introduced Ms. Heisman to an entirely different demographic.
“It was my first time talking to VIPs,” she says. It was also where she began fundraising.
After a while, Ms. Specter told her, “You’re really good at this,” Ms. Heisman recalls. “I said, ‘Good at what?’ I thought, ‘Anybody could do this.’ It came so easily, I didn’t know it was a skill set.”
Ever since, she has been inspired by one question: “What gets a donor from doing nothing to doing something?”
Switching Careers
Before long, Ms. Heisman decided she wanted to raise money for charities. She got together with Marilyn Lucas, a friend of a friend who was then working in development at the University of Pennsylvania, to talk it over.
Political fundraisers, Ms. Lucas remembers thinking at the time, were people who walked into a room with their hand out as they made their way across the room and out the door.
“But clearly Eileen has a real sense of building relationships and doing a lot more than that,” says Ms. Lucas, who is now vice president for development at the Philadelphia Orchestra. “I thought she would be terrific in the development world. She seemed fairly fearless.”
Yet when Ms. Heisman went to work at the Philadelphia Foundation as its first development officer, the initial impression was not stellar.
“It’s boring,” she’d tell her friends in the political world.
Then, a few months in, she opened an envelope and pulled out a check for $650,000. Everything changed.
“I couldn’t believe the size of that check,” she says. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s something here. I’m going to learn how to do this, and I’m going to learn how to do it really well.’ I never have looked back from that moment.”
A Changing Landscape
In 1996, the Pitcairn Trust Company founded the National Philanthropic Trust and Ms. Heisman was hired as vice president. Her task: to raise $100-million in three years.
“I almost started to cry,” she recalls. “Then I thought, ‘Maybe I can do that.’ "
It was not uncommon during this period for her to put her son and daughter on the school bus in the morning, drive to the airport, fly to California for a few afternoon meetings, then catch a red-eye back to Philadelphia to be home when her children—cared for by their grandmother—awoke the next day.
Despite the exhausting pace, the timing for this new venture seemed right.
Donors wanted greater control over where their money went. Donor-advised funds became more appealing and easier to use as the Internet offered more efficient record-keeping and user-friendly transactions. Today, the trust’s donors can send money to a charity with a few clicks.
Of particular appeal to donors is the trust’s acceptance of “illiquid” assets—bequests, foreign securities, even rare coins or interest in a California orange grove. The trust’s 29-person staff then works with donors to convert those assets into funds that can go directly to charitable causes.
Melissa Berman, president of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, has known Ms. Heisman for more than a decade. She recalls an occasion a decade ago when Rockefeller collaborated with Ms. Heisman’s team in working with a donor who had strong opinions but a murky understanding of how the nonprofit world functioned.
She remembers this: “How carefully Eileen listened, and how committed she was to not just saying yes to whatever the client said but to helping the client achieve her goals in a way that was effective and safe.”
Ms. Heisman does describe herself as a listener. “I like to ask open-ended questions,” she says. “Then I see if we can figure out a way to do it.”
But she suggests the questions aren’t merely niceties. The trust, she says, is obligated to be upfront with donors and manage their expectations. She makes no promises, particularly if their vision is unusual or unwise.
During the housing crisis, for instance, “We had a lot of people trying to give one-bedroom condos in Florida,” she says. “We didn’t take any of them.”
Magic Words
As donor-advised funds have grown—with total assets topping $45-billion in 2012, according to the trust’s most recent report—some observers have warned that they’re not just changing the landscape but taking it over.
Donors poured nearly $14-billion into the funds in 2012, an increase of more than a third from the previous year.
Critics see the funds, which receive about 4 percent of all charitable giving, as a way for wealthy people to park their assets, receive generous tax breaks, and take their time in deciding where the money goes.
Foundations are required to distribute at least 5 percent of their assets annually; by contrast, donors never have to give anything from their funds. Those receiving the greatest benefit are not charities, critics say, but the donors themselves.
The issue has become so controversial that a new requirement on donor-advised fund payouts is included in a prominent tax-overhaul proposal circulating in the House.
Ms. Heisman thinks the criticism is unwarranted. She disagrees with the notion that if donor-advised funds weren’t around, donors’ money would go straight to charities.
The percentage of assets that donor-advised funds contribute is three times what private foundations are required to give, she says, citing findings from the trust’s annual report. The National Philanthropic Trust, she adds, has “given away half of our assets.”
As much as donor-advised funds have crept into the spotlight in recent years, there are plenty of other trends and ideas that have captured her attention.
Social media fascinate her. Crowdfunding, she believes, will likely become a powerful tool for charities, particularly small ones.
She is an ardent supporter of Donors Choose, a nonprofit organization that allows people to contribute directly to public-school projects, and dreams about applying that approach to donor-advised funds to connect donors with a broader array of charitable causes.
As for that ringing phone, there’s a reason why Ms. Heisman misses the old days. Every now and then, a donor will call directly and utter the magic words: “I want to make a big gift.”
“I just love that,” she says. “You never know what they’re going to say.”
Eileen Heisman
President, National Philanthropic Trust
Age: 60
Education:
- B.S., psychology, Carnegie Mellon University
- M.S.W., University of Michigan
Career highlights:
- Director of fund development and planned giving at Abington Memorial Hospital
- Development officer at Philadelphia Foundation
- Chief legislative aide to Philadelphia City Councilwoman Joan Specter
Success secrets:
- Answers the phone: Every call with donors “is like a focus group.”
- Walks the office: Checks in often with senior fundraisers.
- Asks questions: Asks donors open-ended questions to determine what they want. Then focuses on turning those wishes into reality.
- Says no sometimes: Some gifts—especially assets like overvalued real estate—may bring more trouble for an organization than they’re worth.
What she wishes she’d known as a fundraising rookie: “To be comfortable with silences. Donors give you so much information if you’re listening.”