Lowell Smith kept changing his mind about whether he wanted to be anonymous in this article. He’s running an experiment to find nonprofits he’d like to support and revealing his identity could spoil it. In the end, he decided to allow his name to be used, mostly, he says, “because who in their right mind wants to read about what I am doing, anyway?”
Classic Smith, it seems. Warm, but shy, he speaks modestly about himself only after a good deal of encouragement and can’t imagine what the fuss could be about his latest project: deciding which charities will inherit his million-dollar estate.
The exercise is not academic. Smith, who inherited his wealth, is 80 years old and was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He lives on his own in Asheville, N.C. He never married and has no children or relatives he would include in his will. He is actively looking for organizations he’d like to donate to both now and after he dies.
Last fall, he sent anonymous letters to about two dozen charities, laying out certain fundraising practices and asking the organizations to contact him through an intermediary if they believed they were doing “everything on the list.” In a blog post on her website, Penelope Burk, a fundraising consultant and researcher, wrote about Smith, without naming him, and told organizations to contact her office if they thought their fundraising measured up.
Smith’s quest is personal and unorthodox, to be sure. But it also raises broader questions about what donors want — and if and how charities and fundraisers are meeting those needs and desires.
“I send donations, and I might get a form letter or a poorly written letter that seems like they’d send to anyone. Or they ask me for another donation in the same thank-you letter,” Smith says of his experiences with charities over the years. “What can I say? Mostly, I support their mission and think they are doing good work, so I will probably give again. But I think there has to be a better way to raise money, something better for both of us.”
‘It Didn’t Make Sense’
Lowell Smith describes himself as curious, prone to dive deep into topics of interest, which include the psychology he studied in graduate school before dropping out to open a television and stereo repair shop. After selling the shop, he says he became a commercial airline pilot. He lived for stretches in a hot-springs resort area in Northern California and then in Germany with a girlfriend before moving back to California to care for his aging parents. After they died, he toured the country looking for a place to live and landed in Asheville, in part because of the university there. He earned a nursing license and practiced in a clinic for low-income patients. Retired now, he works a few hours a week as a Spanish interpreter for a state agency that serves children with developmental delays.
Decades ago, he started making small but regular donations to charities that meant something to him — the Human Kindness Foundation because “people in prison should have the chance to read and learn,” and La Esperanza Granada, an anti-poverty group he volunteered with on a trip to Nicaragua.
But his inquisitive mind wanted to know more about the nonprofit sector than just the feel-good stuff so he started reading about the industry, including by subscribing to a newsletter from the watchdog group now called CharityWatch. In the early 2000s, he came across Burk’s work. One of her books, Donor-Centered Fundraising: How to Hold on to Your Donors and Raise Much More Money, resonated with him.
In it, Burk argues that conventional fundraising methods lack the personal touch donors crave. Based on her research, including two national studies on the effect of communications and recognition on donor retention and gift value, she lays out steps nonprofits can take to implement what she calls donor-centered fundraising.
“Here are surveys, research that show what nonprofits could be doing to get more donations, and I wasn’t seeing it happen,” Smith says. “It didn’t make sense.”
Over the years, he would talk about the book with fundraisers at some of the organizations he supported, or he would mail them a copy to consider for themselves. He also gave copies to about eight local charities, he says, later finding at least three of them had been donated to the public library.
Undeterred, he doubled down last year on his interest in Burk’s version of donor-centered fundraising, deciding to make it the litmus test for charities new to him that he would support.
“I started this campaign not just for me but because maybe it helps [nonprofits] think about their relationships with donors and how to improve their fundraising,” Smith says.
In November, he sent the anonymous letters, and Burk wrote about his experiment on her blog. In the letters, charities were asked to check “yes” or “no” in boxes next to a list of fundraising tactics — that all their donors receive a personalized thank-you letter each time they give; that each contribution, regardless of size, is assigned to a specific program or project; and that all donors, before they are solicited again, receive a report that describes measurable progress in that program or project. If an organization could confirm all three, it should submit its name to the unnamed donor.
Smith, through Burk’s office, has received only eight responses. He’s now in different stages of considering or continuing to test the organizations, some of which he asked not to be identified here.
In one response, the CEO of a charity that works internationally wrote in an email, “We can tick all the boxes in your table” and asked for the donor’s initials, which he declined to give. Smith sent a gift to the group using his name but not revealing himself as the anonymous donor. A couple of months later, he had still not received an acknowledgment.
In a few other cases, the organizations’ responses to his contributions have been adequate, but the groups still might not make the cut. Two work in areas Smith is not that interested in — helping the poor is highest on his list — and a third is a large national organization that he believes already has plenty of donors.
Joy in Giving
Quad Cities Community Foundation submitted Smith’s favorite response. It began, “You are seeking a new relationship. So are we!” Within days after Smith’s $100 contribution in December, he received a letter that included a handwritten New Year’s greeting and invited him to call if he wished to designate his money to a program. Enclosed was the top fundraiser’s business card and a one-pager with photos and blurbs about how people benefit from the foundation’s work.
Still, Smith says he’s not likely to give a large gift to Quad Cities, which is in Iowa, though he will continue to donate small amounts as a show of support.
“They’re not my community foundation,” Smith says, “but it’s good to see they know how to build real relationships with donors, so I am confident they will do well in their own area.”
Anne Calder, vice president for development at Quad Cities, says her light and enthusiastic response to the blog is rooted in the idea that “giving should be a joyful activity for the donor and the organization.” And, she says, “donors are paying attention. They know the difference between a transaction and a relationship.”
As for Smith — whose identity Calder did not know during the Chronicle interview — she applauds his “creative, impactful experiment” and hopes nonprofits take it as a cue to examine their fundraising practices, policies, and attitudes.
Promising Responses
Fundraisers at the END Fund, started in 2012 to fight tropical diseases, considered Smith’s anonymous letter like a donor’s request for proposals and jumped on the opportunity to articulate how it aims to relate to supporters. They sent back a three-page letter describing details of their “donor-centered approach,” a colorful flow chart titled, “The END Fund Sample Donor Journey,” and a sample of a donor-acknowledgment letter, accompanied by a handwritten note.
Getting the anonymous letter was “quite unique,” says Katie Douglas Martel, a vice president at END, who also did not know Smith’s identity. “But we hold any inquiry from any donor or potential donor with both hands. And we are happy to share our model, which is high-caliber and high-touch and is about creating the relationships donors want and deserve.”
Smith’s relationship with Pisgah Legal Services, which serves low-income people in Western North Carolina, where Asheville is located, is growing.
After making a few small donations starting in 2018, he attended a lunch program showcasing the group’s work, where he met the development director Ally Donlan Wilson. He followed up with a $5,000 contribution that he agreed Pisgah could use in a two-day matching-gift campaign. By last year, he had started volunteering as an interpreter and more regularly attending the lunch programs.
On one of his visits, he dropped by Wilson’s office to give her a copy of the second edition of Burk’s book on donor-centered fundraising, which Wilson was familiar with but hadn’t yet read. He also sent Wilson a version of the anonymous letter he had started to circulate elsewhere, telling her that he was interested to see how many of the boxes about fundraising practices she could check.
Wilson says she was intrigued and impressed by the challenge. After reading the book, she rewrote some of Pisgah’s acknowledgment letters using language more focused on the donor. And she says that she and her colleagues are working toward changing and updating the letters at least four times a year so donors aren’t likely to get repeats.
Still, in an email response to Smith, she told him that while his letter gave her “concrete things to strive for in terms of making our interactions more donor-centric,” she wrote that “sadly,” she could not check all the boxes at that time.
Smith says he was glad to hear that Wilson had so closely considered his appeal and that he would continue to watch what Pisgah was up to.
In February, he got good news about his health: His cancer appears to be in check. With a more positive prognosis, he says his new plan is to give away more and more money while he is alive — he contributed a total of more than $33,000 last year — but still aims to preserve about $1 million to earmark for charity in his will.
With the energy he expects to regain after slowing the cancer treatments that had been weakening him, he also plans to visit Nicaragua again. On previous trips, he met some of the students he had sponsored through local nonprofits to attend high school or college and says the experiences were inspiring.
For now, though, he might be a little busier than usual at home with a new volunteer gig at Pisgah Legal Services: making thank-you calls to donors.
