Touch System

From Long Island to Long Beach, hundreds of big & little campaigns to raise money for the public welfare got under way last week. As usual, whole-souled armies of volunteers were doing local bell-ringing, buttonholing footwork. And as usual, many of the amateurs were being guided from afar. The guide: one of the dozen or so professional fund-raising firms whose business it is to put system into benevolence.

Few of the drives will miss their quotas: the U.S. is the world's most ardent brother-keeper. Every year U.S. citizens give away some $2,000,000,000. But they do not do it offhandedly. They have to be scouted, charted and carefully flattered. And they prefer to believe that all giving, however large or complicated, is as spontaneous as a dime for coffee. It isn't.

All for S.M.U. In Dallas, Tex., for instance, hard-working volunteers have raised one-third of a needed $1,500,000 for Southern Methodist University. Donors and prospects, who have dealt only with the volunteers or university officials, might resent the idea of outside, professional direction in the drive. But if the missing million appears by the deadline, March 1, S.M.U. can thank the smooth, self-effacing American City Bureau, of Chicago, which set up the campaign and then stood discreetly aside to watch the volunteers collect. The saving in time, chaos and personal irritation should be well worth A.C.B.'s fee of about $20,000.

The largest and one of the oldest fund-raising firms, American City Bureau is also the most prosperous. Last year, from the S.M.U. and 87 other campaigns, the company grossed $600,000. In 1943, A.C.B. rounded up pledges for $440,103,451, probably got more in 1944. To do this, it employed 60 pleasantly efficient male organizers and publicists. (Professional women organizers are usually taboo. Most volunteer workers are women, will not take orders from other women.)

All this prosperity, as A.C.B.'s natty, 55-year-old president James Edward Al mond well recalls, is a far cry from 1913, when the company was formed. A.C.B. began by setting up chambers of commerce in U.S. cities. It collected only $40,000 the first year, charged its fees on a percentage basis. (A.C.B. now charges a flat weekly rate of $400 per man on the job. What the man is paid is a deep A.C.B. secret.) In 1920, the company began soliciting business from churches, colleges, hospitals, and even the great national relief organizations.

How It Works. A.C.B.'s money-gathering technique, polished by some 2,200 campaigns, is typical of the philanthropic finance industry. Its keynote is careful organization, its first rule: set the quota just high enough. The staff organizers and publicity men are briefed by the firm pres ident on the upcoming campaign. Then an impressive committee, headed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, if possible, is lined up and plugged in press & radio.

Volunteer committees are organized, and a letterhead, heavy with big names, is readied. Then comes an announcement that someone has donated $150,000 or so. Other donors are asked to match or better it in an appeal to their competitive pride.

A slogan 'like "Give Chicago a House of Prayer" is conceived and printed along with other sales talk on a beribboned, dignified pamphlet, promising heavenly & earthly rewards. (Some of the earthly ones: getting one's, name inscribed in a "golden book," on a hospital plaque, or in a stained-glass window.) At last the volunteer committees hold a "kickoff luncheon." A pamphlet is snuggled under every napkin, and the drive is launched.

Few such gatherings produce the miraculous results attained by Manhattan's Tamblyn & Brown in 1926. At the opening dinner of a campaign to raise $100,000 for the Jerry McAuley Water Street Mission in New York, a wealthy coal dealer picked up his pamphlet entitled: The Man Nobody Knows. Profoundly moved by it, he leaned over and whispered to the chairman, who blanched, then bounced to his feet to quaver that the quota was achieved and the drive over.

Also in the Vineyard. Comparable to A.C.B. is Manhattan's John Price Jones Corp., whose small, ruddy-faced Mr. Jones is best known of all the fund-raisers. Yet he seldom solicits accounts, considering inconspicuousness a professional asset.

His scholarly studies are regarded as textbooks for the business. Smaller firms are Ward, Wells & Dreshman, and Tamblyn & Brown (out of fund-raising and into public relations exclusively for the duration). Together these Manhattan firms have raised over $2,000,000,000 for nonprofit causes. They have had to be patient, elusive and resourceful, with the corporate manners of an undertaker and the understanding of a Freud. Once, when Tamblyn & Brown were getting nowhere with a drive for Williams College, they happened to print a part of the College song, The Mountains, in a pamphlet. Checks fluttered in. When Horace Dutton Taft tried to raise $2,000,000 for the Taft school the drive failed. A fund-raiser's solution: Mr. Taft deeded the property over to his trustees and the goal was reached.

The Finer Points. A prime fund-raising virtue is discernment of the kind possessed by A.C.B.'s Almond: "Hollywood is a bad source for contributions. That's first-generation money; the people never had more than two pants to their name, and now that they've made the money themselves, the hard way, they want to hang onto it, or buy jewels."

Another virtue is taste. Chorus-girl cheesecake is highly damaging to fund-raising publicity. The usual press-agent stunts have to be carefully curried. When Washington's National Cathedral arranged to have the remains of Admiral Dewey dug up and placed under its nave, a freshman employe of Tamblyn & Brown was so impressed that he immediately got off an office memorandum suggesting that the firm keep its eye on ex-President William Howard Taft (then alive) for its client, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Unrecognized patron saint of planned philanthropy is Benjamin Franklin, who in 1751 undertook to gather money for the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. Said Organizer Franklin, summing up what still may be the best fund-raiser creed: "I do not remember any of my . . . maneuvers . . . wherein, after thinking of it, I more easily excused myself for having made some use of cunning."

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