Funder Enlightening

[Readers will pardon my having dispensed with the frills (color, graphics, animation) of contemporary web-sitery, but the issue I am addressing is of such gravity that it demands our full and undivided attention and I feel that such trim would only serve as a distraction.]

From here you can get the following CFFE pages [see below] without delay. This page also provides an overview of the CFFE’s foundational motivation and its anticipated mission.

THE CENTER FOR FUNDER ENLIGHTENING was founded by George [call me “Eddy”] Antrobus in the year 2000, and funded, motivationally speaking, by exasperation with the ubiquitous duplicity that has come to characterize post-sixties Twentieth Century fund-raising copy. The dilemma that arises as a dialectic between proponents of the financially practical necessity of “spinning” the donor-public (telling them half-truths, provoking them to emotional over-reaction to “crises”, promising them unrealistic polity-disposition modification) in order to maximize the contribution-response, and the far-and-wee voices of those who would demand enforced ethical responsibility for funders to be candid and up-front in public fund solicitation, has nearly ceased even to incite partisan conversation as the Twenty-First Century dawns. The protests of the Far-and-Wee are now mostly confined to parrying maneuvers in the frontal assault launched by the bleeding-heart money-conduit fuglemen; the funder-franchisees bask in exclusionary status based on a naïve public confidence in the motives, and a politically-corrected posture of non-interference in the affairs, of enterprises professing a commitment to serving the “public good” while purportedly eschewing the profit imperative. In a nutshell, the problem we are facing is that the big funder heads have opted to take full measure of the clouded license-sanctioning policy and are storming the frontal-lobe defenses of a polity caught with its breech-clouts down, fleece-gathering in a flat-lined cognitive climate. Mr. Antrobus, provoked by a protracted funder-solicitation assault on his mail-terminals, which commenced with a modest one-time contribution to an early drop-out candidate of the 1996 presidential race but which continues to this day, and suffering ever-increasing provocation to rage by the brazen effrontery of the flim-flam informing these solicitation tracts, at the turn of the millenium vowed to provide a voice that would overwhelm the ambient noise which has effectively silenced the “Far-and-Wee”. The CFFE proposes to be that voice.

THE CENTER FOR

FUNDER ENLIGHTENING

This site is devoted to a critical analysis of modern fund-raising, addressing the duplicitous excesses of which fund-raisers are increasingly guilty, and the sociopathic nature of their casual dismissal of the tenets of basic integrity and dignity when dealing with their targeted public.

MODERN FUND-RAISERS AND THEIR TECHNIQUES:

Fund-raising has long been a vital mechanism in the realization of philanthropic ends, as well as a cherished option in the exercise of our democratic freedoms. Any attempt to calculate the noble causes served by such endeavors would be futile, America’s history is so surfeited with incidents of monetary charity. And it is still the case that fund-raising is occurring around us every day; to give succor to some suffering souls stricken by the exigencies of a life awry; to empower some proponents of a worthwhile cause in pursuit of the public interest; or even with no greater interest than to bring a moment of joy to an otherwise mundane existence. All are laudable ends.

However, though once commonly thought of as something a good citizen did unselfishly, fund-raising has become increasingly the venue of the touted interests of the political candidate, the frantic fringe-lifestyle activist, the crisis-in-contemporary-values hack, the grass-roots uprising commandante, and the unsung walking-wounded of every venue of political warfare. At a more fundamental level, it has become what canny sociopaths do to advance their own financial solvency, or that of someone with muscle-bound motivation but puny principles, and then only under the express condition of bountiful compensation. Fund-raising is now a castellated industry, grand and secure. This ascent into the rarified air of those conventions which are so entrenched as to be insouciantly conceded by the policy wonks of our cultural codification without a blink is only secondarily dependent on the urgency of the issues expressed in the funder’s (in-house vernacular for money motivated, as opposed to cause motivated, fund-raisers) appeals; bringing in the bucks is what secures this endeavor’s “business as usual” credibility. And the chutzpah of these masters of monetary manipulation knows no bounds. They will say whatever it takes to get into your wallet, manifesting by turn the mesmerizing aplomb of a snake-oil salesman, the waft-of-wampum sensitivity of a salivating lawyer, and the affinity for fact of an Arkansas politician.

In as much as the art, craft, or technology of fund-raising is still only at the soft-science level, in that the rules and procedures for success are still being formulated, the appeals are presented in an extravagant variety of formats. Some of the more pedestrian will try to hook their sucker with a flash of cash in the form of check, currency, or coin accompanying the solicitation, which of course the prospective donor is free to spend whimsically, although it is always clear from the presumptive appeal message that the responsible response would be to reply in kind with even more – much more – money. The current cutting-edge favorite of the socio-political issue funders is to finesse their prey through the pretense of seeking valued input in the form of opinion expressed as true/false or multiple choice answers to no-brainer “survey” questions, laying the ground-work for an apparent collusion of interest that can only result in a celebrated win-win. [Often, if not generally, these questions are so obvious that the respondent who finds any meaningful dialog here is, ipso facto, a bon-bon (an easy mark, or a “push-over”, in the fund-raiser vernacular)]. Others will request participation in a petition drive, or include a previously prepared card to your congressional representatives which requires only your signature; in either case crafted to leave the impression that the validity of these appeals is contingent upon your financial contribution. Some hope to strike at the heart of the no-baggage mark (one whose emotional responses to crisis will be mature and predictable) with traumatized emotionalism (none so traumatized as to lose sight of the ultimate monetary objective, of course), even to the point of affecting a persona little short of crying on the solicited shoulder. These ploys may take the form of a kind of rambling, confused appeal designed to put the truffle (a mark who affects an altruistic grandeur; one who requires the pretentious illusion of doing-good as a prerequisite to shelling-out) in mind of someone in terminal despair, or alternatively, to affect choked-up pleas for a simple, sincere and candid confidentiality; both approaches meant to melt the misgivings of the hard-nose donor. Finally, a common (in more ways than one) technique, often an integral part of some other basic strategy, is the allusion to a feeling of special warmth and closeness toward the potential donor on the part of the solicitor in cases where this actor is a political candidate for instance, or qualifies in some other fashion as celebrity front-furniture (fund-raiser slang for a high name-recognition straw-man associate who may be able to tap into fan loyalties). Such an appeal will typically be authenticated by recognition of “your noble, vital, and sustaining support in the past”, with the result that “I am very concerned that I have not heard from you since my last letter”, and that “I think of you as a special friend, without whose selfless contributions our dramatic progress to date could not have been dreamed”. Such outright fabrication, when wholly spurious as it generally is, can only appeal to a gullibility so profound that any personal financial distress resulting from over-zealous contributions motivated by this wax-job is roundly deserved. But be afraid … these shysters are successful beyond imagination.

It hardly bears commenting upon that the fund-raising license may be profitably exercised by any well capitalized group that can acquire the equipment to do the automated addressing, arrange for the bulk rate, and see to the mailing. Generally these funders print the promotional material in-house as well, more and more often personalizing it for the intended recipient (commonly referred to as Joe and/or Jane Wallet letters). The mailing lists are generally provided initially by the titular cause-organization front, i.e., the group which is ostensibly doing the fund-raising, often referenced among the funder operation personnel by constantly changing flippant epithets, such as Big Sugar, The Fortune Live-Hundred, Easy Slider, Rich Uncle [whatever name is appropriate; Flash, for instance], and the like. Usually the funder organization will take over a sucker-list (generally, but not always, designating one with a high percentage of donor returns) in short order, and at any rate will be handling all the mechanical aspects of the funding effort. The named-cause group may be getting a modest, and even sometimes generous, piece of the action, but is usually compensated on a prior arrangement flat-fee basis as provider of the “hook” (the motivational fulcrum over which the potential contributors can be levered into shelling out).

The effect of such appeals even on a responsible, mature citizen can be potent to the point of paralysis. As a rule of thumb, the kinder and more caring is the recipient of the appeal, the greater the likelihood he/she will be snookered. Sometimes it is very hard to see through the blatant flim-flam of these polished pleas for favor. The intensity of the fund-sucker’s (one of numerous in-house slang expressions for a money-only motivated fund-raiser; referenced here is sucker as in “parasite”, rather than as in “dupe”; see sucker-list, above) attempts to score (any return mail with money enclosed qualifies) grows like a Hydra on steroids; a respondent to any one appeal can expect nine more within the month. This equation is as sure as the rising of the sun. Make donations to a thousand truly needy, and you will still be just another Joe or Jane; but make one contribution to a funder and in no time you’ll be Mr/Ms Wallet to countless ruthlessly greedy supplicants.

As potential sucker-lists are big business themselves, names are only removed if they become embarrassingly unproductive, such as those which are judged to be terminally unresponsive (have not been heard from in any context for 2 years). A response is defined as any type of feedback from the target name or address. Even though the returned envelopes may contain verbal abuse directed at the fund-raiser, they still qualify as a response at funder HQ. If the respondent shells out for postage or participates at the survey or signature level, he/she is put in a grade category, and this name will move up to the more highly prized grade 4 level, referred to as the appetizer list. Should the solicitee make a financial contribution below the minimum , he/she will be moved up to grade 3, the entre list; a contribution in the range between the minimum requested and 10 times that amount will result in inclusion at the grade 2 level, or dinner list. Anything above 1000% of minimum qualifies for grade 1, the dessert list, which not only sells for ten times the price of an appetizer list, but the names here will receive special mailings, often laced with shameless flattery and including invitations to expensive gala functions arranged just for the purpose of separating these big spenders from even more maxi-helpings of their disposable income. These events will often feature some high-recognition celebrity(s) identifiable with the cause, and who generally will have been pre-paid by contractual arrangement for their appearance(s). The final list classification is referred to only as The President’s List, and is restricted to those rare few whose contributions extend from the thousands to the millions of dollars; pivotal players upon whom the suck-fund’s (another slang appellative; interchangeable with fund-sucker) success truly does rest and with respect to whom the shameless flattery would be heart-felt adulation. Such lists as these are typically not for sale, or if they are the asking prices will be astronomical. (In a now legendary incident, one such list was bought “for a Souix City sou” at public auction of assests of a fallen Fund-Op, then resold for 12.5 million dollars. The Fund-Op which then bought the list had a short-term politically affiliated ascendancy at the peak of which it was familiarly known in the trade as “Gore’s Gonads”; the organization was liquidated in the wake of the failure of Gore’s pleas for supreme intervention in the Florida vote-count, and the managerial staff have since retired to a massive private fortified estate on the Dalmatian Coast.)

The vernacular employed by the professional fund-raisers is interesting in itself, frequently ridiculing or denigrating as it does the contributor or potential contributor. Most interesting are the self-abasing slang appellatives such as “suck-fund”, and “fund-sucker”, which are heard frequently around a funding operation site when there is no danger of being overheard by an outsider. This tenuous posture of ironic self-ridicule puts me in mind of an episode from Marjoe Gortner’s documentary expose of the tent revivalist and faith healer shuck in which he and his cronies are counting the piles of money after a particularly lucrative night. “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred … Praise Jesus! Twenty, forty, sixty …”. No pangs of guilt, spasms of remorse, or higher ground second-thoughts are expressed or implied.

There can be little doubt that tracing the progress of fund-raising growth and development would, in fact, be one of the great American success stories. In America money is success, and successful fund-raisers have lots of it. Some statistics suggest that the profit potential of such operations may rival the illegal drug trade, but the big operators are understandably reluctant to reveal more than is absolutely necessary relating to the magnitude of their financial reserviors. Still, there is a profoundly unsettling hypocrisy involved with the pursuit of private sector disposable income in the interest of what is increasingly, and unashamedly, personal gain sought out in the disguise of concern for some glaring violation of public dignity. (A timely observation is in order outing the crowning irony of the conception and pursuit of the CFFE game-plan as expressed in the CFFE funder letter; this is an appeal which virtually mimics the fabric of the bogus cloak of altruism that would disguise the unabashed greed of the Fund-Ops, yet for the astute observer CFFE’s transparent cover reveals our sincere and true dedication to sounding the alarm for the teeming masses of assaulted solicitees who have … in the interest of probity let’s say, inadequate cerebral facility to discriminate in their own best interests.)

On reflection, “profoundly unsettling” [above] is perhaps an alarmist over-reaction. Whenever I fume over the fraudulence of the TV news, about which almost everything is contrived, I have to remind myself that what must appear as a patently bogus slipshod parody of the facts to anyone personally involved in the event(s) portrayed, is in fact an inescapable consequence of the very success of the projection and appeal of the story to a mass audience. Affectation of spontaneity to the contrary, there are few candid views of subject or event in the video news format, what with a camera crew tracking mud into the kitchen and a news-jockey attempting to structure the Q & A sound bites for maximum viewer impact. (Q: “Why do you think this pervert was hanging around your neighborhood all that time?” A: “Well; it was on the front page of the Chicken Hawk Gazette, wasn’t it?” Q: “When did you first realize you were being molested?” A: “When the big hand was on number one, and the little hand was past second-base.”) One must consider that the duplicity of the fund-raiser is not unique in our lives. On the other hand, keep in mind that the shuck-meister (fund operation manager; my own contribution to the funder’s lexicon) at the receiving end of your response has such diminished concern for your financial welfare, or appreciation for your contribution, that even now he/she is dreaming of a mother-of-all-sucker-lists which will include your name if you qualify, perhaps to be purchased by someone even less scrupulous than him/herself.

WHY I AM PERSONALLY CONCERNED WITH THE EXCESSES OBSERVED:

For reasons too trivial to deal with at the expense of your time, I became a player (in the fund-raising vernacular, a contributor who appears to be motivated more by altruistic concern than by guilt) in the funder game within the last few years, and back when I still naively thought fund-raising was cause-driven; what seemed an obvious conclusion based upon the promotional hyperbole which, need I say, I mistook for sincere concern. At the time of my first and only substantial contribution (a political one), I attracted the attention of some of the big-money generators (the large and highly successful fund-raising organizations, as distinguished from funders, which applies equally to the people in charge of the operation), and now the appeals that fill my mailbox are both numerous and relentless, apparently almost irrespective of my response.

As a result of a protracted accumulation of these unsolicited appeals, I now have what might be looked upon as a contender-class collection of cause (and in some cases, product) promotional material. It recently occurred to me that I might exercise my civic responsibility by sharing it with the public, along with what I have learned about the nuances of the processes of such promotion, having myself struggled so long with its intricacies. I think you will be surprised at the range of blatant misrepresentation, not to mention the unabashed chicanery, evident in the crisis mongering hysteria to be found in these classic specimens of the art that I present for your perusal. As a collector of fund-raising (and to a lesser extent mail-marketing) material, I now make occasional calculated response contributions in the form of a stamp or a $1 bill, “to cover mailing costs”, just to insure that I stay on the mailing lists. I have saved many, and all of the more interesting, fund letters I have received since perhaps 1995, along with any particularly interesting marketing solicitations. In the latter case this is not motivated by the suspicion that there is a great deal of cross-over between the fund-raising lists and the mail-marketing lists (which of course in many cases there is), but only because of the commonality of their hyperbolic generation and promotion of the respective crises upon which they base their appeals. In any case, I hope that you will be both pleased and enlightened by the insights and analyses I offer in my presentation of each of them.

It has not been my intent to minimize the profound impact, in the form of money generated, marketing and advertising techniques devised and perfected, or lifestyle and fashion changes propagated, that the mail-marketing phenomenon has had on American culture. Mail-marketing is considerably older, in fact, than mail-based fund-raising. And even today, the incredible proliferation of the funder license notwithstanding, there is much more money, comparing gross or net figures, realized through mail-marketing solicitations than through funding operations. But this is hardly a surprise; the mail-marketer, after all, has something tangible to sell. And any consideration of this merchandising phenomenon must include the big catalog houses, some of which alone realize multi-million, or in rare instances even billion, dollar annual sales. It would be, likewise, hardly a surprise that a business constructed to streamline the funding solicitation process would also consider dabbling in the mail-marketing game; much of their overhead cost would apply equally well to either endeavor. Procurement, warehousing, and inventory requirements of the offered items which the marketer faces present special problems, but a well-equipped and efficient funder might do only the advertising copy, solicitation-list management, and saturation mailings on a contractual basis, realizing tidy profits for both enterprises.

My consuming preoccupation with fund-raising operations has to do with an ethical legitimacy issue that is not shared by the mail-marketers. This is a shadow-issue perhaps, but the profit-motivation and product-representation concerns dealt with in making a moral evaluation of the marketer are only tangentially equitable to those that must be considered in making a like judgement of the funder; the latter operates by franchise alone on the teetering edge of legitimacy in a way that the former does not.

Among the unsolicited mail-marketing appeals I mention (above), you will not find boiler-plate solicitations from sewer cleaners, insurance, loan, credit card, or magazine hawkers, purveyors of fine anything, nor from any of the catalog houses, etc., etc. Imaginative cutting-edge mail-marketing however, dependent as it is after all on a short-circuited conscience and a practiced unctuous manipulation of the relevant vocabulary, both of which are familiar and required behavioral attributes of the efficient funder, is quite as fascinating as fund-raising and probably equally offensive. The art of the respective artificers is surely the object of mutually reciprocated acclaim. The fund-raiser offers nothing in return for your money except a sense of civic participation and a cleansed conscience, and that only if you have been oblivious to all the fabrication and subterfuge you had to suffer for the self-congratulatory opportunity. The mail-marketer offers a product in return for your money, but the hyperbole you are subjected to in the come-on may still be the difference for the purveyor between a no-sale and a satisfying customer. The fund-raiser and the mail-marketer are genetically linked; at least figuratively, and by some lights literally. Take away a mail-marketer’s product and he/she would be a funder by default. Even though the means to their respective ends support essential dissimilarities, their ultimate aspirations, in the form of profit, are identical. And the apparently unlike means actually utilize identical tactical concepts, in the form of strategic employment of promotional flummery to sink the hook preparatory to reeling in the sucker.

FINDING A FUND-RAISERS LAIR:

Probably the fund-raising capital of the world is Washington D.C. It is the source of most of the political party solicitation, and along with a couple of towns in northeastern Virginia, much of the lobbyist and “concerned-citizen” group political issue solicitation as well. Although the bulk of the generators are concerned with essentially political issues, there are nonetheless huge numbers of operations devoted to every conceivable attention-getting ploy and located in every part of the country. If you follow the funding phenomenon as I do you will notice that many states have specific address areas from which most of the local funding efforts will emanate, and to which the return traffic is directed. Thus it wasn’t really a surprise to me within the last few years that so many of the appeals I was receiving were coming from the same place; a little town in central Arizona named, curiously enough, Skull Valley. I hardly even noticed this new source at first. But before long I was effectively pulled up short as my appreciation grew for this unmistakably savvy, hard-core fund-raising enterprise located so inconspicuously.

The fund letters, along with the occasional product or service solicitation, I have accumulated from the Skull Valley source confirm a common recipient for the returned contributions, survey replies, and purchase responses. This is a single, but apparently infinitely divisible by drawer, Post Office Box. The numbers of letters I have received from this source right up until the present time has left me with no doubts that this is a formidable mailing service fund generator and mail-marketer. The tenor of the appeals from this source is so manifestly typical of the genre that most of the sample letters I have posted below have been selected from the solicitations of this funding enterprise.

A couple of years or so ago, sometime in 1999 as I recollect, I began getting an inkling of the magnitude of this operation and I decided to pay Skull Valley a visit and see what I could learn. The town itself would appear to have a population of perhaps a few hundred persons; it is little more than a gas station, general store, shade-tree auto repair, lunch-only café, donation-funded fire station, US Post Office, and public school, plus locally scattered residences. I spent an afternoon driving through what appeared to me to be the “community”, and I was still unable to locate any shop or business building that might house the sort of equipment that would be needed to print out and address the quantity of postal traffic that all evidence suggests is being generated somewhere nearby. The one exception, which had a number of ancient John Deere farm tractors parked around it, proved to be in fact a shop for the restoration of these machines which is owned by a local rancher. The community does stretch out along a meandering wash (more of a creek actually; the descriptive “wash” is in this instance nomenclature contrary to the denizens’ of rural Arizona’s customary proclivity to celebrate the presence of naturally occurring ground-water with grandiose nominatives), a water-course with a dense growth of cottonwood trees along it, and I suppose I could have missed something.

I did have one productive episode while I was driving around when I came upon the Skull Valley Mini-Storage, a facility with no more than half-a-dozen units, but which piqued my interest momentarily as a plausible candidate for a fund-raising operations materials-warehousing site. Although it hardly qualified for size, still it seemed to be the only place that up to this point I could not readily eliminate as a candidate for the targeted activity. There was nothing going on around the complex, and when I saw the dumpster out back I poked through it’s contents. The waste therein was sparse and appeared to have been generated by private residences. But I did find one most intriguing item; a crumpled six-page hand-written draft of a memo, addressed only to “Whom It May Concern, etc.” (see “Funder Memo”, in the letter samples below), and although it was the only fund-related item I found, subsequent readings convinced me that this document must surely constitute a transitional statement in the development of cutting-edge funder philosophy. I initially identified it, with the thought of making it available to the public, somewhat verbosely as “Notes From A Funder Found In A Dumpster Behind The Skull Valley Mini-Storage”. It wasn’t until very recently, when I received a mail-marketing appeal for a correspondence school offering training in fund-raising (see “Funder Shower” letter below), that my earlier judgement regarding this memo’s pivotal “position paper” significance was confirmed.

It has occurred to me that this whole protracted accumulation of mailings I have received may be some sort of hoax; that I, perhaps along with a few others, am the only one getting this mail. In my own area I am rather well known as an active analyst and outspoken critic of the big-money funder phenomenon, and thus I might, by a stretch of the imagination, be a plausible target for such a deception. This unlikely scenario raises far more questions than it answers, however, and the number of pieces I have received would alone suggest a monumental undertaking, hardly justifiable as a joke; nor is the fact that I too am an Arizona resident a very compelling connection. Perhaps most important, the funder memo I found in the dumpster could hardly have been planted there in anticipation of my curiosity, as a practical matter; I had alerted no one of my impulsively undertaken trip to Skull Valley. Add to which, although I can’t speak for the others if there are any, these Skull Valley solicitors, whoever they are, are not getting any of my money beyond a very occasional one dollar cash donation.

After exploring the community for some time I pulled in at the Skull Valley post office, and although there is nothing tangible to assure me that the mail actually goes out from there – bulk mail usually has no source-identifying post markings – it is a virtual certainty that anything that comes back to the fund-raisers must be delivered there, as that is the return address on all the solicitations in question. Yet my impression of the post office building itself, which is clean and modern in a bleak country fashion, is that, while it seems much too large for the apparent size of the community it is still far too small to be the postal provider for such a fund-raising colossus. I hung around outside in the parking lot for over an hour in the mid-afternoon, and nobody even drove in. Some discrete inquiries of the postmaster, a substitute while “Shelly, the regular postmistress”, was on vacation, revealed that the box holder is a business which has identified itself as “FUNDER AGE ENTERPRISES”. (This disclosure alone, I have since discovered, may have been a violation, on the part of this postal employee, of current Postal Regulations.) The only address the postmaster could, or was willing, to give me was the P.O. Box number itself; nor was he inclined to offer anything specific regarding the organization, it’s activities, or, not surprisingly I must admit, the quantity of mail that FAE receives. He professed to have no clue as to the physical address of the FAE operations, but when I expressed amazement that such an operation could keep a low-profile in such a small community, he did comment off-handedly that “they may have their facilities in another part of the country and be doing their mailings out of town”. What could be the benefit of such an expedient eludes me, unless this Post Office is just incapable of handling the volume; a short-coming that should be corrected rather than avoided, one would think. Still, there seemed to be little or no evidence of mass mailings going out from here; and little or no apparent probability of any additional information being forthcoming from the ersatz-postmaster either.

An astute observer of the funder technology will be interested to learn that the FAE mailings, unlike the case with the previous generation of fund appeal, not only provide no postage for return of the contribution, even the envelope for such a return is not included. This marks a long-term trend however, seen more and more often in the funder venue. For some time, for instance, there has been an increasing tendency for simulated hand-written scribbling on return envelopes requesting the donor to supply his/her own stamp even on prepaid envelopes, as well as an increasing trend for the envelopes to have no postage at all. (Some of us remember the days when the usual technique was to paste a hand-full of small denomination stamps making up the full postage on the return envelope – a ploy to lend the illusion of a dedicated and sincere kitchen-table operation. In fact there are a few hard-core funders still employing this dark-ages tactic, surely at great sacrifice of profit.) The FAE operation is likewise pioneering a return to pre-credit card solicitation, asking for checks and, unheard of in recent memory, paper currency (cash!) only. Of course the credit card is a great convenience, but this network is costy and as the funder’s object is to make money all such transitions to a simplification of the process free up more of the donation income as profit. There are tax-related implications here as well; even non-profits are scrupulously observed by the IRS, and cash leaves scant trail. A casual perusal of the sample letters will provide convincing evidence that the funders have honed the impact of their appeals to compensate for any loss of revenue that might arise from the aggravated inconvenience perceived by the contributor who now is asked to contribute his/her own postage and envelope as well. In fact, such shortages add a note of urgency, and thus of sincerity, to the request. By all appearances FAE is making a generational leap forward in the fund-raiser’s operational strategy.

Out of curiosity, I made some inquiries while I was there about the origin of the name, “Skull Valley”. Certainly it defies the casual guesswork of the uninformed visitor beyond a vaguely foreboding resonance. The postmaster was characteristically unhelpful on this subject, as with my other queries. Outside, a grizzled Irishman with coarse hair growing from every visible orifice was sitting against the wall of Ralph’s Pretty Good Gas Station. He would only identify himself as “Jack”, but said that when he first bought property in the area there was “a likeness of a human skull about the size of an upright freezer” that sat atop the café, and it was there for years. He suggested that I probably wouldn’t find a much more plausible explanation, unless predisposed to entertain any number of preposterous speculations which had fossilized in the local-legend matrix in years past. I didn’t press my luck, and moved on. Another informant, whom I met inside the little general store where I went for a ham-sandwich and ice cream before starting my trip home, identified herself as Robin and said she was in the area on a meteorological assignment for a bird-watching class at the Skull Valley high school. (I was subsequently told, when I stopped in a neighboring community to ask directions, that Skull Valley doesn’t have a high school! Go figure.) Robin was a font of information, telling me first that the person behind FUNDER AGE ENTERPRISES is one “Dr. Harry Cox” (she had no bona-fides informing the nature of Cox’s “doctorate”, but suspected that he is a diploma-mill graduate cum laude), who is “an active alienist, conspiracy theorist, and New-Age medium” and lives in a trailer court in Hellmouth, which is a wide-spot-in-the-road settlement not on the map in the Mojave Desert in southeastern California. On further questioning she stated that Dr. Cox once told her that the explanation for Skull Valley’s name was linked to a story he had tracked down in an old copy of the Hellmouth-Heater Democrat dating from around 1897, titled “Strange Occurrence at Proctor’s Well”, detailing an event that happened outside of Curio (the town is now lost, but may have been near Grasshopper Jct. on the present site of Chloride), Arizona, which involved an alien landing. She said it had not been clear to her how far outside of Curio the events in question had taken place, whether “Proctor’s” well was in fact “a typo, and the whole incident involved an ugly scene between an employee ‘of the esurient-parasite power company’ and Dr. Cox” at the water source for the latter’s mobile home in the course of which “he ‘gave the runted corporate lackey an ear-full’”, or how the skulls which account for the name manifested themselves and whether they “were bones of aliens, or of local natives”. Her rendering of Dr. Cox’s tale and it’s discrepancies had a compelling ring of authenticity, and I was later easily able to dismiss my misgivings over her remark about involvement with the high school as perhaps a misapprehension prompted by the ambient effect of rarified air in this central-mountains community. Just as I had finished my sandwich and was getting ready to embark on my return trip home, a lady in a red SUV pulled up in front of the store, running over the crumpled brown paper bag with the ice-cream in it that I had set on the ground while I was digging for my car keys. After I got her attention by waving my flattened dessert around menacingly, she disarmingly introduced herself with a not-to-be-denied p.r. smile as Lisa M, a locally famous cabaret singer on her way to an engagement in the next town. Not to miss an opportunity, I asked her if she knew how the town got it’s name, and she said that she had heard a story to the effect that it involved “early Native American wildings that left human bones scattered about the valley like an Idaho potato crop gone feral”. Upon leaving she invited me, by way of amends, to her show which she opined might reincarnate as “Dessert Raid” in an attempt at catharsis-through-levity of the dyspeptic episode she had caused me, judging by my “over-reactive fuss” about the Eskimo Pie. Reluctantly I declined on grounds of a scheduling conflict. It has been some time now since my trip to Skull Valley, and I still have no satisfactory answer to the name-origin question.

WHAT WE CAN DO TO PROTECT OURSELVES FROM THESE PARASITES:

After what is turning into years of experience with a wide range of funder letter types, you will not be surprised that it is no longer possible for me to take them at face value. Their typical transparent pandering knows no bounds, their duplicity is legendary (or will be, if my public-spirited efforts are successful), and they have no peer for breathless crisis mongering. This exposure has given me the familiarity, and provided me with the analytical resources, to formulate some obvious “Rules of Engagement” in the on-going fund-raising conflicts. With the help of these guide-lines, you can learn to recognize these charlatans, and learn how to deal with them. Following are the six fundamental flags that will confirm funder-fraud, and an alert to the attitudes you must adopt to inure yourself to their appeal:

1) Never assume the urgency expressed in the characterizations of the impending crises. They are always of lesser magnitude, and frequently nonexistent.

2) In the evaluation of any fund-raising solicitation, consider the nature of the cause or crisis, and the source of the expressed concern. Is there any evidence to support the implied claims that the person or organization soliciting the funds has any hope, in fact, of altering the course of, or solving, the dilemma presented, even should the requested funds all materialize. If you pay attention to results, you will soon notice that fund-raising organizations only raise funds. They don’t resolve crises, which for obvious reasons would be counter-productive in any event. And even if such a promotion scheme was cause-oriented, it isn’t likely that the enterprise would bring in the massive quantities of money required to be effective in making the vast and difficult polity-issue changes that are regularly proposed.

3) Always be suspicious of flattery and/or familiarity. You know better than anyone what your actual relationship with the fund-raisers is or has been. They will credit you with being the very foundation of their support group; the key contributor without whom all the progress made to date could never have been realized. Snuggle up to these hucksters at your own peril.

4) Be suspicious of the name of the solicitor; in fact, be assured that in many if not most cases the name, usually designated as “Director”, “President”, “CEO”, “DOD”, and the like, is wholly fictitious, or the name of a front contractee who may sign the letters and be available for public display on a pay-per-appearance basis. Sometimes these front personalities are so craftily constructed as to virtually defy real-life identification.

5) Know in advance that it is the money, and the money only, that is important in the fund-raiser context. Any suggestion that your opinion, input, declaration of support in the form of a petition or survey, etc. is vital to the mobilization or direction of their effort – in fact, any suggestion that your non-cash input is even of incidental interest to anyone at funder-HQ, or any assurance that “your response will be tabulated and the [input count] rushed to [any one of numerous arbiters of public policy]” – is completely spurious.

6) Most important, keep in mind that these gigantic sucker lists and mass mailings are not put together for the amusement of those running the operation. By any reckoning there are great costs involved, on top of which, why would anyone want put their energy and enthusiasm into this kind of stupifyingly tedious and unchallenging work unless there was something really rewarding coming back in those envelopes? If you still feel compelled to counter with some cliched pap about “these compassionate cause-driven people getting their reward from the satisfaction of doing good”, go back to 2) and start over.

THE FUNDER LETTERS:

At some point consideration must be given to the necessity, or desirability, of even attempting to assess the legitimacy of the fund-raising organization which has sent any given letter. First, let me make clear that in this context legitimacy is not a judgement with regard to the fraud inherent in the appeal itself, but only whether the supplicant is as represented therein; ie, the nominal supplicant is actually the one writing the appeals and doing, or arranging for, the mailings, as opposed to a funder who expedites the whole process, from mailing lists to counting “the take”, but does in under cover of some other interested party’s name and/or cause. Most of these appeals are the work of professional fund-raising organizations, but in some few cases the represented interest group will actually be doing its own legitimate fund-raising, perhaps even employing its own “professionals”. But by and large the game is much too big for any but the most efficient players, which often if not generally eliminates the person or group who may in fact have an interest in the issue being flouted. At any rate, there is little to distinguish the former from the latter scenario in the appeal letters themselves, making it impractical to even attempt regular judgements of legitimacy.

A couple of general observations might be in order, however. Some fund-soliciting communities, such as the Christian Fundamentalists, or the political candidates of either party, tend to do more legitimate fund-raising than, for instance, those groups espousing the usual Conservative or Liberal front-burner causes. One reason for this is that the former groups have access to virtually unlimited seed-money with which to finance their initial appeals. This is the other secret, ie, capitalization, along with a high level of expertise, that identifies the big funder houses. On the other hand, in the case of a group attempting to raise one-time emergency funds for some high-profile, media-star “victim” with appeals at the National level, the monies raised are typically so far in excess of anything that might be reasonably required by the “wronged” party that there is usually little doubt that “professionals” are in charge, with or without the consent of the “victimized” celebrity. In fact I am more than inclined to suspect, although as yet I have no evidence to support the conjecture, that the Cosa Nostra crime families are, or soon will be, engaged in “fund-raising” at the big-house level. Remember: You saw it here first!

On the nature of the relationship between the front-furniture and the funder, the important thing to keep in mind as you peruse these sample letters is that all is not what it seems. In most instances I have no idea what sort of deal was struck between the celebrity or cause-proponent and the funder organization. There is no doubt that in some if not most cases the ostensible person-with-a-cause had very little idea, and perhaps none at all, how his/her crisis was being exploited, what the contents of his/her solicitation letter were, or how much money was generated. These hapless suckers (victims of exploitation even more surely than are the recipients of the solicitations) have had to be content with making the best deal they could and hoping for an honest split as per agreement, even, tragically, in those cases where they are true exponents of a cause in need of funds. In as much as the nature of these deals would be all but impossible to expose – who is going to talk? – I will approach the following letters at face-value when circumstantial evidence of duplicity is absent. I will only make blanket attempts to second-guess the greed or fraud that might have accompanied any of these efforts, or the disappointment or other provocation for contemplated or attempted retaliation that might have resulted, when it seems appropriate. But I will make observations regarding the nature of strategic funder tactics in the interest of exposing them, and may extrapolate assessments as to motivation that will have little or no immediately obvious support. Please bear with me, as I hope to shed the brilliant white light of analytical verity into the dirty corners and vermin infested cracks of the funder’s lair.

WHAT CAN I DO TO DEFUSE THE FUNDER’S EMOTIONALLY-CHARGED APPEAL?:

NEVER, under any circumstances, respond with a contribution to a funder solicitation presented under any pretext over the phone, via e-mail, in face-to-face confrontation with someone who comes to your door, or to any fund appeal delivered in any disguise in a bulk mailing. Make it PERFECTLY clear in any fund-solicitation context that you will ONLY give consideration to fund appeals which arrive in the form of PERSONAL (ie, ORIGINAL, not copies of, correspondence sent via the US Post Office hand-stamped) mail. This is the sort of mail you would receive from a friend or acquaintance, or from a stranger whose interest in YOUR response was sufficiently sincere and meaningful that they would take the time to send an appeal personally addressed to your sense of civic or charitable responsibility, pathological compassion, bleeding-heart cause-triggered currency hemorrhage, or whatever the case may be. Insisting on a personal, posted solicitation before any response can even be considered is a rational, mature request. The personal nature of the mailing lends credibility to the solicitor, and allows time for contemplative consideration of the cause on the part of potential donor. A fortuitous adjunct of this requirement will be, of course, that the number of funder mailings you receive (should your demand for this consideration be acknowledged), or at least the number of funder mailings to which you will subsequently feel compelled to give ANY consideration, will drop precipitously.

STATEMENT OF ELIGIBILILITY AS AN EXPERT WITNESS:

I take this opportunity to affirm that, after considerable reflection, I would in modesty judge myself qualified as an expert on mail-generated fund-raising matters. Consistent with this judgement, I hereby offer my services, conditionally, as an “expert witness” for litigation or arbitration in fund-raising related civil actions. Such an engagement would be contingent upon my being paid the recognized acceptable standard hourly fee for the area in which I was to appear, plus accommodation, meal, and travel expenses to and from a location of my choice. For such purposes, I may be reached at:

CENTER FOR FUNDER ENLIGHTENING

Attn: George “Eddy” Antrobus;

President, Founder, & Executive Director

P.O. Box 36

Kirkland AZ 86332

Or; “eddy@funderenlightening.org”