The screed is about the naive view of development you get from time to time during the search for leaders of educational institutions: “He’d be great with alums.” “She can really work a room.” “He’s really connected to the movers and shakers.”
Sorry. Sophisticated development is not about the ability to be charming or to work a room or to have access to wealthy people, although all those are nice, ceteris paribus. Perhaps you can get lucky and find the donor who’s just itching to give a $25 million naming gift to the Southern Euphoria University College of Law, but that’s not generally how it works. It’s a long game, and more than anything you can’t raise money for a sow’s ear without at the same time demonstrating that, indeed, you are turning it into a silk purse. The two are inextricably linked.
Jack Welch said famously that GE’s businesses were going to be number one or number two in their field, or GE would get out. The rationale for that isn’t some Neutron Jack inhumanity. It’s that he understood business is fund-raising. It’s either raising funds in the form of sales revenue because you have goods and services you are proud to sell, or it’s raising funds in the form of capital from investors because you have businesses you are proud to say have a future. Being number one or number two is a quick and dirty heuristic – and a quotable line – for being a silk purse and not a sow’s ear. (I’ll bet GE kept some very good businesses that were number three!)
There’s a similar dichotomy between sales and marketing. Sales is knocking on the door; marketing is the sophisticated process of having something to sell and persuading people they want it. Marketing is about a value proposition: put your money here rather than somewhere else because we will deliver to you more utils than the competition. Compelling value propositions take work and require huge amounts of effort within the four walls of the institution before you put them out to customers and investors. The same is true of schools.
Beware the naive view of development. Beware the pitch that is just about willingness to knock on doors without linking it back to the hard work of building a distinct institution. Beware the person who thinks there’s a meaningful distinction between being an “inside dean” and an “outside dean.”
End of screed.