My position as a monk/priest for some 25 years in international educational institutions brought me into extensive knowledge and experience of the nonprofit fundraising process. These nonprofit institutions (including Himalayan Academy) were completely dependent upon annual fundraising gifts for supporting programs and for supporting the staff of monks. Monthly fundraising letters were written with inspiring and inclusive phrases and much time was put in by the monks toward cultivating these important monthly gifts. For many years I was the lead writer and planner for these funding drives—developing and managing their execution in several locations and countries. I was the first person to introduce direct mail fundraising to the country of Mauritius. Our monastery and teaching campuses were located in California, Nevada, Hawaii, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Mauritius. Several of these campuses were so large that major construction projects were commonplace, or renovation and addition work were fairly constant. New worship architecture, gathering halls, administration offices and personal quarters needed to be funded through the entire construction cycle. These large and small construction projects were all funded through capital campaign donation drives that I was instrumental in planning and executing. Additionally, I participated in social welfare drives and human disaster relief campaigns. My expertise in annual campaigns includes strategizing and personally developing monthly mailings, telephone calls, donor research, personal meetings, fundraising events, year-end progress reports, establishing cash-flow channels. For over 25 years I've been involved in the writing and design of presentation materials for multi-year capital funding drives, and often managed a large team of volunteers. This included training them in how to cultivate donors, how to ask for donations and the skills of demonstrating appreciation, sense-of-inclusion, and followup. To give the volunteers or other staff members the most useful resources for talking to potential donors I invested much of my time in writing presentation scripts for telephone and personal meetings. On several large multi-million dollar projects (see below) I served as the director or co-director managing a substantial staff and successfully reaching high funding goals over a short period of time. As a manager I worked hard to keep my team inspired and engaged in all processes of the donor cultivation and fundraising methods. I love hearing ideas and building them with team members, and giving great appreciation and credit to those I work with—indeed, as a monk, I tend to steer all credit to other people. As a nonprofit director who was also a monk, I am very keen on studying the latest methods and psychology of fundraising. I read often new, creative thinking on the art of fundraising, and always write out my own perceptions of these methodologies. Among the main psychologies of fundraising is the art of creating bridges of interest to potential donors—the ability to find interests in the life of a donor that overlap the interests of the nonprofit. This, along with the graceful ability to ask for donations, are central fundraising arts that I possess much experience in. |
Nonprofit Projects Chronology Projects I have been a team member of or directed solely or codirected:
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