‘Asking Properly’ reprinted
Howard Lake | 16 March 2005 | News
White Lion Press has reprinted George Smith’s ‘Asking Properly: The Art of Creative Fundraising’. Ken Burnett explains why this excellent book has reappeared unrevised and not updated.
“This is an exceptionally important book”, explained Ken Burnett, author, consultant and founder of White Lion Press, the book’s publisher. “Not only is it perhaps the best book ever written on the subject of fundraising creativity (a short list to head, perhaps, but a distinguished claim nonetheless), its content also is in many ways timeless and it is, still, years ahead of its time.”
He explains: “within these pages you can find not only an unmatched analysis of what makes for real creativity when communicating a cause, but also a raft of clues to the future of fundraising, a future that the bulk of today’s practitioners are only just beginning to appreciate”.
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The book distils at least three decades of George Smith’s experience in fundraising. He and Ken had worked together for many of the world’s most adventurous fundraising charities. “From way back George and I were both dedicated evangelists for monthly giving and legacy marketing, fundraising staples now but which, back then, were innovations not widely practiced and universally unsung. In 1994 we were given the task of implanting these philosophies into Greenpeace’s offices around the world. This, ‘the best job in the world of fundraising’, as George called it, transformed Greenpeace’s fortunes everywhere and led directly to Greenpeace Austria’s development of ‘Dialog Direct’ and the incubation of what’s now known almost everywhere as face-to-face fundraising.
“At the time of writing, after just five years, Greenpeace has recruited more than 1,400,000 new monthly donors worldwide through face-to-face, raising an annual income of US$130 million. That for just this one organisation, from one good idea.”
When stocks began to run low Ken says that it wasn’t a difficult decision to reprint. However, “given that it first appeared in 1996, our first thought was to revise and update it, and issue it as Asking Properly, the 21st Century edition. But on closer look that proved to be both impractical and unnecessary.”
“So please don’t be distracted by examples from the recent past or by statistics that may now have been surpassed”, asks Ken. “Just enjoy the brilliant words, the well-chosen illustrations and the instructive anecdotes. And benefit from this fine depiction of the art and craft of fundraising which time has shown to be not just instructive and enduring, but quite remarkably prophetic.”
Find Asking Properly on UK Fundraising’s bookshop.
- Asking properly: the only sustainable way to do fundraising (22 July 2015)
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.