In 1957, my father sat in the cold metal hut buried halfway into the ground of Shemya Island, a remote piece of land that sits near the very end of the tongue full of islands that make up the eastern edge of Alaska. It’s no surprise that some of his photos from that island have Russian fishermen in them.
My father was an electronic spy some 20 years or so before electronics was a thing.
As the ranking sergeant, his job was to supervise soldiers who listened in on Russian Morse Code transmissions. His clearance level was so high that he had to once refuse the vice president of the United States entry into his workroom.
In 1988, I walked through the cold air of Boston over to the Harvard Business School library to take a cranky elevator down to 3 levels below the ground. I culled through dusty copies of the Duns Million Dollar Directory or The Standard and Poor’s Register of Corporations (which really was one volume) to find out that a prospect we were interested in had married the daughter of the company founder, and that is why he could give $1 million for a professorship.
As a Harvard researcher, I was also tasked with reading newspapers and covering the geographic area of the gift officers I was assigned to. My job was to get to know how wealth was created in those geographies and suggest new prospects.
I was prospecting about 5 years before prospecting was a thing.
My dad’s job was to spy in order for our country to have intelligence on what the Soviets were up to. My job was to help a gift officer have an intelligent conversation with a prospect about the most impactful gift she can make — and I mean impactful to herself, not just to Harvard. We both did it using listening devices, though I eventually used computers and the Internet on top of paper books.
Are both jobs creepy? I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why: If someone wanted to ask me for $1 million, she’d better know something about me. Oh, and Dad? Well, he was protecting us from what was our greatest threat during the Cold War.
Here’s the thing: The Soviets knew that people like my father were out there listening. Don’t you think that your best prospects do, too? After all, getting a phone call from a major gifts officer is probably a rite of passage for someone who is building wealth. And if I were on any wealth list at all, I would expect to be approached.
I am proud to be the clipboard wielding, database slinging staff member whispering into the ear of any gift officer who is about to approach someone and ask him for some of his assets. I am proud that what I do leads to endowments so that people get services and education. And I’m proud to play a part in the sheer flattery that comes with someone asking for a visit and congratulating a prospect on the sale of his last business.
Soldiers have been replaced on Shemya Island by satellite dishes, so no one has to walk in that frigid wind to get dinner. However, that’s where my parallel with Dad ends. Prospect researchers aren’t just code catchers; we are interpreters. We actually decode what the numbers mean, including whether a prospect has liquid wealth and where she likes to give it away. As long as wealth is measured by complex formulas that must be translated into English, we have to be involved to make sure our gift officers relate well to our donors.
So, I’m proud to keep my headphones on, separating the signals from the noise.