A kinder, back-to-basics approach to donor relations amounted to a 30 percent increase in contributions for D.C.’s Heritage Foundation.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

Case in point: A friend of Von Kannon’s works at The Nature Conservancy, which this past spring was the target of a scathing story in The Washington Post that made accusations of fundraising impro-prieties.

“[He] was really upset,” Von Kannon says. “And I said, ‘I promise you one thing: You’re going to get a million-dollar gift from somebody you never thought was a potential million-dollar donor, because you’ve been attacked.’ And he came to me a month later and said to me, ‘You know, you were wrong; we got two of them.’”