An act of God shakes up fundraising at Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

The conference call itself generated a few extra gifts, Carpenter said, and fell short of the anticipated 25 percent to 30 percent response rate. But soliciting gifts, at that point, wasn’t the main objective of the call.

The full-court press came soon after.

Carpenter and his team had to rethink how it approached major donors and, simply, get more aggressive. The goal: to develop 300 to 350 major donors and make some level of contact with each of them within three months.