Meet Our Award Winners: Matthew Bregman

How would your co-workers describe you: I’m not sure — but I’d love to know! I think they’d say that I’m funny and a little obsessed with my kids, and that I never stop asking for things.

Greatest lesson ever learned: This is a hard question, and it actually inspired a recent post in my blog. But more succinctly, and specifically in terms of fundraising, I think I learned an important fundraising lesson back in my first job, when I was organizing my first revenue-generating special event. We were featuring Ralph Nader (long before he became a pariah because of the Al Gore campaign). Nevertheless, we were struggling to sell tickets, and we were sure that the key to success would be aggressive and comprehensive follow-up with our membership base. But no one, and I mean no one, was buying tickets. And I began to believe that the whole concept of the event must be terrible, and that I was not cut out for fundraising, and our organization wasn’t cut out for prosperity. Then someone put a tiny ad in the back of The Village Voice, and the phones started ringing off the hook. We had simply been asking the wrong people.