Fundraising by Fiends
You really do hate to see fundraising pass out of the hands of the people directly involved and over to professionals.
These are fine people, the professionals in the fundraising business, but you lose something I think when you can no longer realistically imagine that the person at the other end of the line raising money for your alma mater is an actual student at that same school, or that the people manning the phone banks that the camera pans over could easily be your friends and neighbors.
The nervous student in the first case makes reference to the various campus sweet spots you so much enjoyed – the pond, the student union, good old Freeman Hall where you had the majority of your classes – and something about her eager persuasion, the notion that she is inside that student union right now and at the end of this phone shift she’ll walk home to the dorm along the same sidewalks you used to walk – makes you open up your wallet for a good deal more than you would have predicted at the start of the evening.
By the same token, the earnest faces of the people at the local PBS station, hovering over their red phones and looking expectantly at them as though willing them to ring, also hits a soft spot. Just regular people gathered from the outside: reading clubs, and civic organizations, and benevolent groups of all manners. It doesn’t seem right that those phones aren’t ringing off the hooks, so again, you loosen your wallet to a somewhat painful degree.
The old ways can’t hold forever in today’s fast-paced world however.
Professional fundraisers are well-trained to understand the varieties of human nature and the appeals that will work on each ‘type’ of person. I get that.
I just think it is taking it too far to hire demons, fiends, foul entities, and various menacing characters from ancient depictions of the afterlife to do your fundraising for you. This comes at you awfully strong; it is ‘overkill,’ as they say, and can turn the potential donor ‘off.’ That’s my thinking anyway.
Put yourselves in the shoes of the average alumni.
The phone rings of a evening, and carelessly picking it up without checking its origins, the homeowner finds himself immediately the object of the caller’s pitch.
Except this time, it isn’t the rushed eager voice of the volunteer coed telling him how much they appreciate his donation of last year and would he like to upgrade to The Platinum Category this year. It is a beastly otherworldly voice that seems to drip with supernatural menace.
We are cautioned always to never be over-quick to draw impressions from the small things that come up in first meeting or speaking to someone, but the homeowner in this case gets the definite feeling that the being that he is conversing with has tentacles where his eyes should be, meat cleaver type claws where his hands should be, scales instead of skin, and an overall pulpy approach to fashion which just doesn’t work.
Let us call him Frank, The Destroyer of Worlds, simply so he has a name.
Frank dispenses with the usual rushed intro designed to keep you on the phone long enough to strike up a conversation, and goes right into the main act of his pitch, which is to let out a punishing roar directly into the phone and thereby into the homeowner’s ear.
This roar combines the worst of the sounds that you’d get in a wind tunnel designed to test jet airplanes that has had a nut and bolt factory’s full day output poured in at the front end, the collective howl of one thousand leaf blowers set to full tilt, the more traditional furnace-y type roar that you get in the movies when someone accidentally opens one of the side doors into hell, with a final touch of the noise that electric beaters make against a glass bowl that doesn’t yet have anything in it to beat, say an even million of them.
Oh, and say that some clever manufacturer has figured out how to make roller skates out of sharpened fingernails and a several hundred skaters wearing these interesting contraptions are engaged in some sort of race, an endless race, upon a surface made of grade school blackboards.
The homeowner, for his part, can’t swear to it, but he gets the feeling that flame is emitting from the caller’s mouth at the same time as he is roaring.
Now, the homeowner could argue the point and say, “look, I haven’t a clue what you’re saying, and besides, I think you are on my no-call list. whatever it is you’re calling about. Thanks, but no thanks.”
This, though it always feels good to let loose with one of these consumer rights manifestos, is destined to do no good whatsoever.
This isn’t an ordinary caller for one thing, and for another the homeowner gets the definite impression that the pressure is just going to be stepped up at each stage of the pitch.
Well, that is the way with these people, or fiendish underworld entities as the case may be, they never know when to let up, always working to close the deal.
There is nothing in in this fiend’s message to the listener of nostalgia for the old quadrangle or the stadium filling up with cheering students.
He, though not a native English speaker, gets the message across that he is all about devouring your head with a single bite if you do not immediately comply with his fiendish demands.
The wise homeowner at this point looks at the piece of literature that has come in the mail and says, “OK, look, I’m in for ten dollars a month. I’ve got three kids in school, this will be coming right off the top of my pizza and beer budget, and that is just all I can do.”
At this point the underworld beast somehow send a wave of heat down the telephone wires and the homeowner’s phone heats in his hands until it’s nearly too hot to hold.
“OK, $15 a month, but that is absolutely it. No, I not interested in joining the President’s Platinum Giving Club. $15 a month.”
And if he is lucky, the beast’s ghastly appetite is assuaged for the moment.
In a like manner, whereas you are used in these fundraising drives at the local public television station to seeing people manning the bank of phones wearing cardigans and nice vests and perhaps pastel jackets, looking like librarians, prize winning pet owners, and members of the local gardening club, your attention is arrested when you now see that the volunteer staff consists of various troglodytes, trolls, this one fellow who looks to be a cannibal of one sort or another who is spending his down time filing his teeth, another fellow who looks to be put together from several other fine people but done so not by an expert but by someone working off a YouTube instructional video, that three-headed dog from Greek mythology, Cerberus, yes, that’s his name, Cerberus, a small but outspoken coven of witches who are busy casting spells on the crew at the station and turning them into different species entirely, and just a lot of other types of characters that you’d just as soon not meet in a dark alley.
A good guess is that the station has asked for the full range of threatening characters to stock the background, and that regardless of what exact type of monster populates your personal nightmares, they are fully represented by this panel of phone bank volunteers.
Oh, and here comes a beefy fellow holding a clutch of what seems to be human heads, people he has no doubt engaged with through his busy day, and who is looking for a place to sit and some sort of surface to place all the heads upon.
Rod Serling appears to let you know that it is no use to try to change the channel or to turn the TV off, so you sit back down, just as though you hadn’t stood up to try to do exactly that— change the channel I mean — and pretend to just have been stretching your back, and consider, along with all the thousands of others of these viewers, whether you’d really want to get a call from these guys, or whether you’d just as soon cough up the money now and get it over with.
The phones at the station start ringing like mad, and it seems that you are not the only one to have the thought, and we can presume that the evening goes swimmingly, if filled with heart-stopping terror, and the station meets and exceeds it goals for the night by some large margin.
Effective? Yes, no doubt. Hard-working professionals? Of course.
But I think we have come a long way from that enthusiastic starry-eyed coed, who just seemed, I don’t know, easier to deal with somehow.
