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Neck & neck with Tamblyn & Brown and Tamblyn & Tamblyn in the educational field is Manhattan's John Price Jones, Inc., a much bigger fund-raising firm whose founder & president, John Price Jones, a dapper pince-nezzed Harvardman, stepped from a reporter's job on the New York Sun into the 1917 Liberty Loan drive. John Price Jones works for Harvard, Columbia, Chicago and on many a noneducational project like Community Chests, emergency relief funds.
Keynote of professional fund-raising is organization. Before accepting an account the fund-raiser makes a systematic study of the institution's assets and needs. A preliminary report such as Tamblyn & Brown drew up for Yale may run to 700 pages. When the amount to be raised is agreed upon, the fund-raiser sets a maximum expense budget, including his fee, running to 5% or 6% of the total. If the fund-raiser exceeds his budget he pays the excess from his own pocket. The professional trade group, the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel, frowns on wildcat free-lance operators who drum up business on a contingent percentage fee or offer ironclad guarantees to raise specified sums. But fund-raisers usually get what they go out for. George Tamblyn figures that he has raised some 75% of the money he has promised.
Rule No. 1 in fund-raising is to set the goal exactly high enough. College presidents and trustees are apt to be unsanguine about the amount they can safely ask from their alumni. John Price Jones raised $13,931,780 for Harvard in 1920, a feat widely admired in the profession until Tamblyn & Brown promised and delivered Yale's record-breaking fund. In the opinion of fund-raisers, Harvard's Tercentenary ranks as a great lost opportunity. President James Bryant Conant, relying on a home-managed, low-pressure appeal, realized only $5,500,000 on that prime educational event.
Rule No. 2 is to draw up a sound prospect list. Alumni who have announced their intention to remember their schools in sizeable legacies are usually written off in advance. A fund-raiser like John Price Jones keeps some 50,000 names of super-givers always on tile, elaborately classified. When President-Emeritus Abbott Lawrence Lowell hired Mr.Tamblyn to raise $1,000,000 for Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, he specified that no appeal should be made to Harvard men as such. Equal to that emergency, Tamblyn raised most of the money by holding a banquet to which he invited 400 owners of large and well-gardened estates in Westchester and Long Island.