Steven McCormick: Danger of Chasing the Money

Especially with the emergence of this new generation of philanthropists who have a very strong grounding in entrepreneurially driven enterprises where they've been inordinately successful, generated a great deal of wealth, frankly, figure they kind of know how to do almost anything and see themselves as drivers of change. Good thing. But also needed to help nonprofits be more sophisticated. And I'll tell you, having worked again for a nonprofit organization, the temptation to change what you're focused on in order to get that money is too great. It's overpowering. So, as I said, every year I worried about raising enough money for the Nature Conservancy. We had a strategy driven towards our mission. We thought it was well conceived. We would sell that. And often I would encounter very wealthy people who would say, well, that that's interesting. That's not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in this other thing that, you know, was close enough. You know, I was just thinking about that myself. I think that's a really good idea. We're ready to go do that. And I will confess that more than once, I was seduced into getting a big contribution, not thinking through the implications, and actually ending up taking on more of a fundraising burden. There was one time when we were working with Caterpillar Corporation, and they had a strong interest in watershed management. We didn't have a lot of experience in watershed management. We had bought land on river corridors. But watershed management is a much more complex undertaking, having to understand users of water and issues like contamination of water, water rights. But Caterpillar was really interested in that. And they said, well, they'd be willing to put up $15 million. What did I hear? $15 million. So I said, yeah, you know, we were. That's where we're headed as watershed management. We're going to take all these properties that we bought. We're going to figure out, you know, work in the larger watershed. And we got into it and realized this is at least a $50 million undertaking. This was on the Upper Mississippi River. This is not a small river. And, you know, ended up kind of slogging through, but not really living up to what Caterpillar wanted from us. So philanthropists, as entrepreneurs need to be very thoughtful about the pull that they have on organizations and how they can very profoundly disorient or distract organizations from what they say is their mission.