The Windmill and the Ask

Driving through the San Gorgonio Pass outside Palm Springs, you come over the rise and there they are: hundreds of wind turbines, blades turning in the gap between the mountains. It is a remarkable thing to see. But one thing struck me as I passed them on the freeway. The place of these wind turbines is clearly not random.

The turbine does not make the wind. It just has to sit in exactly the right spot to catch what is already blowing. A good ask works the same way. The donor’s motivation is already there. Your job is not to manufacture it. Your job is to position yourself to catch it at the moment it is moving.

Placement decides what effort can catch. You could build the most beautiful turbine in the world, but stand it in a dead-calm valley and you get nothing. An ask can be perfectly crafted and still return nothing if it is mistimed, or aimed at someone whose wind simply is not blowing that day.

And notice where they put these things. On ridgelines, in mountain passes, at the places where the wind is funneled and reliable. Those sites were chosen after years of patiently reading the land, measuring where the wind actually moves. For a development officer, that reading is the cultivation work. It is everything that happens long before you commit to the spot and make the ask.

So the question is not only “is this a good ask?” Or, “am I doing it right?” A better question is, “am I standing where the wind is?”

The relationship is the anemometer

Our field has a favorite sentence: “Fundraising is all about relationships.” I have said it myself, many times. The windmill made me want to say it more carefully.

Before anyone pours a turbine foundation, someone puts up a measuring tower with an anemometer (an-uh-MOM-ih-ter), a wind gauge, on top. It often sits there for a year or more, recording which way the wind blows, how hard, and when. The anemometer does not make a single breeze. It tells you where the breeze already is.

That is what a good relationship does for a development officer. The donor’s motivation comes from their own values, their history, their family, the things they have lived through. It was there before I met them. The visits, the calls, the coffee, the campus tour: those are my instruments. They tell me what this person cares about, how strongly, and whether the season is right.

So relationships matter enormously. But they matter as instrumentation, not as the engine. When we tell ourselves the relationship produced the gift, we take credit for the wind. And we start to believe that more lunches will make a calm valley blow.

There is one honest qualification. A relationship can do more than measure. Done well, it builds trust, and trust is part of what keeps a donor giving year after year. The relationship does not make the wind, but it can keep the turbine in good repair, so it is still turning when the wind comes back.

The car lot

The opposite of the windmill is the car lot. You know the scene. You step out of your car and a salesman is already walking toward you. He does not know why you came or whether you are ready. It does not matter to him. His method is to make wind by force: work everyone who walks onto the lot, and turn hesitation into a signature through pressure.

Sometimes it works. That is the uncomfortable part. Pressure does produce some sales, and it produces some gifts. But look at what it costs. The customer leaves feeling handled. Next time, he parks across the street, or buys online, or avoids that dealership for ten years.

Fundraising has its own car lots. The script that does not pause for an answer. The ask made on the first visit because the quarter is ending. The third phone call in a week. The gala table where the paddle raise is designed so no one can comfortably sit still. Each of these can move money. Each of them can also teach the donor to avoid us.

None of this means the windmill is passive. A turbine has a motor that swings its whole head to face the wind, and it tilts its blades to catch more of it. That is real force. But it is always applied in the direction the wind is already moving. A clear ask, a deadline, a well-timed reminder do the same work for a donor who meant to give and had not gotten around to it. The research bears this out: being asked, and being reminded, both raise giving. The same studies show where the cost lands. It falls on the people whose wind was not blowing, who give grudgingly, unsubscribe, or stop answering the door. So the line is not pressure versus no pressure. It is pressure that helps a donor act on what they already want, versus pressure that makes a gift they never meant to give.

The salesman is pure effort with no placement. The windmill is placement first, then effort. One is extraction: taking a gift the donor did not quite mean to give. The other is alignment: being in the right place when the donor’s own wind is moving, and giving it somewhere useful to go.