Dr. Reynold Levy’s Yours for the Asking: An Indispensable Guide to Fundraising and Management, is simply one of the most engaging and informative soup-to-nuts books on fundraising available in print. Currently President of New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Levy is also a very experienced philanthropy leader. His career has spanned senior roles at foundations and non-profits from the International Rescue Committee and the AT&T Foundation to New York City’s 92^nd Street Y. In his well-paced, 172-page third book, Levy crams in a lifetime’s worth of personal anecdotes, observations, and humor to keep the reader turning to the next page for more of his insight and wit.

Published just before the global economic crisis in late 2008, Levy’s book is definitely geared to development personnel trying to cultivate and solicit donors. However, I feel that anyone in development can learn a good deal from this book about how to engage donors, including the importance of better understanding what drives their philanthropic interests, in an effort to engage them in your cause. “Two-thirds of all [U.S.] households contributed funds to nonprofit institutions” in 2007, Levy says, highlighting the fact that the number of potential donors to any particular cause is huge. It’s more about how to properly steer donors to one’s organization and motivate them to continue to support its initiatives. Levy’s goal in writing this book is to get at the root of why “the act of asking seems so universally disliked, misunderstood, and disdained. It is even more perplexing to discover that there is no must-read, must-own guide to raising funds, given the hundreds of thousands of Americans who struggle to solicit donations every day.”  I found that last observation a little perplexing myself, as Penelope Burk, who has spoken at NEDRA conferences in the past, predated Levy by five years with her Donor-Centered Fundraising.

That oversight, and Levy’s prediction that the economic crisis hitting while he was writing Yours for the Asking would be “short and shallow,” are notable missteps in a publication that otherwise features a lot of great strides towards enriching one’s understanding about the field of development.

In his first chapter, Levy makes a passionate appeal to “America’s charitable potential.”  He considers the disparity between the top states in terms of aggregate wealth (California and New York, whose rate of per capita giving ranks them 21^st and 23^rd in the U.S.) measured against the top states in terms of per capita giving (Utah and Oklahoma). “Generosity is unevenly distributed geographically,” he observes. “Expanding where generosity lives is a terrific challenge for fundraisers and a tonic for some of the most serious problems that ail the nation and the planet.”  His first chapter is chock-full of interesting anecdotes and applicable lessons from his tenure at several international, national, and regional non-profits.

Chapters two through five, comprising the bulk of Yours for the Asking, offer a deep dive into specific on-the-road development ideas. These sections focus on individual donor solicitation, encouraging trustees and directors to donate more to the causes in which they are involved, the characteristics of an excellent development officer, and raising funds from an ever-increasing number of foundations, which often have labyrinthine policies to adhere to. I found the following rallying cry from Levy inspiring. “The profound obligation to convince those with the wherewithal to give more of themselves to institutions and causes larger than themselves falls to you,” he asserts. “That is not a burden. It is a pleasure. That is not a job. It is a calling.”

One nugget from Levy’s chapter on individual donor solicitation really resonated with my experience. I imagine it will sound familiar to many others in development research as well. “Listening carefully to donors,” he says, “allows you to bring back valuable observations to the line staff of your agency and assist in their quest for continuous improvement.”  For anyone who has ever hoped, encouraged, and begged "road warriors" for more details in their contact reports so that researchers have additional information on a prospect, surely this sentence strikes a chord.

Another section that I found particularly interesting and perhaps more applicable to development researchers focuses on the often-overlooked small, local and regional businesses near one’s institution as an under-identified source of funding. Dr. Levy encourages development shops to zero in on this largely untapped potential donor by appealing to civic pride and the mutually beneficial partnership of having a business and a non-profit deepen their involvement in the community in which they both operate. Locating “the intersection between the interests of business and the needs of your nonprofit” is essential in order to “easily tap corporate resources.”

Levy offers answers to “tough questions” in chapter six, insightful life lessons to be a successful fundraiser in chapter seven, and a breezy few pages of fundraising humor in chapter eight. In the lengthy appendices, he also offers several examples of fundraising successes from his long career in philanthropy. All of those chapters were interesting, but I personally found chapter nine (about the future of fundraising in an era of globalization) to be the most directly relatable chapter to my day-to-day responsibilities and thinking. He uses contemporary examples such as the rise of texting-to-give and an ever-expanding set of resources to identify international donors as encouraging signs for the future of development. “The nation’s army of professional and volunteer solicitors,” Levy powerfully persuades, “are fully capable of identifying enhanced and new sources of giving and of raising funds in unprecedented sums.”

Throughout this book, one fact is clear: Levy is deeply committed to raising the visibility and capability of America’s philanthropic “third sector” on a par with the business and government sectors. He unflinchingly believes that the hundreds of non-profits, and the thousands of development staff members working in the third sector, can be a stronger force for good throughout our society. That inspiring vision, and Reynold Levy's ideas about how we can make that vision a reality, were well worth my time in reading Yours for the Asking and seeing how I can apply its lessons to my involvement in the world of philanthropy.