Unjust Rewards
(Added 5/10/2011)
I know a development director who ingratiated himself with an elderly donor. When the donor died, she left the development director, personally, some hundreds of thousands of dollars in her will. I don't like that part at all, but I like even less that it seems that he took extra care to make sure he would get something from her estate. In fact, I think she told him that she would leave the money and that's why he took such good care of her - which, to me, is an injustice. And, on top of that, her prior will called for three charities to receive bequests; while the bequests were not canceled, the charities were left with a lot less than they would have been. I work at one of those charities and feel good work will now not be done because of someone's greed. There's something really wrong here.
I feel your pain. When we do the work to cultivate a prospect and are told that he or she intends to leave a bequest, it feels almost as if someone is stealing something that we've earned. My first question is: Would you feel the same way if you knew the donor decided to reduce your bequest so that another charity would benefit? While you might be upset, I doubt you would feel the same level of injustice. You might feel you could have cultivated the person better or that she may have changed her charitable passions, but I sense that what you feel now would be different. The anger may stem, therefore, from knowing that an individual - not a charity edged his way into her life to such a degree that she wanted to do something nice for him.
This happens all the time welcome to the world of recently deceased rich people. The law is clear that people can leave their assets to whomever or whatever they want. This is not just a nod to a law to avoid an ethical question - the law is a function of a solid ethic: what is ours (don't think about the estate tax for this situation) can be directed wherever we wish, during life and at death. There's nothing wrong with that. And that a fundraiser benefited from an individual's gift is, quite frankly, none of your business. (Much discussion has taken place on this point, and most people contend they wouldn't agree with me on this.) It is the business of the person and, to some extent, the charity, however, and the charity might rightly have a policy that discourages accepting estate gifts from donors. (But even there, if the recipient took it to court he or she would probably be told the gift is acceptable.) The ethic you're looking for, therefore, is that which resides within the individual. But who are you to tell someone else what an acceptable gift is? What if someone whom you knew before she was a donor, became a donor, died, and then left you money in her will? Would that be different? Either way, the person is making up her own mind. The key is that the decedent has made a decision that is not only lawful, but also ethical. Or is allowing someone to make up his or her own mind a problem?
And on the matter of ingratiating himself to the donor, I'd be careful before throwing stones. Fundraisers, and in particular planned giving officers, are famous for doing nice things behavior that is intended to gain favor for prospects and donors. It wouldn't take much for an outside observer to conclude that such behavior is the same as ingratiating. When we breezily throw around the phrase 'friend raising' as one prism through which to understand what good fundraising is, we might take care to predict the consequences of a job well done.
Of course, if the person in question didn't make up her own mind, but was unduly persuaded, or was non compos mentis, we have a whole different kettle of fish. A person taking advantage of that would be unethical and would be, I believe, in most states, acting unlawfully.