Started in marketing - drifted toward engagement

Someone posed a question to me: What do you know now that you wish you'd known then?

(In truth, I bristled at this. I like to be the one posing the questions!)

But it boils down to this. At the start of my career, I was involved in a one-to-many gig. It was public relations, outreach, marketing. Whatever you call what I did back then, it was all about getting the word out to as many people as possible. Not a bad thing; just presumptuous. It presumes the mass audience gives a damn about what I'm talking about. These days we'd refer to this approach as "push marketing."

Over the years, I discovered a more effective way. Not one-to-many. No. One-to-one or one-to-few is ever-so-much-more effective in the end, especially when the "one" or "few" you relate to are known to care about the cause I'm representing.

Instead of me telling you my story, and me hoping you will do what I want you to do, I get to know you. Relate to you. Become involved with you. Call it what you want. I personally like the term engagement, mainly because I like the dating-to-marriage metaphor that it evokes.

When someone is engaged to you (with you), your beloved doesn't walk into the room and hand you a four-color brochure listing his good qualities. He doesn't force feed you his list of projects he's implementing. He doesn't spend his time droning on and on about his great past accomplishments. While you know quite a bit about his past, it's not because he told you his life-story right off the top, or in one sitting.

No. You got engaged to (engaged with) the other person because you came to figure out that you care about the same stuff. You care about each other: he about you, and you about him. If I were to eavesdrop, I'd hear you sharing with each other your hopes and dreams, and joint plans for the future. Together, you would craft the terms of your relationship, your promises to each other, your intentions for spending a long time together, supporting each other, for better or worse. That's much more along the lines of how we should be "engaged" with a donor. Shifting this mindset entirely changes the conversation.

So, what I know now that I wish I knew then is: It's all about the relationship, a two-way relationship. If the relationship is founded on me always getting you to do what I want you to do, then it's headed for, uh, well, a messy divorce.

But if I engage you as one who cares passionately about a shared cause, you will do whatever you can. It's really that simple.