by Shari Missman

Since Whitney Jones started helping people and corporations raise money over 18 years ago, more than $200 Million has originated from capital campaigns. The company has worked with over 200 clients so far and each one hs been challenging in its own way. Jones, who started Whitney Jones, Inc. (WJI) in Winston-Salem in 1981, says business has become invredibly busy in terms of nonprofit organizations raising charitable dollars.

"We have been in business now long enough and have established ourselves solidly enough where we are doing more capital campaigns in North Carolina than anyone else," notes Jones. "Each campaign leads to another campaign and so on." Still the only firm in NOrth Carolina to belong to the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel (membership by invitation only), WJI is constantly being checked internally to improve systems and become more efficient.

"We are constantly assessing the way we work," says Jones. " We just completed a survey of our clients that we did in conjunction with John Redmond, kirector of the Center for Applied Research at the Bryan School of Business at UNCG. He did a series of client interviews and made some recommendations so we will continue to improve the way we deliver service. One area we are moving into is the area of technology. We are investing in a whole new computer system right now and we have added a staff member who spends more time with our clients helping them with technology questions. That is one way the nonprofit world is moving in terms of fundraising."

Jones Credits the company's success to both an efficient staff and to repeat customers. "For example" explains Jones "we aredoing a campaign for old salem and this is the third

campaign we have done for them. But this one has a $25 million goal wheras the last one had a $5 million goal. So, that is indiciative of another phenomenon - the goal sizes are increasing significantly. It is more difficult for the organizations to do what they are doing for the same reason any service business faces challenges. The client wants more personalized service but wants to pay the same or less than they were paying several years ago. And they want quicker results."The staff Jones currently has is highly experienced with an average tenure of between five and 12 years. He points out when he finds good employees, they do not usually have fund raising experience. Rather, it is their people skills that are most important in achieving the goals of the company.

Ironically, in the business of fundraising, the better you are, the better you have to become. Jones explains, "When the company analysis interviews were being done with our clients by the UNCG conultant, one of the things the interviewer said to us was that since we have been doing this for so long and so successfully, in the view of many of the people he was interviewing, simply to have us working on the project added value to the project and made it more likely that it would succeed."

"That has raised an interesting challange for us says Jones. "Now that we have achieved a reputation of integrity, the challenge is to hang on to that on a daily basis in a world in which what we are doing is highly compettitive and there is a great level of unpredictiblity involved. It is not luck. It is constantly on a daily basis applying pressure on ourselves to perform - to do a better job. The purpose of bringing someone in to asses wher we are was not necessarily to be more profitable or to do more work or to be more successful. The real goal of what we have been doing is to try and do what we are already doing better."

Currently WJI's breakdown is 40 percent individual, 20 percent corporate giving, 20 percent foundations and 20 percent government.

Just a few of WJI's 20 current clients include: Old Salem, YMCA of Greater Winston-Salem, the Salvation Army, Reynolds Auditorium, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Family and Children's Service, and Davidson Community College Foundation.

WJI has changed much of what they were doing over the past few years. Their concentration is more from a consulting standpoint and less basic logistics work. They are aggresively pursuing expanding the service of helping nonprofit organizations develop and maintain websites. Says Jones, "We are not doing the same thing as we were 10 years ago. In a way, we are doing more consulting and less hands on work."

Jones considers his company a full-service organiztion which delivers a wide variety of support services in order for a campaign to work from beginning to end. "The most exciting part of a campaign is when you reveive a donation much larger than what you were expecting," he says. "Seeing that generosity gives us the best feeling."

There are three ingredients in Jones' recipe for success: vision, perserverance and selflessness. He says, "you have to have a vision that is larger than any task you are trying to accomplish. In our case it is to make communities better places to live. We are not here to raise money, we are here to make this place a better place to live. And that is motivating to us and to the people we work with. As for perserverance, it is one thing to learn how to do somthing and another thing to stick to it over a long period of time until you succeed. Success does not come quickly. This is very important. You really have to hang in there over the long haul. Finally, there needs to be a certain amount of selflessness. If you are trying to accomplish everything for yoruself there is only so much you can do and you are not going to intrest other people. To whatever degree you can become selfless, other pople will gather around you."

Jones says he would not change athing about how he built his company over the past 18 years. Although it is difficult to sto somtimes and reflect on what they are doing due to the tremendous workload, Jones says everyone in the company take joy in the challenges that they face. "Just giving to others," says Jones,"is what drives everything we are doing".