Nicole Reese SBA 3 Interview With Beth Savage

8/14/2019 Nicole Reese SBA 3 Interview With Beth Savage

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When I asked Beth Savage, the Vice President of Development at KCTS 9, to sum up her

thoughts on ethics and fundraising, she told me, “Simple. The integrity of your entire

organization can be defined by two things: the ethics in your fundraising strategy, and whether or

not you are ethical about the way you use your donor’s money.” She paused, after that sentence,

to make sure I was really listening and not just writing down her words, and then reiterated her

point, “Above all, Cole, you must be honest and transparent with your donors about how you use

their money. They don't have to give us a dime. We have earned their trust, and that is why they

give.”

Beth Savage became the VP of Development at Seattle’s public television station 5 years

ago. Previous to this, she had been working at the same position at the St Louis PBS station.

When asked about how she came to be in that position, and what professional advice she had for

me, Beth told me, “I don’t know if you create your own luck, or if you just get lucky. I have been

damn lucky in my career, but you have to be open to it. You have to see opportunities, and make

them happen.”

Beth was offered her first fundraising job right out of law school. She had gotten her start

my volunteering on a gubernatorial campaign in Missouri for the Democratic underdog. “I would

literally put up yard signs until my hands were bloody. I had a very bad staple gun and the little

wooden posts they gave me were just covered in splinters, it was awful! But, we got lucky and

the opponent was indicted, and then the Govern asked me 'do you want to practice law, or do you

want to come fundraise for me, because even when you are in office, you fundraise all year long.'

I feel really lucky because my whole career kind of rolled out right there.” From working as a

political fundraiser, Beth says that she learned the fundamentals of fundraising.



After working for the Governor, Beth began to working for Planned Parenthood, and

finally found herself as the VP of Development at KETC in St. Louis. When I asked what

brought her all the way out to Seattle from St. Louis, she told me it was because KCTS 9 is more

sophisticated in the way it handles its fundraising. Our direct mail and telemarketing campaigns

are consistently some of the most effective in the nation; she wanted to see what made us so

successful, and help us to grow. Furthermore, she said that she always had great admiration for

the programs that are developed out of KCTS 9, and she wanted to be a part of it.

Throughout the course of our interview, Beth and I kept circling back to theme of ethics

in fundraising, why they are so important, and why nonprofits are held to a higher standard. "Our

donors are really the owners of our organization. [PBS is] the most trusted organization in

America for 9 years now, but you can ruin that trust in a minute... Losing that for us would be

such a great disservice to the community we work in, because we are an institution of informal

education." Beth told me that she feels finance is one of the largest areas in which nonprofits can

stand to improve their ethics.

Nonprofits are a given a very special place in the U.S. tax code, because of the good that

they do within their community (Grobman, 2011). Quite often, large funders give money to an

organization with the stipulation that the money can only be used on specific sections of the

organization's budget (Brinckerhoff, 2009). What Beth really emphasized during our

conversation was the importance of managing the smaller, individual contributions. "If someone

gives you $100, and you spend $60 of that on your bonus instead of programming, you are not

going to be able to justify that, and it will hurt your organization." I asked her why we should we

expect more of the leadership in the third sector, when we read stories of Sallie Mae's CEO

getting a new private golf course just as student loan rates were about to double (Lindstrom,



2010)? According to Ms. Savage, it is because people not only have to trust you, but they have to

believe in you enough to get up and write you a check. She feels that where as the nonprofit

sector has come a very long way in terms of ethics and accountability, there are some

organizations that have done such irreparable damage to the sector, that it will never fully

recover. People, to an extent, will always doubt your intentions, even when you operate with

transparency. It is because of this hesitation that our leaders must always be operating with the

highest ethical practices.

Beth told me, that of all the nonprofits she has worked for, she feels that PBS is always

under the most scrutiny from their donors. Part of that comes with being such a well-known

educational institution. "We say that we operate somewhere between education and

entertainment, but when KETC in St. Louis put a picture of the globe on the public affairs

section of their website, it took 20 minutes for a donor to call the main switchboard and let us

know the globe was spinning the wrong way. It took 16 seasons of The Daily Show before Neil

deGrasse Tyson finally pointed out the same thing to Jon Stewart about the globe in his opening

credits, and they still haven't changed it! Our donors don't only keep us on our toes about how we

spend their money. They hold us to the highest ethical standard in everything from education, to

the grammar in our press releases, because they know better than we do what we mean to our

community. It keeps us honest too, because you do not want to disappoint. I feel blessed to be

with an organization that is so loved."

References

Brinckerhoff, P. (2009). Mission Based Management. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.



Grobman, G. (2011). An Introduction to the Nonprofit Sector. Harrisburg: White Hat

Communications.

Lindstrom, C. (2010, 03 10). In the Public Interest: Sallie Mae, That's Just Not Right. The

Huffington Post .

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Nicole Reese SBA 3 Interview With Beth Savage