Asking: A 50-Minute Guide to Everything Board Members, Volunteers, and Staff Must Know to Secure the Gift

It ranks right up there with public speaking. Nearly all of us fear it. And yet it’s critical to our success. Asking for money. It makes even the stout-hearted quiver.

But now comes a book, Asking: A 59-Minute Guide to Everything Board Members, Staff and Volunteers Must Know to Secure the Gift. And short of a medical elixir, it’s the next best thing for emboldening you, your board members and volunteers to ask with skill, finesse … and powerful results.

Jerold Panas, who as a staff person, board member and volunteer has secured gifts ranging from $50 to $50 million, understands the art of asking perhaps better than anyone in America.

He has harnessed all of his knowledge and experience and produced what many are already calling a landmark book.

What Asking convincingly shows — and one reason staff will applaud the book and board members will devour it — is that it doesn’t take stellar communication skills to be an effective asker. Nearly everyone, regardless of their persuasive ability, can become an effective fundraiser if they follow Jerold Panas’ step-by-step guidelines.

In Born to Raise, the author wrote: "Someone once told me that my career would have five stages: 1) Who is Jerry Panas? 2) Get me Jerry Panas, 3) We need someone like Jerry Panas, 4) What we need is a young Jerry Panas, and 5) Who is Jerry Panas?"

Jerry believes he’s somewhere between stages two and three. "But," he says, "my friends indicate I’m somewhere in stage four, quickly approaching stage five!"

Hailed in Newsweek as "the Robert Schuller of fundraising," Jerry is the author of seven books, many of them classics in the field. He’s also a popular columnist for Contributions magazine and a familiar and favorite speaker at conferences and workshops throughout the nation.

A senior officer of one of America’s premier fundraising firms, Jerry lives with his wife, Felicity, in a 1710 Farmhouse in northwest Connecticut.