Meet Our Advisors: Kurt Aschermann
Kurt Aschermann has years of marketing and resource development experience. He has worked with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America and March of Dimes, and has been a consultant for a variety of for-profit and nonprofit organizations. He currently is president of the Boston-based Foundation for Charity Partners, which provides fundraising solutions to charities.
Kurt also is a member of our Editorial Advisory Board. To learn more about him, check out this feature that looks at his background, experience and fundraising advice.
Hometown: Born in Ossining, N.Y., lives in Falls Church, Va.
Education: Bachelor’s degree in physical education from Springfield College, Springfield, Mass.
Professional background: “Teaching, politics/government, March of Dimes, 16 years with Boys & Girls Clubs of America.”
Heroes/role models: Jimmy Carter; Nelson Mandela; Henry David Thoreau; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Dietrich Bonhoeffer [the German pastor who participated in the German Resistance against Nazism]; and [American journalist, anarchist, social activist and co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement] Dorothy Day.
Favorite quote: “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” — Henry David Thoreau
Best advice you ever received: “Dr. Harvey Schiller was president of [TBS] Sports and a member of the National Board of BGCA. He told me, ‘Never let the for-profit bastards think they are better than you.’ I took that to heart and was successful, I think, because I dealt with them on the same level.”
Charity Partners is not a nonprofit, but it works with nonprofits. How does that work? “We invite customers of products to purchase the products, pay a premium (which they would do anyway, like for concert tickets), and donate the premium to charity. [It] also will work for travel, consumer products, fashion, etc.”
How do you see social-networking working for nonprofit organizations and their fundraising efforts? “‘It’s the Web stupid,’ is what I say when I train. Nonprofits that don’t understand the technological age we live in are doomed. Those that don’t see how social-networking is the communication tool for young people are doomed times two.”
