When Is Your Next Road Trip?

When I played sports in high school, there were nothing like home games. The crowd loved you, and you were used to the schedule and facilities. The atmosphere was lovely, and you could sleep in your own bed after every game.

When you played games on the road, many unfavorable and unpredictable variables came into play. Many times you had to spend extra hours on the road on a bus trying to find foreign fields. The visitor locker rooms were always small and dirty. The night games lasted forever, and the weather conditions always seemed less than stellar. I didn't enjoy being booed all of the time, especially when my football team was supposed to win. As weird as it sounds, fans threw lettuce at us when I played baseball in a country town. In West Virginia, it should have been coal.

Let's transition to the field of philanthropy. For most of us it is all about road trips. How many prospects are dying to travel to your office, sit down and write your organization a big, fat check? I can remember listening to a prospect in Nebraska whom I was waiting to meet make a three-hour presentation on the benefits of dirt. I vividly remember spending a workweek in Hawaii that I enjoyed 45 minutes of. When living in Miami during the Miami Vice era, I would make countless trips to hotels and beaches while sweating in my work suit trying to visit prospects. Try spending the night in a cramped $400-a-night New York City room when your flight was cancelled at 2 a.m. One time, I was in Denver trying to get back to Indianapolis from a prospect visit when I was snowed in at the old Denver airport for three days. That event took place years ago, when we didn't have the Internet to keep us entertained.