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.
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F. Duke Haddad, EdD, CFRE, is currently associate director of development, director of capital campaigns and director of corporate development for The Salvation Army Indiana Division in Indianapolis, Indiana. In addition, he is also president of Duke Haddad and Associates, LLC, and freelance instructor for Nonprofit Web Advisor.
He has been a contributing author to NonProfit PRO for the past 13 years.
He received his doctorate degree from West Virginia University with an emphasis on education administration, master’s degree from Marshall University with an emphasis in public administration and a bachelor’s degree from West Virginia University in business administration, with an emphasis in marketing/management. He has also done post graduate work at the University of Louisville.