The love of mankind is the heart of philanthropy. It’s because of volunteers – people like you – that organizations are able to provide services, purchase equipment, and build facilities. It couldn’t be done without you.

Jerold Panas’s Asking is the best thing for emboldening you, your board members and volunteers, to ask with skill, finesse, and powerful results.

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 sales skills to be an effective asker. Nearly everyone, regardless of their persuasive ability, can become a highly effective fundraiser if they follow a few step-by-step guidelines.

“Jerold Panas has demonstrated again that he is truly the poet laureate of philanthropy.”
­-Kenneth Roberts, President, The Frist Foundation

“May become the Bible of fundraising. Another masterpiece by the master of modern philanthropy.”
-George Miller, President and CEO, United Methodist Higher Education Foundation

“I’ve known for years Jerry Panas knew everything about fundraising. But how does he know so much about me? In ASKING, he tells my story from ‘jitters to joy’. Your confidence grows from page to page.”
-Edmund Toomey, President & CEO, The New England Aquarium

“ASKING is a quick read with practical tools, role plays, scripts, and examples that will ensure volunteers are successful when they put on their fundraising hats.”
­-M. Cass Wheeler, CEO American Heart Association

“ASKING is the best of the breed. I can testify from first hand experience that if you ask the Panas Way, you shall receive.”
-Dr. Hugh B. Price, President, National Urban League

The book is full of gems. No better blueprint for those of us embarking on the adventure of asking.”
-Jerold Katz, Head, The Park School

ASKING Contents

1. The Joy of Asking!

2. Thanks for Being a Friend

3. You’re Never a Loser Until You Quit Trying

4. You Won’t Get Milk from a Cow by Sending a Letter

5. Enthusiasm is Contagious.  Start an Epidemic

6. Enlightened Givers Feel the Rapture of Being Alive

7. It’s Easier to Get the Gift than the Visit

8. Successful People Do What Others Never Get Around to

9. The Secrets of Success Don’t work Unless you Do

10. No One Ever Listened Himself out of a Gift

11. Donors Give to the Magic of an Idea

12. The Archer Strikes the Target, Partly by Pulling, Partly by Letting Go