The Yellow Legal Pad
On the second Tuesday in November, at the small round oak table in the kitchen of a low-slung ranch on Elm Ridge Road in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a seventy-four-year-old widow named Ruthann Boekhoudt sits down with a mug of Constant Comment tea, a black felt-tip Bic Round Stic pen with a slightly chewed cap, and a yellow Ampad legal pad she bought at the Meijer on 28th Street in September of 2004.
The legal pad is not new. It is, in fact, the same legal pad — the same twenty-eighth pad in a slowly shrinking stack on the second shelf of the pantry — that she has been using since October of 2019. She uses two sheets a year. She keeps the pad beside a small blue tin of Danish butter cookies her sister brings her every Christmas. She only takes it down on this Tuesday in November, and on one other Tuesday in early May.
On the top line of the yellow sheet, in her careful schoolteacher's cursive, she writes the year. 2026. She underlines it once. On the second line, she writes the word Giving. She underlines that once too.
Then she writes, from memory, and without hesitation, eight names.
The eight names are her year.
The list is the whole game
The list is the whole game.
There is a chart on a slide deck in a conference room in Ann Arbor, made by a well-meaning development consultant in the spring of 2018, that says the average American major-gift donor considers thirty-one different appeals in a calendar year and gives to between two and four of them. The chart is not wrong. It is also, in the strictest sense, useless. Ruthann does not consider thirty-one appeals. Ruthann considers eight. The other twenty-three envelopes on the sideboard by the front door — the four-color brochures, the small return envelopes with pre-printed suggested amounts, the one bright red envelope from a large national nonprofit that always mails a keychain — are, before they are opened, already lost.
They were lost in October. They were lost in July. They were lost, mostly, in decisions made on the last two Tuesdays of the year before, which are the Tuesdays on which Ruthann drafts and then does not, in any material way, revise the list.
The list is not a shortlist. The list is the thing. The line at the bottom of the list, drawn with the felt-tip in a single quiet horizontal stroke, is the widest and most consequential moat in American fundraising. Nine institutions in Grand Rapids will, this November, mail Ruthann. Eight will make the list. One will not. The one that does not will, in April, receive a small type-written form thank-you from the annual-fund team explaining that the shop is sorry to have missed her this year and looking forward to reconnecting in FY27.
They were never going to reconnect in FY27. The list was, quietly and without malice, written without them.
How a name gets on the list
The eight names on Ruthann's list are, in the order she writes them:
St. Mark's — the parish where her husband Willem was buried in April of 2021 by a young rector named Anna who wrote a card in her own handwriting three months later, on plain cream paper, in an ordinary blue ballpoint, that said I have been thinking about you and Willem this week. He would have loved the June garden.
Blodgett Chaplaincy — the hospital chaplaincy that sent a woman named Margaret to sit with her the night Willem died, and who did not, in the four hours between three and seven in the morning, once mention a bequest.
Aquinas — Willem's college, class of 1971, where he tutored on Wednesdays for eleven years after retirement, and where a young alumni-relations associate named Dominic wrote her a note last September that said, simply, on the back of a football schedule, We miss him too.
Meals on Wheels of Western Michigan — the program whose driver, a retired postal worker named Frank, has brought Willem's ninety-two-year-old mother her Wednesday lunch since 2016 without ever once being introduced to Ruthann herself.
Kids' Food Basket — the program her granddaughter Ellie has volunteered at every Saturday morning since ninth grade, and about which Ellie once wrote a small essay Ruthann keeps folded in the top left drawer.
Grand Rapids Symphony — the one thing Ruthann buys for herself; the Friday-night subscription series she has had since 1998.
The Foster Closet in Kentwood — a small clothing pantry a woman at church told her about, gently, in March, and to which she has been sending fifty dollars a month, unrequested, since April.
Habitat for Humanity, Kent County — the house Willem helped build in 2013 in Wyoming Township for a young Ethiopian family named Bekele, whose youngest son Yonas wrote Willem a Christmas card every year until he died.
Nowhere on the list is the small regional nonprofit whose executive director called Ruthann on the phone on a Tuesday afternoon in October of 2023 and left, on her answering machine, a two-and-a-half-minute voicemail beginning Ruthann, we haven't been in touch in a while, but I wanted to catch up about a really exciting new capital campaign. Ruthann did not call back. The nonprofit's development director sent, in July of 2024, a follow-up letter, and, in November of 2024, a four-color brochure. Neither made the list. The nonprofit did not know it was auditioning. It had, in the plainest sense, missed the audition — which was Willem's funeral in April of 2021, at which the executive director had, gently and for wholly understandable reasons, not come.
The list, when Ruthann writes it on the second Tuesday in November, is not a ranking of loudness. It is a ranking of presence when it counted. The institutions on the list were, one way or another, in the room. The institutions not on the list were not. It is that plain, and it is that unforgiving, and it has almost nothing to do with the mailing that lands in the sideboard between the second week of October and the third week of December.
What is on the sideboard
The sideboard is where the appeals live from October to December.
The sideboard is a small maple piece Willem's father built in 1957, in a workshop behind a hardware store in Zeeland, Michigan. It has three drawers and a shallow shelf and a slightly wobbly runner on the top-left drawer that Willem meant to fix. Nobody opens the drawer. Nobody, in this house, has opened the drawer since April of 2021.
On the shallow shelf, from the first week of October to the third week of December, appeals accumulate. There are usually between twenty-eight and thirty-four of them by Thanksgiving. They come in glassine window envelopes and in cream-colored ivory envelopes and in one bright red envelope, every year without fail, from a large national nonprofit that includes a small metal keychain with the return address embossed on the fob. Ruthann does not open the red envelope. She does not open the keychain envelope. She does not, if she is being honest with you on a Tuesday afternoon in July when the pressure is off, open most of the envelopes.
She opens the ones with a return address she recognizes. She opens the ones with her own name handwritten on the envelope. She opens, always, the small square envelope from the parish that has her name typed on it but has, in the corner, the small handwritten note — from Anna in blue ballpoint.
The other envelopes stack, in a small neat pile, and then — a week after the list has been finalized, a week after the eight checks have been written on the porch or at the kitchen table with the felt-tip and the yellow pad — move, in a single motion, to the recycle bin beside the back door.
That is, on eighty-seven percent of American major-gift appeals to seventy-four-year-old widows in Grand Rapids in a given November, the actual physical fate of your envelope.
You did not lose in December. You lost in April of 2021.
The Tuesday nobody mails on
The mistake almost every shop makes is to time its cultivation to the ask.
The ask arrives, in most files, in the last quarter of the calendar year, when the list has already been drafted. The ask arrives on schedules built around the fiscal-year giving pyramid on the wall of the development office, and around the direct-response consultant's mail-drop calendar, and around the CEO's newsletter cadence. It arrives, in short, on your calendar. It does not arrive on Ruthann's.
Ruthann's calendar has two Tuesdays on it. One is the second Tuesday in November, when the list is drafted. The other is a much smaller Tuesday, in early May, when the list is quietly revised for spring — usually a single addition, occasionally a subtraction. The Tuesdays that matter for a shop trying to be on the list are the ones in between.
The third Tuesday of August is a Tuesday nobody in fundraising mails on. The second Tuesday of March is a Tuesday nobody mails on. The Wednesday after Easter is a Wednesday nobody visits on. These are the days on which a card in your own hand, on plain cream paper, addressed to Ruthann by her first name, saying nothing in particular except that you have been thinking of her, will arrive in a mailbox that is otherwise empty except for a Con-Ed bill and a small circular from the pharmacy.
That is the entire audition. The audition is not the pitch deck. The audition is not the case for support. The audition is not the wine reception in September. The audition is one small unhurried undramatic sentence, in your own ink, on a Tuesday nobody else remembers, that says we are still here, and we still remember him.
Institutions that pass the audition make the list. Institutions that do not, no matter what they mail in November, do not.
A small honest note about Rōmy
Rōmy does not put you on the list.
The list is put together on a yellow legal pad by a woman who has decided, over the course of forty years and one hard April, which institutions have been present in her life. That decision is not, in any pretendable sense, one a piece of software gets to make. It is made by the rector who wrote in her own hand three months after the funeral. It is made by the chaplain who sat quietly through the small hours. It is made by the college that wrote we miss him too on the back of a football schedule. It is made by the driver who brings the Wednesday lunch.
What Rōmy can do — quietly, on a Thursday morning in September, before any of this — is put in front of a director of development the small careful set of donors in her file for whom the actual list-writing Tuesdays are coming up. Widows in the third year after a spouse's death. Long-tenured congregants at parishes whose priest has changed. Grandmothers whose grandchildren volunteer at a program the file does not know about. First-generation Americans whose parents' names still show up on the small memorial-gift line of a 1997 dinner program in the institution's own basement.
The list Rōmy hands the director is not a ranking. It is a small handful of names — eight or ten, on the average shop in the average season — with, next to each name, one quiet true sentence that identifies the small moment of presence the institution has, in the honest way, already earned. The presence is not something the software invents. It is something the software finds, patiently, in the newsletter Willem was in a photograph in in 1994, in the small obituary in the alumni magazine, in the parish's own printed history in the 1979 dedication of the parish hall.
The point is not to win the mailing. The mailing has already been decided. The point is to be in the room the year before — on a Wednesday, with no ask, with a card in your own handwriting — on the small careful set of occasions when your presence can still be earned.
A small assignment, with love ♡
This week, before the summer ends, do one small thing.
Open the report your CRM does not run by default. Donors over sixty-five who lost a spouse between eighteen and forty months ago. Whose gift last December was equal to or larger than the gift the December before. Whose last recorded personal contact with anyone at your institution was a form-letter thank-you in fiscal year 2023.
Pull the list. It will be shorter than you think. Ten names, maybe twelve.
Now write ten short notes, in your own hand, on plain cream paper, addressed to the person by her first name. Not appeals. Not solicitations. Ten small warm unhurried sentences that say something true — that you remember her husband; that your rector, your executive director, your program director asked after her family last Thursday; that the June garden looked especially fine this year; that you have been thinking of her.
Put them in the mail on the third Tuesday of August, which is a Tuesday nobody in fundraising ever mails on and which is, for exactly that reason, the Tuesday your card will be the only thing in the box.
Somewhere in Grand Rapids, in early November, a widow will sit down at a small round oak table with a mug of Constant Comment and a felt-tip Bic Round Stic and a yellow Ampad pad she has been keeping since 2019.
She will write the year. She will underline it. She will write Giving. She will underline it.
She will write, from memory, the names.
Be one of them. ♡