Sweet (elite) charity.

• Author: Thompson, Deanna
• Position: David Winslow and Associates

SWEET (ELITE) CHARITY

This Winston-Salem fund-raiser plays for hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate contributions. David Winslow is looking for a fat donation.

One Friday morning, Winslow and Peggy Haigler walk into the office of Ernest Mario, one of the highest-ranking executives in the international pharmaceutical industry. Mario is chief executive of the British pharmaceutical company Glaxo Holdings PLC and chairman of its Research Triangle Park-based American subsidiary.

Haigler is helping Winslow raise $2 million to renovate the Executive Mansion, where the governor's family lives in Raleigh. The three chat for a few minutes about the campaign and a private dinner held the night before for potential donors, a "cultivation event" one of Mario's executives attended.

It's Mario who brings up the bottom line. He turns to Haigler. "What do you want?" he asks. "One hundred thousand dollars," she replies. He agrees to the amount.

"It was that simple," Haigler says later.

Deceptively so, says Winslow, who spends months researching and courting potential donors before finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of asking for money. "If you don't have the right person asking the right person in the right way at the right time for the right amount, you're going to fail," he says.

A lot of Winslow's business is figuring out who should do the asking. David Winslow & Associates in Winston-Salem is one of 44 companies licensed by the state to make money by telling others how to raise it. All but 10 of those companies have headquarters out of state. For $100 and an ounce of paperwork, just about anybody can get a license in North Carolina as a fund-raising counsel.

But not just anybody can attract the clients that Winslow does. He specializes in campaigns to raise money for the arts, historic preservation and the environment, which drew roughly 6.5 percent of the $104 billion Americans gave to philanthropy in 1988. Winslow moves in the world of the rich and the foundations they support, and to be successful he has to know as much about social circles as he does about the causes he promotes.

"People don't give money to people like me," he says. But they do give money to their social peers--people like Haigler, wife of the president of Burroughs Wellcome Co. in Research Triangle Park and a friend of the man who forked over $100,000 on behalf of Glaxo.

Winslow's three-person staff isn't big enough to take on the huge projects that large national companies undertake, such as the $200 million campaign that Pittsburgh-based Ketchum Inc., a fund-raising counsel that has its Southeastern headquarters in Charlotte, is doing for North Carolina State University. Instead, he draws on his ties to the arts community and his contacts as a native North Carolinian to give him an edge on smaller campaigns, such as the Executive Mansion drive.

Winslow, 34, is a mix of entrepreneur and artist. He grew up in Greensboro, one of seven children of a chemical engineer and an executive secretary. He tossed newspapers onto people's doorsteps for extra cash as a youngster, about the same time he was taking a seat, at 14, as the youngest member of the Greensboro Symphony.

A child prodigy who started playing the violin at age 10, he almost turned down his first job in fund raising. "I held fund raising in disdain," he...