ART : Newport Museum Primes Money Pump

In political fund raising, they call it EMILY money. It’s an acronym: Early Money Is Like Yeast. The idea is that a few big donations at the start of a campaign are essential building blocks because they inspire other donors’ confidence in a candidate’s drawing power.

In arts fund raising, they also want that EMILY, a quest that explains the quiet--even secretive--presence these days of Charles P. Ries in an office at the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

Ries is a fund-raising consultant with the Manhattan-based Oram Group Inc. He’s after the big, early money in the museum’s campaign to build a new $20-million museum on 10 1/2 acres in Corona del Mar.

He has been courting cultural philanthropists on the museum’s behalf since the beginning of the year, according to Henry Goldstein, the Oram Group’s president. Ries declined to be interviewed, and Goldstein said he also doesn’t want to talk about the museum’s campaign in detail--just yet. Why the zippered lips?

“Talking hurts our relationships with donors,” Goldstein said from New York. “There are large donors out there of alleged sophistication who think that this whole process happens magically, and they don’t like the idea that there are experts out there who are hired to come in and help.

“They want to think it all happened because people in the community believed fervently and worked so hard and somebody happened to ask them for some money.”

Goldstein added, though, that the time will come when he will want to crack this protective shell of silence. The campaign, he said, will follow a typical pattern: He will eagerly pursue press coverage of all the hoopla expected to surround its more public phases, and he will try to place news stories about large gifts, to generate publicity as a sort of reward for donors and a lure to new ones.

That’s just what happened during the Orange County Performing Arts Center’s capital campaign.

Meanwhile, Goldstein said, “at this point, (the) campaign is targeted very specifically.” Fund-raising consultants work like generals who form an army of volunteers--who themselves have various ranks within the organization, according to how much money they give or can solicit from others.

The consultants typically generate audio/visual presentations for the professionals and volunteers to make to potential donors. In the case of the Center, the presentations mentioned tax advantages of making a donation and the sort of “donor recognition” bon bons a donor could expect, from names etched on bronze plaques to whole rooms and auditoriums named in their honor.

Goldstein declined to discuss the pitch being made to potential donors to the museum, though he did say that recent changes in the federal tax code, reducing the deductions available for certain charitable contributions, have not had the discouraging impact on major gifts that he expected.

Already, according to sources at the museum, the campaign has attracted money from trustees and their close friends and relatives. Goldstein would say only that the campaign is going well; he would not disclose how much has been garnered. Nor would he name the person to be chosen as the chief volunteer.

“When the time is right,” he said, “we will let that be known. Right now, people are not interested in getting their names into the newspaper. They can get the information they need without publicity. . . . What interests them is knowing (that) the other people involved are people of philanthropic competence.”

In other words, yeast.

While Goldstein and his crew are working to raise the money, museum director Kevin Consey and Rogue Hemley, chairman of the board of trustees, have just returned from a whirlwind, six-day European trip, during which they sharpened their ideas about the future museum’s design.

They scouted sculpture gardens at six museums in Denmark, Holland and Germany to get an idea of what kind of sculpture garden they will want in Corona del Mar. The decision, Consey said, is crucial: “We will have to use the out-of-doors in a creative way, because we have lots of it.”

The sprawling site is a broad, gently sloping hillside where MacArthur Boulevard meets Coast Highway.

Consey said the tour did not produce a specific idea for the museum’s sculpture garden but rather gave them points of comparison, so they can work in an informed way with the architect, Renzo Piano.

Consey and Hemley spent three days in Genoa with Piano, who Consey said is expected to submit a finished design in the fall for the board’s approval.