Excerpts Series: Donor Development
DEVELOPING THE STRATEGY
In our training, Donor Development: Developing the Strategy, we highlight 10 Keys to Effective Donor Development. In this post from The Excerpts Series, we will highlight the first three. If you’d like to take the full training (only $69 for non-members) click the image at right.
Key #1
“No group of individuals is waiting to give. It’s also known as ‘The Law of the Nonexistent They.’”
Sometimes in our work with nonprofits, we hear: “If I can only get my 501(c)3 I can get all these donations.”
Well, there’s some truth to that. Maybe people aren’t gonna donate to you until you get your paperwork order, but there is no group of individuals that’s just hoping and waiting that somebody will present them with an opportunity to give. The reality is most of the time people are asked to give more than they are able to give. We need to understand this. It is a competitive environment. When we ask people to give our nonprofit their discretionary money — the money that they will have to sacrifice to give to an organization — others are asking as well. If we’re new to this we sometimes don’t realize that there’s not a group of people just waiting to donate, but it is important to keep this in mind as we strategically build our Donor Development plan.
Another principle to think about is that anonymous individuals who have little or no connection to your organization are not waiting in line to give you money. I think the best way to illustrate this principle is to ask yourself a question: At my home where I get mail, how many pieces of mail or letters do I get around Christmastime asking me to give money? We probably all have a lot of letters that come in the mail to us from organizations that are asking us to give them money. And what do we do with the majority of those letters? If we don’t know that organization or have no connection to that organization, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll even open the envelope.
So we have to think about, as an organization, our ability to ask others to give us money. People that don’t understand who an organization is or what they do are not going to give to that organization. We have to remember that anonymous individuals that have no connection to us are not going contribute to our organization.
It goes back to the principal we mentioned earlier — it’s about relationship. Later in the training we’re going to talk about engaging people before we ask them to invest, but before we even begin, we must remember: there is no anonymous individual waiting for someone to send them a letter asking them to give money. There are no anonymous individuals waiting for you to take them to coffee so that you can ask them to contribute. Only when someone feels connected to our organization and feels like they’re engaged with our organization are we going to have an opportunity to get them to invest. It is really critical that you get this really important principle.
Many people will invest if you give them reason to. It is our job when we’re in the development world and we’re on that team that is in the trenches trying to raise money for our organization, that we understand that no one is waiting to give us money, BUT there are opportunities for people to contribute to us if we give them reason to. If we can sell our organization well, if we can make the connections well, if we can develop a relationship with them.
Key #2
Donor Development is a conversation, sometimes a series of conversations between fundED and fundER.
In this case it’s between the nonprofit and an individual. It is a relationship. It is a series of different conversations in different ways, communicating with each person in different ways to build a relationship and to get them to invest. Once they invest we continue to nurture that relationship. This is a really critical part of this key: communication, conversation, ongoing — it’s a series. We are not working on a one time contribution. That’s not what we’re going for in Donor Development. There’s a place for that. We can have fundraising events. We have an emotional appeal. We have a lot of people there — they give that night. I love that. We need to be doing that. But in Donor Development it’s about a relationship. That’s the real key difference. It’s an ongoing relationship, an ongoing conversation.
As nonprofit practitioners we need to communicate, communicate, communicate. This is where it’s important to have a strategy, to have a plan, to know who’s going to be communicating in what ways, to whom and when. All of that is really important. Err on the side of over communicating not under communicating when we talk about Donor Development. It is about relationship.
We want to communicate that our organization or nonprofit has something of value to offer. We offer something of value to our community — that’s the crux of what we do. This includes our programs and services, the mission-driven work we do that is benefiting our community in some way. We need to be able to communicate that well.
We also need to be able to communicate to a donor that they have an important role in our work in the community. We need to find ways to communicate this to each donor so that they know and feel that they are a part of our work.
We also need to communicate that we have something of value to offer to the individuals that are being served.
Finding different ways of communicating well is going to be really important. We don’t focus highly on this this particular webinar, but I really encourage nonprofits to have communication plan that is not separate entirely from our Donor Development, but complementary. As an organization it’s important to understand every communication that is going out. This could really fall under our Image Management piece, but it is very closely tied to Resource Development. We need to have consistent branding, consistent stories, consistent communication that illustrates this point: what we offer is really valuable.
Again, the second key is a series of conversations. Keeping the conversation ongoing between the organization and the donors and communication is crucial to all of this.
Key #3
Effective Donor Development is a result of telling your story.
As an organization, you have to figure out: What is the story of our nonprofit? What is compelling about who we are as organization and the impact we’re making? What is the story that we have to tell, the song that we have to sing?
Effective Donor Development really follows being able to tell your story well. And in telling our story we need to recognize that some people think with their head and other people think with their heart. When it comes to Donor Development, we’ve got to recognize that telling our story has to have both of those components. We want to know our facts and we want to be able to share factual information and we also want to make sure that we are giving a personal impact story.
Know your facts and figures. Know the impact you make on the community. How many people are you serving? Be certain about your numbers. How big is your budget? What is the impact of the dollar? Think about the facts that represent who you are as organization in telling the story.
Then have a story of impact so that you have a personal, heart-wrenching, very moving story about how your nonprofit impacts the personal.
In telling the story you need to have the ability to hit someone that is a thinker in the head and you need to have a personal impact for those that that think with their heart. Telling your story needs to involve both of those components.
And tell your story to anyone that will listen. Again, the context here is that we’re trying to grow individual donors and have them come alongside us in the work that we’re doing. It’s important to be able to tell your story. Have different versions of your story ready that range from 30 seconds to a minute or two minutes. This way when you are with people and when you’re listening to others talk about their work, you are ready at events or at meetings to tell the story of your organization. It’s really critical that you know how to tell your story well.