Why Donor Wooing Requires WOWing

cashier-Pixabay1791106_640The Unfair Exchange Bernadette Jiwa, The Story of Telling.

That will be eight dollars,’ the woman, who is carefully weighing and wrapping two serves of freshly made fettuccine for us to take home, says.

As my husband is about to hand her the cash, she takes another handful of the pasta from behind the glass and adds it to our package.

She doesn’t announce that she’s giving us twenty per cent extra for free.
She doesn’t even invite us to notice the gesture at all.
It’s enough for her that she knows she has added value.

We think of value as a hard metric—the anticipated fair exchange of this for that.

But value can be a surprising, generous, unfair exchange.

Something that is given because we can, not because we must.

Ah… value.

Wow, wow, WOW!

This is what all fundraising, fundamentally, is about.

A value-for-value exchange.

Yet one side of the exchange is a hard metric: The donor’s cold, hard cash.

While the other side of the exchange is something decidedly less tangible: Freely given gratitude from you and your organization.

Or at least that’s how it should work.

The Difference between ‘We Must’ and ‘We Can’ 

What does your donor love and loyalty plan look like?

Do you even have such a plan?

If the only reason you acknowledge donations is because you feel you ‘must,’ it’s likely your donors aren’t walking away from the encounter feeling much more than matter-of-fact. The transactional receipts many organizations send out are registered by the donors as “Ho, hum. Guess I’ll go file this with my tax receipts.”

This kind of exchange is fair, sure.

But it’s not generous.

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Walkathon participants

8 Secrets to Keeping New ‘Third Party’ Donors

By now you undoubtedly know you’re losing too many first-time donors.

In fact, the most recent Fundraising Effectiveness Project report shows you’re losing an average of 68% of these folks!

Today I want to talk about a subset of new donors who don’t renew.  They’re called “third party donors,” and they come to you through a variety of portals:

  1. Guests of event ticket buyers
  2. Online auction purchasers
  3. Donors who give to friends’ P2P fundraising pages
  4. Donors who give to crowdfunding campaigns sent to them via a friend
  5. Donors who make tribute gifts in honor or memory of a friend or loved one

The good folks at Classy know most nonprofits are not doing a good job cultivating donors who come to them through third parties, so they’ve prepared The Guide to Courting Third Party Donors. You can download it for free (40 pages), but let me give you the highlights – along with some of my own thoughts.

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language of love alphabet

Nonprofit Gift Planning: Do You Use the Language of Love?

language of love alphabetI recently listened in on a thoughtful webinar by Scot Lumpkin for The Stelter Company. It’s all about meaningful conversations with donors who (you hope!) may contemplate a gift to your organization.

To get folks to “YES” you just need to learn the language of gift planning!

It’s not just about HOW people give, but WHY.

Scott was speaking of what is often called ‘planned giving.’ It’s a term that’s unfortunately come to mean giving vehicles, which is a decidedly non-donor-centric way of framing things.

Anyone who contemplates a major, or stretch, outright gift plans ahead.

No one just gets up one morning and decides to give away $10,000.

Or let’s just stipulate it’s relatively rare.

Rather, would-be philanthropists consider how making a particular gift at a particular point in time may match their values and helps them accomplish their objectives, personal and philanthropic.

It’s seldom a spur of the moment action.

For purposes of this gift planning article, let’s consider your audience to be prospective major (outright) and legacy (deferred) gift donors.

Let’s try an experiment.

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cigar smoking Groucho

Can You Smoke What’s in Your Major Gift Pipeline

You want a smokin’ major gifts program, don’t you?

Of course you do.  You want to light those babies on fire!

Better put, you want to ignite your donor’s passions, light the fire in their bellies, and help facilitate the type of philanthropy that will be a win/win/win – for you, your donors and the vision your organization seeks to attain.

You can’t do this without nurturing a pipeline that lights your donors’ sparks of interest, fans the flames and patiently waits until ignition happens.

Sure, you could just light little fires. Fires that self-extinguish pretty quickly. But these aren’t the fires that will sustain you and keep you warm over the long haul.

That’s why every nonprofit, no matter your size, cause or longevity, needs to build a major gifts pipeline.

Otherwise, you’ll have nothing to smoke!

Want to learn how to stop running on fumes?

Let’s Build Your Major Gifts Pipeline in 10 Steps!

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Rose inside book. Pages shaped like heart.

Nonprofit Fundraising: Do You Know Semantics Matter?

Rose inside book. Pages shaped like heart.What’s in a name?

“A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” said Shakespeare.

But, would it?

Seth Godin thinks words matter. As do I.

“That’s just semantics”

Just?

The meaning of the word is the reason we used the word.

If we don’t agree about the meaning of the word, we haven’t communicated.

Instead of, “that’s just semantics,” it seems more productive to say, “I’m confident we have a semantics problem.”

Because that’s all of it.

The way we process words changes the way we act. The story we tell ourselves has an emotional foundation, but those emotions are triggered by the words we use.

Not just.

Especially.

— Seth Godin

What do you call the folks who respond to your fundraising appeals?

Are they donors?

Maybe that’s okay. Or perhaps

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Cookie Monster when his name is misspelled

Donor’s Lament: You Didn’t Thank Me Properly

Cookie Monster when his name is misspelled

Everything I learned about saying “thank you” I learned from:

According to Burk’s research from Donor-Centered Fundraising, more than 80% of thank you letters start with “Thank you for your generous gift of…” or “On behalf of the Board of Directors, thank you for your generous gift of…”

Y  A  W  N

  • Want to stand out?
  • Want your donor to actually read your letter?
  • Want your donor to feel good about the decision they made to invest in you?
  • Want your donor to feel warm and fuzzy inside?
  • Want your donor to say “Aw, that’s SO nice!”
  • Want your donor to feel the opposite of bored?
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Fundraising Do's & Don'ts logo

Fundraising Do’s and Don’ts: Email Invitation

FR_Do's_and_Don'tsI’m continuing with my new, occasional feature of “Do’s vs. Don’ts.”

Whenever something arrives in my mailbox that seems a good ‘teaching opportunity,’ my plan is to share it with you.

Please let me know if you find it useful!

Today’s example is an emailed invitation to a donor appreciation luncheon.  

Do you think it’s a “Do” or a “Don’t?”

What’s wrong or right with this subject line?

I received an email with the headline: Want to enjoy lunch with our kids next Thursday?

The preview pane continued:

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Conscious compassion

4 Ways to Consciously Keep Donors Connected

Conscious compassionWhen people give to you for the first time, often they know very little about you. Perhaps they found you through a link on social media. Or organic search. Or through a friend who emailed them a link to your appeal.

They were inspired to give, once, based on whatever they saw or read.

What happens next is critical.

Either you’ll inspire donors to stick with you, or you’ll depress their enthusiasm through benign neglect.

I say “benign,” because I’m sure you don’t mean to mistreat your supporters. Nonetheless, I’m willing to bet many of you do.

  • Perhaps donors make a gift online, and are not immediately taken to a thank you landing page that reassures them their gift went through.
  • Perhaps you send donors a deadening thank you email that looks like a receipt.
  • Perhaps your generic thank you doesn’t tie back at all to the reason they gave.
  • Perhaps your thank you talks all about your organization, rather than about how your donor is a hero.
  • Perhaps your thank you focuses on the amount of their gift and its tax deductibility, and fails to mention specifically what it will accomplish.
  • Perhaps your email thank you lacks the personal touch you put into your mailed thank you letters.

Here’s the deal: Donors are looking for meaning. If your thank you and subsequent donor communications don’t give it to them, they’ll dismiss you and go look for meaning elsewhere.

All donors have questions they need you to answer for them. If you fail to answer these questions you fail to lay the groundwork for developing a positive, ongoing relationship.

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Are You Rocking Donor Retention 101?

It’s doubtful you are unless you’re making robust use of your donor database for this purpose.

In other words, you must make this a TOP priority.

Retention lives or dies in how effectively, or not, you use your database to support your relationship-building, loyalty-driving efforts.

If you think of your database as a largely undifferentiated mailing list, you’re not going to realize your potential to:

  • Boost renewal rates
  • Increase average gift size
  • Upgrade donors
  • Secure major and legacy gifts
  • Recapture lapsed donors
  • … and more!

Really, I just can’t bear to think of you not maximizing return on your investment. And that won’t happen unless you focus on donor lifetime value.  And lifetime value will be very, very small — unless you retain and upgrade donors over time.

There are 5 Keys to Donor Retention

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