Three San Francisco Hearts: heartsinsf; Love Captured Heart; Planes

Nonprofit Major Donor Fundraising A B C’s

Three San Francisco Hearts: heartsinsf; Love Captured Heart; Planes

You don’t just roll out of bed one day, randomly go visit a major donor prospect and ask for a random amount. At least not without a boatload of advance preparation. Right?

It’s a lot smarter to begin at the beginning.

And then take it step by step from there.

According to a plan.

A plan to secure BIG gifts for you BIG mission.

It’s always a great time to review what you can do to get yourself and your solicitors (staff and volunteers) ready to make win/win matches between your organization and your prospective major donor/investors.

Ready for some A, B, C’s?

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How Do You Keep Former Nonprofit Board Members Engaged?

Heart hands

Sustain the positive energy of love and connection

Are you throwing your former board members out like yesterday’s trash?

This may not be your intention, but you’re kind of guilty of this if you don’t continue to (1) let them know how special they are, and (2) build personal relationships with them. After all, one of the foundations of Penelope Burk’s groundbreaking work in Donor-Centered Fundraising is the finding donors want one thing first and foremost: “Show me that you know me.”

Are You Showing Former Board you Know, Love and Feel Specially Connected to Them?

CONSIDER THIS:

  • As board members, they got used to being treated as “insiders.”
  • Now that they’ve stepped off the board, you’re treating them as if they mean less to you.

Every single communication with a former board member should let them know you know who they are.

If you treat them like they’re toast, don’t be surprised when they start sending you little bread crumbs instead of the whole slice – or loaf – they once sent. People want to be appreciated. It’s just human nature. And facilitating philanthropy (the word literally means “love of humankind”) is a very human endeavor.

Don’t stop loving your former board members.

Stop blaming them for stopping to love you. Blaming is a cop out. Instead, look in the mirror and see what part you may be playing in their changed behavior.

SPECIAL TIP: You can apply much of the suggestions in this article to former staff as well.  I often marvel at the hands-off way I’m treated by some of the places where I once worked, sometimes for many years.  Places where I donated too, because I believed in the mission. Now I’m just a “prospect” or “lapsed donor” to them, and the communications I receive come across a bit infantalizing. After all, I know this stuff.  I wrote a lot of this stuff!  It just feels like they’re telling me “since you don’t work here any more, you mean nothing to us.”

Why Former Board Merit Their Own Engagement Strategy

Former board should be one of your top segments for cultivation!

IN A NUTSHELL:

  • They have a deep understanding of your vision, mission and values.
  • For years, they made your nonprofit one of their top philanthropies.
  • They have numerous connections with your cause, including relationships with staff, each other, and even beneficiaries.
  • At one point you were part of their identity and family.
  • You likely have a special place in their heart.
  • They may even have included you in their estate planning!

Don’t stop making beautiful music together! Continue to treat them personally, unless they specifically ask you to stop. Don’t simply relegate them to your impersonal e-news mailings or mass annual appeals. Treat them like major donors and develop a love and loyalty strategy that invites them to stay engaged with you, albeit in a new way.

8 Strategies to Build a Former Board Member Love and Loyalty Strategy

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Three San Francisco Hearts: What-We-Do-for-Love; Tales-of-the-City; ColorFall-of-Hope

4 Types of ‘PERSONAL’ Your Nonprofit Must Adopt Today

Three San Francisco Hearts: What-We-Do-for-Love; Tales-of-the-City; ColorFall-of-HopeEarly in my career I received a piece of fundraising advice that has stuck with me to this day:

People are all people.

And what do you do with people if you want to build a relationship?

You get PERSONAL!

In fact, if I had to tell you how to win over donors with just one word, “personal” is the word I’d choose.

This One Word, ‘Personal,’ Should Become Your Mantra

Let it underscore everything you think about and do.

Your annual appeal writing. Your special events. Your newsletters. Your blog posts. Your proposals. Your reports. Your social media. Your donor cultivation.

If you take just this one word to heart — PERSONAL — you’ll be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.

  • This one word that can set you apart.
  • This one word can help you build relationships like nothing else.
  • This one word can sustain you, through thick and thin.

Also Make ‘Personal’ Your Spiritual Discipline

Though we we give lip service to the importance of practicing empathy and donor-centricity, truly valuable tools in building donor relationships, these terms are subsumed by the umbrella of the ‘person’ to whom they apply. Start there.

Visualize your person, and before engaging in any strategy or tactic, ask yourself:

Is there a more personal way to deliver this message?

Begin to build a PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE into your planning.

Make sense?

GETTING PERSONAL has always mattered.

Today, in a still-disrupted, socially distanced, increasingly virtual environment, with striving for greater diversity, equity and inclusion at the forefront, how you get personal and how you define people are more important than ever.

Today I’d like to flesh out the multiple meanings of this word, and discuss how getting personal can help you achieve your nonprofit fundraising and marketing goals.

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Three-San-Francisco-Hearts: Love-is-Contagious-San-Francisco-Glow-Transparent-Harmony. Benefit for S.F. General Hospital Foundation

Try These Nonprofit Donor Retention Tweaks with BIG, Happy Outcomes

Three-San-Francisco-Hearts: Love-is-Contagious-San-Francisco-Glow-Transparent-Harmony. Benefit for S.F. General Hospital FoundationHave you ever received confoundingly terrible customer service? Maybe at a restaurant, hotel, fast food restaurant or retail outlet?  It happens all the time and, likely, you’ve thought to yourself: “Why on earth are they treating me like this? It’s so stupid! Don’t they realize I’ll never come here again?”

Sadly, this is exactly what many donors feel when:

  • You make it difficult for them to give.
  • They receive poor follow up from you.
  • You don’t seem to know them, or even try to get to know them.
  • You treat them as one of the masses, rather than making them feel special.
  • You ignore what they’ve told you or shown you.

“Customer service, like everything an effective organization does, changes people.”

— Seth Godin

Part of the Problem is Culture

Think about it. When you experience poor service in the for-profit world, it’s likely because the person with whom you’re interacting has no stake in the business. They see their job as just a job, and really don’t care about the business as a whole. Whether or not a customer returns again means little to them.

This also happens at nonprofits without a donor-centered culture of philanthropy. While the customer, or donor, may not always be exactly “right,” it is imperative everyone in your organization recognizes and appreciates the value donors bring.

“Each person directly associated with your organization should value donors and implicitly or explicitly express that value with gratitude and appreciation. No exceptions.”

— Brian Lauterbach, fundraiser, consultant, entrepreneur

“Without tackling internal issues head-on, we believe the prospects for major fundraising progress are limited. In most organizations, fundraising is limited more by organizational culture and structure than by lack of strategic or tactical know-how.”

— Alia McKee and Mark Rovner, Founders, Sea Change Strategies

NOTE: How to instill a culture of philanthropy is a topic for another article (like this one), but at base it has to do with how people treat each other in your organization.

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Three San Francisco Hearts: Love Sent. Received, Shared; Together Under the Stars; Justice

Are You Treating Your Donors Like Gumballs?

Three San Francisco Hearts: Love Sent. Received, Shared; Together Under the Stars; JusticeWant your donors to sustain you? Then you can’t consume them in five minutes.

Yet all too often nonprofits treat their donors exactly like a gumball dispensed from a machine. Chew it up. Spit it out. Done.

Oh, yeah… maybe you send a quick thanks to whoever gave you the change to buy the gum.  But that’s as far as your gratitude takes you. You’re over it. You never even think about that gumball again. You probably can’t even remember what color it was. You’re off hunting down your next snack.

Little snacks are nice.  But they won’t sustain you over time.

One-time donations are the same way.  And they’ll stay that way – one time – if you treat them the way you treat your gumballs.

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Three San Francisco Hearts: Rainbow, Love, Resilience. Benefit for S.F. General Foundation.

Top Strategies for Making Friends with Nonprofit Donors

Three San Francisco Hearts: Rainbow, Love, Resilience. Benefit for S.F. General Foundation.Today a friend, who serves on the board of a struggling local arts organization, asked me what they can do to increase their fundraising. I asked her a few questions; then answered simply: “Have more conversations with people; make more friends.”

You see, they have people who know about them but they’re just not giving.

They have donors, but they’re not giving enough.

Why? Because they haven’t been treated like friends and family. They don’t feel connected.

What’s the best advice to build stronger connections with likely supporters?

1. People Give to People

Remember this basic truth. Humans are a social species.

People also buy from people.

So if you consider fundraising “making a sale” (which I do, because it’s part of being human to be constantly trying to persuade others; read Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human), you must show up as authentically human.

And how do you do this?

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Head and Heart

Easiest 7 Strategies to Get Inside Your Donor’s Head and Heart

Head and HeartHere is some wisdom gleaned from many decades of personal nonprofit work.

It derives from both my stints as an in-the-trenches development professional (five different organizations, wearing many hats, over a 30-year career), and my past decade as a coach/consultant for nonprofits of all sizes and shapes.

I will also be sharing quotes from donors Penelope Burk surveyed (also here), as these authentic testimonials provide great insight into how donors think and feel.

Finally, we’ll conclude with seven relatively easy things you can do to connect more meaningfully with your supporters so they’ll stick with you through thick and thin!

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Transform Annual Reports into Gratitude Reports for the Best ROI

Grateful signAnnual reports don’t have to be dry as dust. In fact, the most effective ones are not financial reports; they’re a story with the donor at the center. And they inspire action.

When you consider all the blood, sweat, tears and money that go into them, you want to assure they:

  • Resonate with people emotionally.
  • Paint a picture people want to jump into.
  • Showcase the value of philanthropy and what it does to create change.
  • Shine a light on how much the donor is needed.
  • Include specific areas where donors can help.

Towards getting the biggest bang for your annual report buck, consider renaming them (or at least thinking about them) as Gratitude Reports. Make them all about your donors, how grateful you are to them for making your work possible, and how appreciative you are for all the accomplishments they enabled.

Rather than “2023 Annual Report,” consider a more donor-centered title like “Generosity Report,” “A Gratitude Report,” “The Year of the Donor,” “Impact Report.” or “You Make it Possible.” I’ve seen all of these; feel free to get creative and let your title guide your content!

Top 5 Gratitude Report Strategies

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Food bank donations truck unloads

5 Ways Effective Annual Reporting Drives Donations

Food bank donations truck unloadsFor many nonprofits, the yearly annual report is often just another task on a very long to-do list. Most charities are juggling a lot—development, program maintenance, fundraising, and more—and the annual report can feel like yet another mandatory routine project. One that often gets handled at the last minute without much intentional care and effort.

Even though annual reports are an industry standard, most nonprofits don’t realize how fruitful an effective annual report can be. An annual report that prioritizes storytelling, transparency, interactivity, and more can actually bolster donation solicitation efforts and become a lucrative fundraising tool.

Before we jump into the nitty gritty of strategic annual reporting, let’s cover the basics.

What is an annual report?

Think of an annual report as a “year in review”—like a yearbook of sorts, but for donors, supporters, and partners to look at the highlights of any given year at your organization. Of course, a lot can happen in a year (nonprofits know that best), but with an annual report, you can summarize all the year’s milestones including your impact, accomplishments, new developments, and more.

Annual reports can be created and presented in a variety of ways—both digitally and in print. Depending on the needs, audience, or even constraints of the individual nonprofit, you might choose to create a printed booklet or pamphlet (which could then be mailed to supporters and donors or handed out at events). Or, in line with more frequent developments in the space, you could turn to digital software tools to create an annual report that intrigues readers with more vibrant visual elements like photos, videos, and clickable links.

What does an annual report include?

Every nonprofit’s annual report is different, depending on its mission, values, impact, audience, and more. However, most organizations include a few standard elements:

  • Stated mission and values
  • Accurate financial data
  • Examples of impact
  • Major accomplishments
  • Program and initiative assessments
  • Event highlights and recaps
  • Donor and board member lists
  • Contact information

Though every nonprofit is required to submit a Form 990, most organizations take their reporting a step further and create a yearly review that includes more audience-centric material (like the topics listed above).

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dig into the best part of annual reporting—the ability to create the ultimate fundraising tool.

5 Ways Effective Annual Reporting Drives Donations

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Why Donor Wooing Requires WOWing

Woman checking out at cashier

The 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.

WHAT ELSE DO YOU HAVE TO GIVE?

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