How to get the 6 figure gift in 3 steps

Imagine yourself with a portfolio of donors that you have taken the time to get to know well.  You’ve zeroed in on your top tier donor.  She’s been giving consistently and has tremendous capacity.    How to you get her to the finish line?

One word: cultivation.

Real estate may be about location but in fundraising cultivation is king.  Cultivation requires a solid plan.  Your goal is to be constantly be learning more about your donor to deepen the relationship while delivering outrageous customer service that exceeds your donor's expectations and delights them.

Ready to move your top tier donor up the giving ladder?

Step one: Identify her interests. 

I’m going to illustrate this process with my own experience with a donor, we’ll call him Mr. Smith.  He loved our mission, empowering girls in math, science engineering and technology and his giving quickly grew from a $1,000 annual gift to $5,000.  Mr. Smith was a millionaire with great capacity.  A capital campaign was a few years into our future, but I knew I wanted him to make a lead gift.  I researched everything I could on Mr. Smith and invited him for a personal tour of our facility to learn more about his interests.  Just his interests - no solicitation.

I planned our visit like a wedding planner plans a wedding.  I wanted Mr. Smith to have such a great time he’d tell everyone.  I produced a fun, engaging and emotional experience to connect him personally to our work.  He met a graduate and did a science experiment extracting DNA from strawberries using alcohol.  He was moved by the testimonial and enjoyed rolling up his sleeves to experience how hands on our work was.  I made sure we had a quiet comfortable space to visit.  I left nothing to chance and you shouldn’t either.  Plan every last detail of your donor’s experience.

Step two: Create a plan to nurture her interests and deepen the relationship.

I learned in our visit that he was a futurist.  I created a high tech advisory council to advise us on building our future computer lab and asked him to chair it.  He filled it with high tech C-level friends, we met over lunch in our space and engaged attendees with in person testimonials from graduates and solicited their advice on cloud computing trends that might impact our technology planning.  I discovered Mr. Smith made giving decisions jointly with his wife so I began cultivating Mrs. Smith and recruited her to chair our capital campaign steering committee.

Step three: Make the ask.

After years of cultivation and increasingly larger gifts we asked and received a 6 figure gift from Mr. And Mrs. Smith.

If you don’t know where you are going any path will take you there.  Set a revenue goal and build a strategic cultivation strategy for your donor and you WILL succeed.  Today is your day.  Your donor is waiting.  So…get on your way!

Stay classy,

Rachel

Set an Email Out of Office that Inspires Your Donors

About to set your out of office for the holidays?  This is a golden opportunity to put a warm glow on your organization right at end of year when people are thinking about giving back.

A couple of weeks ago I got the gold standard of all automatic out of office responders from my friends at Greenlights who were away from the office after their big gala.  We all know how exhausting and demanding events are.  After months of planning, recruiting sponsors and table captains, selling tickets, organizing seating charts, making name-tags, finding auction items, and writing speeches most folks are ready for a vacation, if not retirement.  But while you may be ready for some well deserved time off your constituents are at the peak of their adoration of you and positively buzzing with goodwill about your organization!  Ironically this is when they are the most likely to reach out to you - when you are taking some well deserved time away from the office.  It may be a couple of days or a week.   Usually when I reach out to a staff member after an event or around a holiday I get no response or a very brief one sentence autoresponder.  That’s exactly why Matt’s message stood out like a rose in a bed of thistles.

Here’s what I love about his message:

1)      I was thanked immediately for supporting the event – in the subject line and the first sentence.

2)      I got important “insider” info about the events success – I was told in second sentence how much they raised that night.

3)      He shared important program information – revealing the award winners were.

4)      He ended with a call to action to donate.

Whether you craft a thoughtful holiday out of the office or a post gala out of the office message, put some thought and preparation into it.  Leverage this communication to thank your constituents for their support and share a brief quote or story of thanks from a client you serve.  Include a link to give in your closing or as a p.s.

Special thanks to Matt Kouri and the great team at Greenlights for letting me use their email in this post!

Happy Holidays!

Try this at home: Donor Cultivation Events that Deliver

This is the second post in a 2 part blog series originally appearing on Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog on November 7th and November 8th, 2013.

In yesterday’s post I shared 5 questions you should ask yourself to develop a donor cultivation event:

1)      What are you already doing with clients that would be meaningful for your donors to see?

2)      What high value “VIP” volunteer opportunities can you create to allow donors to feel a part of your mission in a fun, engaging way?

3)      Who is your audience: major donors, midlevel donors, prospects, board members, media, stakeholders, etc?

4)      What is your event concept and event plan from start to finish?

5)      What is your follow up plan for everyone who attended?

Today I want to inspire you with great examples of donor cultivation events I’ve personally done to get your creative juices flowing!

I founded Girlstart where we empowered girls in math, science, technology and engineering.  We served girls at our location, local schools, universities, and on occasion field trips.

The low hanging fruit for us was summer camps held at our location.  Each Friday when the girls “graduated” from camp we invited “celebrity judges” to review the campers work (websites, robots, videos, business inventions, etc) and award prizes.  We had reserved parking, a set start/finish time, and assignment for judges with the option to interact with the girls as much or as little as they felt comfortable doing so, such as asking them questions about their invention, introducing their career, etc.  Our judges loved it and we made camp come alive for them by engaging them in a camp science experiment, such as sewing stiches on a chicken breast in a mock surgery, or testing “mystery powder” found at the scene of a caper.  Each guest got a personalized invitation, reminder calls, a staff or board member to escort them personally through their visit, a follow up phone call and handwritten thank you card for attending.

Once we mastered that we were ready for our next trick: inviting our donors on a field trip.  Every year for our Take a Girl to College Day we had 100 + middle school girls come to the University of Texas campus to experience a day in the life of a college student.  If these girls went to college they would be first generation college students.  It was a meaningful experience to behold and we soon welcomed donors to it with valet parking, a green room with refreshments, time to mingle with other supporters and board members, and an orientation from a program graduate.  As the girls got off their school buses college admissions counselors (our donors “cast” in a VIP acting role) congratulated each student by name to tell them they’d just been accepted to Harvard, Yale, MIT and more and give them their (scripted) orientation.   This event was a huge hit and our sponsors especially loved it.

My last example is an event created specifically for my top tier major donor in my portfolio.  I had a 6 figure ask goal for his capital campaign gift.  After learning in one of our visits that he was a futurist, we created an ad hoc high tech advisory council to advise us on building our future computer lab and asked him to chair it.  He filled it with high tech C-level friends, we met over lunch in our space and engaged attendees with in-person testimonials from graduates and solicited their advice on cloud computing trends that might impact our technology planning.  Several months later we had the gift!

As I said in yesterday’s post, even if your clients are remote you can still creatively engage your donors.  The only limit is your imagination!