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!

Why I Love Donor Cultivation Events

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

Successful major gift fundraising demands a strategic cultivation plan and goal for each donor in your portfolio.  I love donor cultivation events because they connect donors to your cause and dovetail into the incredible work are already doing with your clients.  Yes, that means if you plan them right they are efficient to boot!  What’s not to love?

The most obvious donor cultivation event is a house party or open house cocktail reception with a welcome from your leadership (Executive Director, CEO or Founder), your volunteer leadership (Board Chair) and finally, a brief but meaningful testimonial from a client you’ve served.

A more complex but face-to-face with your mission event is what I like to refer to as a “VIP volunteer opportunity”.  Essentially, mid and/or major donors are invited to high-level mission interactions (think service experiences) that will leave them feeling emotionally gratified and closer to your mission.  Creating an event like this is a multi-step process.  Here’s a few questions to get you started:

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?

Once you have completed the first three steps it’s time to unleash your inner wedding planner.  You must produce every moment of this experience from start to finish AND have a killer follow up plan to move these attendees to the gift.  Think valet parking, a green room where they can mingle with other donors and enjoy refreshments, a welcome from a board volunteer, an orientation with a testimonial from a client if possible, being attended by a staff member or board member throughout the experience and a warm thank you and follow up to learn what they thought afterwards.

If you are a virtual or global organization don’t lose hope.  You can still engage donors in your mission.  Maybe you have a select group of major donors join an ad hoc committee to read scholarship applications.  You only have enough underwriting to fund 20 scholarships but reading those 50 heartbreaking applications inspires them to help fund the remaining 30!  The secret is in leveraging what you are already doing with your clients by adding a high-touch tightly managed donor element.

Still not convinced?  A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending Penelope Burke’s session at BBCON (hyperlink http://www.bbconference.com/) She did a recent study on this very topic.  Among donors who went to donor cultivation events on a scale of 1-7 with 7 being the most satisfied, donors ranked themselves from 5-7.  88% said what they liked most was meeting leadership and 83% liked meeting other donors.  33% of donors who attended made an unsolicited gift.  35% of solicited donors who made a gift credited the event with why they made the gift!

With donors giving more money to fewer causes, donor cultivation events are an excellent opportunity to make you their preferred charity.