Effective Frontline Fundraising Part 3

Frontline Fundraisers: A Strangely Effective Team of Black Sheep.

It should be no surprise that I start with the frontline fundraisers. Weare called many things: gift officers, philanthropic advisors, road warriors, professional beggars. Whatever you want to call us, weare the folks who are going to be asking prospects big and small for money in person, over the phone, and via e-mail; who are going to be writing your individual proposals and general appeals; and who are going to be adding most directly to your bottom line.

Pretty important stuff, right? So, what should you be looking for in a gift officer?

Itas a tougher question to answer than you might think, for a few different reasons. One is that there is no universally accepted way to ask for money. This is because every donor is different; every const.i.tuency is differenta"and never mind the fact that there are myriad things that philanthropists could support. Your organization will undertake short-term funding projects and longer-term investments, and your approach to fundraising for each of these types of efforts will likely (and should) differ.

There is another reason that the question of what to look for in frontline fundraisers is difficult: successful fundraising, especially successful face-to-face solicitation, is owed in large part to the personal style of the officer in question, and their ability to relate well with the prospect on the other side of the table.

That said, there are certain traits that tend to make for a solid frontliner. An ideal fundraiser: Has a pa.s.sion for the cause one is representing Has an intellectual understanding of the cause one is representing Does not upspeak (meaning you want people who do not end all of their sentences as though they were questions) Is a self-starter that can also play well with others Is an engaging and captivating speaker Is extroverted Can build and manage relationships with prospects Can connect to a variety of different audiences Has hobbies or interests outside of work (since this enhances the likelihood that the fundraiser will be able to connect with a prospect on a personal level) Is comfortable asking for money (I know this sounds really, really obvious, but Iave worked with a few fundraisers who actually didnat enjoy asking for money) Can write well Iad advise against dismissing any CV or rsum on the sole ground that it does not have previous fundraising experience on it. The qualities that I listed above are not exclusive to the development field. Whatas more, a lot of people tend to get into the development field by mistake. This is changing, as the field becomes increasingly professionalized (and as inst.i.tutions find themselves short on cash), but whenever I am at professional fundraising conferences, I am always struck by the variegated backgrounds people bring to the trade.

There is a burgeoning field of professional study in inst.i.tutional advancement. A number of universities that have programs in higher education administration now offer masters programs in development or advancement. Not having attended one of these programs, I cannot speak to their value; itas a relatively new field of study, and I am confident that as the fundraising industry continues to professionalize, you will see more and more candidates applying for jobs who have this kind of degree. There is certainly value in studying the industry, its practices, and its historical context. However, it is hard to replace the practical training of getting out in front of donors, making actual aasks,a getting actual rejections, and closing actual gifts.

Previous experience in sales is common, and, for all intents and purposes, sales brings to the table a transferable skill set. I have gotten feedback from fundraisers with a sales background that the pace is a bit slower in fundraising than in product or service sales, particularly in the major gift field.

Your next fundraiser could come from anywhere, and as time goes by and the field of development/inst.i.tutional advancement continues to grow, so will the candidate pool of people with fundraising experience.

If youare fortunate enough to have the resources to hire a number of fundraisers, go for variety. You donat want a team of carbon copies. Itas likely that your donor pool is too diverse for a single atypea to cover all of your bases, even if the nonprofit that you represent is focused on a singular issue. Some gift officers are formal and b.u.t.toned up; others are a little more laid back and casual. Some are better writers; some are better speakers. Youall need all types, so mix it up if you have the resources to make multiple hires. If youare really lucky, youall be able to construct different divisions of frontline fundraisers. If this is the case, youall want to focus on establishing two teams: the annual fund team and the major gifts team.

The Annual Fund.

The Annual Fund raises expendable gifts, usually revolving around your fiscal calendar and special projects. The annual fund team is the group that will be writing the appeals for your direct mail campaigns, your e-mail solicitations, and your phonathon program if you have one. The job of the annual fund team is to get as many gifts as possible, from a $5 contribution all the way up into the thousands. They will be soliciting gifts large and small, and they should certainly push their individually a.s.signed prospects to give as generously as possible. But at the end of the day, their chief focus is on obtaining a high volume of gifts, as opposed to generating large gifts; in other words, quant.i.ty over quality.

An annual fund officer will be making face-to-face solicitations, recruiting or managing volunteers (see the section in this chapter on volunteers), and strategizing on how to maximize your organizationas exposure to create as large an audience (and donor base) as possible.

You might be asking: Why not just focus on big gifts? Why not just hunt for the biggest buck and be done for the season?

The answer is threefold: First, sometimes you donat have time to wait around while the major gift prospect upon whom you were resting your hopes decides how to steer his or her support. You simply donat know in advance when a major gift will close, and if youare relying on that pledge payment and it doesnat come, youare in big budgetary trouble. Major gift prospects come and go: they make their big gift and often move on to the next nonprofit (unless you steward them well and keep them on your roster!). Some stick around, but others donat. And if you donat have an endowment, where that gift is going to live on in perpetuity, the giftas value will eventually dry up and youall need to go in search of the next big donor. Conversely, you will always have a base of donors who can make smaller contributions.

Secondly, it helps to think of the annual fund donors as major gift prospects in the making. People donat just start giving away thousands of dollars w.i.l.l.y-nilly. They do so because they have been gifting for years and it just so happens that now they are able to do so at a higher level, for whatever reason. If you look at most major donors at any inst.i.tution, it is very likely that before they were making six-figure commitments, they were giving small contributions each year to that inst.i.tution. Sure, there are exceptions (notably with prospects that are preliquid), but for the most part, youall see this trend.

Thirdly, partic.i.p.ation matters. You want a variety of gift levels from a variety of donors. You want ma.s.s appeal. If you are applying for grants, for example, foundations will often want to see evidence of other bases of philanthropic support upon which your organization relies. A strong level of annual partic.i.p.ation will often be one of the things that these foundations and charitable trusts look at when considering your application.

Whatas more, if your organization only focuses on raising money from sources that can give you six figures at a time, youare eroding your support base. Youare sending a message to prospective smaller donors that their $25 doesnat matter. Not only that, but small gifts add up. At one inst.i.tution I know of, gifts of $50 or less usually end up totaling around $150,000 each year. If you donat empower the donors that are giving you $10, $25, or $50 a year, you are cutting yourself off at the knees.

Major Gifts.

A major gift officer is charged with managing a prospect pool of a set number of individuals and moving them through the gift cycle with high levels of personal attention. The size of the pool will vary depending on how many major gift prospects you have, if youare geographically diverse or regionally focused, and how a major gift is defined at your inst.i.tution.

In educational philanthropy, major gifts are usually those in the six-figure range, and occasionally into the seven-figure range. For small nonprofits, it is likely that the major gift threshold will be significantly smaller, and thatas okay. The same principles and strategies will apply.

Weall focus more on major gifts in Chapter 11. Meanwhile, Iad like to talk about the distinction between the annual fund and major gifts in the context of recruitment. Major gift officers tend to be recruited up through the ranks of the annual fund, but not always. Some candidates have no previous fundraising experience. However, with major gift work, you do want to scrutinize your candidates carefully. The stakes are a little bit higher. While the annual fund team can be depicted as a sc.r.a.ppy but plucky, frenetically paced office, major gift work can require a slightly more refined approach. Again, more on the distinctions later, but know that itas fair to expect experience with direct solicitations when interviewing for major gift officers.

As noted, there is no ideal type of fundraiser. There are ideal traits, but they can be embodied in very different ways among individual candidates. During interviews, ask yourself if you would give them a donation right then if you were asked. Itas fair game to ask them to pitch you for a hypothetical major gift at the interview. Also ask yourself: could they have a meaningful conversation with someone half their age? Twice their age? More generally, could they connect with a wide variety of audiences?

Letas now move off the frontline and peek behind the curtain at all the folks who help fundraisers do their job.

Administrative Staff: A Gift Officeras Life Line.

Again, Iam boldly going to a.s.sume that youare able to hire an entire shop. In reality, it is more likely that a small number of you will have to be jacks-of-all-trades. However, by giving you an idea of what a fully staffed shop might look like, youall be able to get a broad idea of the tasks necessary for a well-run shop, and plan (and delegate) accordingly. It will also give you a hiring roadmap, so that as your operations expand, you can turn back to this to know what your next recruitment step should be.

Recordkeeping and Reporting.

The staff member responsible for recordkeeping and reporting is your reference librarian, who is responsible for making sure that you have the most accurate, up-to-date information on your donor base as possible.

You should capture as much information as you can on every single donor. How you design your gift forms, both on paper and online, will help you in this endeavor. Every time you have an event, you should provide a sign-in sheet that asks for each guestas e-mail address, mailing address, and phone number.

You should make sure that your gift officers are feeding your recordkeeper all of the information that they learn, whether itas new work e-mail addresses, new cell phone numbers, etc.

Ideally, you should have the following information about each of your donors: Full name and spouseas name Maiden names (for possibly family wealth connections) Employment information (and spouseas) Personal e-mail, work e-mail Personal phone number, work phone number, mobile phone number, fax number Primary mailing address Alternative mailing address (read: other properties) Birthday Other family information (such as children, parents, family foundations) Recordkeepers will need database software in order to do their job well. This type of software can be expensive, but if resources are an issue, there are free, reliable options available, such as OpenOffice. You could even get away with using Google Docs if you have to.

The Raiseras Edge, by Blackbaud, is software geared specifically toward fundraising operations; it is quite fancy, and thus coveted by a lot of fundraising shops. It does come at a cost, though, and if resources are tight, you can make do without it.

Other inst.i.tutions have database software that isnat geared specifically toward fundraising, but does include fields where development officers can enter and retrieve critical information (solicitation plans, visit notes, and so on). How you keep your data and records will depend on your resources, but at the end of the day, you need to make sure that you are keeping your records accurate and up to date.

Besides budgetary constraints, another question in terms of what type of database software you will be using is what the rest of your organization uses, which inevitably raises the question of compatibility.

Records isnat just a dump site for the data listed earlier. You want a history of how youare communicating with donors. The point of having a designated recordkeeper is to use that person as the conduit for getting information captured into the database. Granted, this person shouldnat act as a gatekeeper, restricting other support staff from accessing or contributing to the database, but the recordkeeperas utility is in making sure there are standards on how to capture, enter, and report on information about individuals, about the efficacy of certain appeals, and other data.

In the next chapter, I explore the role and importance of records at greater length. For now, trust that it is impossible to have too much data on prospects. In addition to their personal information, you will want information that clarifies and explains their relationship with your organization to date. This type of information should include answers to the following questions: How much has this person given to your organization in the past?

Has this person made good on their pledges historically?

Has this person requested not to be contacted by any particular means?

Who from your organization has contacted this person? For what purpose? What was the outcome of that contact? Was it an in-person visit, a phone call, or an e-mail? Was it possible to catch the donoras mood or personality on that visit?

When has this prospect visited your organization?

Which events has this prospect attended in the past?

Does this person volunteer for you?

The more data you have on someone, the more prepared you can be, and the less likely you are to get caught off guard (see the section on disaster stories in the next chapter), when you do contact a given donor.

Logistics: Mailing, Technology, Printing.

This staff member (or members) will be responsible for getting the great ideas that your annual fund team comes up with onto paper, into HTML format, and out the door. They are your operations managers, in a way.

A logistics staff member implements your great ideas and takes point on getting the message of your organization out there, whether itas a direct appeal, a thank you, or an invitation. This person must be extremely detail oriented, with a good understanding of all the tiny steps that are involved in mailing or e-mailing your donor base, as well as an appreciation of the repercussions if there are errors.

I received an e-mail once from a small business in my area, with a subject line reading aTemplate for my b*tches.a I responded to the e-mail, inquiring if perhaps there had been an error in sending this to their e-mail distribution list. I got a quick reply, apologizing for the error and explaining that the template subject line was intended only for e-mail test runs. It was an honest mistake. But it did beg the question: why was there a cuss word in the template subject line, even if it was meant for internal use only?

Details like this are things that your logistics personnel should be considering. In fact, they should spend a good amount of time thinking about how things can go wrong: it is so much easier to spend five extra minutes on the front end, doing one last proofread or sending out one last test e-mail, than to have to respond to innumerable inquiries about why a link did not work, where one clicks to make a gift, or why the recipient received this appeal (in the case of e-mailing to an incorrect segment or const.i.tuency).

You want a logistics person to be inquisitive, with a mind that likes to get under the hood. This staff member should be comfortable with technology, including mail merging software and HTML formatting. Also an a.s.set is the inquisitiveness to ask the questions that will bring an appeal from the planning session to the mail drop in the shortest timeline possible. It is this personas job to think about the minutiae, the details that the big-idea people often donat have a feel for. Granted, you need the big-idea people, but you also need a counterbalance, someone who has a realistic idea of what it takes to implement the big ideas. Without this person, you have a plethora of big ideas and no clue as to how to bring these great visions to life. The result is burnout and embitterment toward whoever dreamt up the visions in the first place.

This person isnat necessarily a pessimist or a Negative Nancy, but will be able to ask the right questions, or to give honest answers when asked about implementation. You want someone who has a can-do att.i.tude, while at the same time recognizing your organizationas limits in terms of timing, costs, and so on.

If your logistics person raises an objection to a certain idea in a meeting, it is in your best interest to hear out the argument. While you donat want your operation to slow down, you need someone in shop who is thinking things through. Take the logistics staff seriously, and listen to their concerns; they appreciate how long things take and the cost of correcting errors once something has gone out. If it takes an extra day or two to get an appeal out because you need to test the data one more time, do it. It is worth the trouble, and is much easier than having to craft an apology to a certain segment of your donor base who received a message in error.

The Donor Relations Team: Thanking Donors, Throwing Parties.

The donor relations team has two overarching tasks that dictate their work-flow, stewardship and events. Donor Relations is the new en vogue term for these two jobs; sometimes, they are each separate departments. At the college where I work, we recently combined them, and there is logic in doing so. Both tasks involve contact with your donor base where solicitation is implicit, but not explicit. (Remember my earlier comment about how everyone on the inst.i.tutional advancement team is a fundraiser, whether directly or indirectly?) The donor relations team engages donors in meaningful ways that arenat directly tied to a solicitation. On the events side, you will want someone similar to your logistics person. This staff member is, in essence, a party planner, and party planners need to have an eye for the finer details: which vendor will provide the catering (whether a donor is underwriting the event affects the answer to this question), whether there will be flowers at the event, what expectations the host has, the capacity of the room/home in question, when to hold the event, who will staff the event, the follow-up plan on how to communicate with event attendees, and so on.

You want someone who, while not a frontline fundraiser, is at the very least comfortable talking to affluent donors. This is because it is often these affluent donors that will be hosting the event, either at their home, or at a club or venue through their connections. If you are lucky, the donor will be underwriting the event, so your events coordinator should be comfortable talking a donor through that process as well (since you can count the underwriting that event as an ain-kinda gift if the donor wants). In the average office, the pace is such that the director of the shop wonat have time to be checking in with the host every step of the way, so you need to be able to trust and defer to the events coordinator to handle things independently.

Itas important to explore the crucial stewardship role to enable you to make a good hire.

Stewardship brings a donoras gift to life by demonstrating, in as much detail as appropriate, the impact of his or her charitable giving at your organization. Donors must be thanked individually for their gifts. Granted, this can be automated, but donors should all still receive a thank-you note with their name on it as opposed to a general salutation of aDear Donora or aDear Supporter.a Personalized thank-you notes should be mailed or e-mailed as soon as possible after the gift is made. Nonprofits that have phonathons should dedicate additional time to thank-you calls.

Still, you need more than a good thank-you note template to steward donors properly. One of the most common ways to steward your donor base is to provide an annual or quarterly report to all donors that provides substantive updates on what your organization has accomplished in the last period, and how philanthropic support made that possible.

As someone whose chief role is to ask for money, I rely heavily on quality stewardship, at both the front end and the back end of my solicitations. My duty at the back end is obvious: after people make a gift, we need to thank them. I cannot, in good conscience, go back to a donor and resolicit for a major contribution until my office has taken steps to demonstrate just how meaningful that donoras gift was and the impact that it has made. As weall see later, stewardship resets the gift cycle that we discussed in the previous chapter.

A good stewardship report can also play directly into a solicitation effort. Often, when I am submitting proposals to prospects of mine, I will pull up a stewardship report that we have given to another donor in the past, take out identifying information, and then include the report in my proposal, citing it as an example of the kind of impact that this prospect could have if they give at the level I am requesting. Good stewardship is therefore a very powerful tool in making the actual ask: I am, in essence, showing donors their future relationship with our organization (provided that they say yes to my solicitation). Your stewardship writer needs to have strong, clear writing skills, and a creative mind for how to make giving s.e.xy. You need someone with an imagination that can bring the gifts which your organization has received to life, and construct an inspirational narrative around those gifts.

This employee also needs to be able to forge positive relationships throughout your organization, since ostensibly, the money that youare raising affects other departments more directly than it benefits yours. Your stewardship writer will have to collect stories from these departments, interview the appropriate parties, work with them to construct a rich thank you note, and also collect numerical data on the program on which a certain gift had an impact.

When hiring a stewardship writer, you will want someone who understands that stewardship is primarily the business of saying thank you, but also sees clearly its role in resolicitation, or even presolicitation.

We will explore stewardship in even more detail in Chapter 8, but what you have just read begins to put forth the justification for recruiting donor relations staff members.

Researchers: Your Wealth Detectives.

I saved researchers for last because, of all the jobs within a fundraising shop, this line of work is the most likely to make people uncomfortable. We donat really like to think about a team of people snooping around, digging up our financial history. However, if you want to discover your potential big donors, you will want to have a researcher on staff to help you figure out when someone can be approached, in good faith, for a significant gift to your organization.

An ideal researcher must have an inherent sense of curiosity. After all, he or she will be spending a good amount of time on the computer, searching tirelessly for information about individuals. A former colleague of mine admits that if you arenat naturally curious, and you donat enjoy digging deep and turning over every stone, you will get bored doing this kind of work.

Researchers are not only responsible for figuring out how much people are worth and how much they can give. This is certainly a big part of the job, but researchers should also be involved in the strategy process with prospects. After all, they are the ones figuring out where prospects are steering their other support and at what level. They can help gift officers with the initial approach, as well as suggest ways to direct the topic during the beginning stages of a gift conversation.

A researcher will be looking for the following data: What a prospect paid for their house (or houses). This is different than the current a.s.sessed value of a property. How much they actually spent on the house is a better gauge of wealth All of the donoras employment information, including employment history Indications of connections to family wealth Other philanthropy Stock Boards upon which the donor sits A good amount of this information is publicly available and can be found for free. Google, Bing, and Yahoo will be able to provide you with some of this. You want someone who is proficient with search engines and has a knack for crafting queries that will provide a more exact match. For example, if you have a donor named John Smith, you had better include some other terms in your search if you hope for any accuracy.

There are also paid services that will help you with your prospecting. The two programs that come most highly recommended are WealthEngine (www.wealthengine.com) and Noza (www.nozasearch.com). These two services complement one another and will a.s.sure you that the John Smith that you are looking at is the John Smith you had in mind. WealthEngine, for example, gives you access to household, individual, private business, and public company information.

There are limits to research, of course. The researcher is, after all, only making calculated, educated inferences based on publically accessible information. This can mean that an a.s.signed rating (an indication of giving potential) could be off, or that the rating is accurate, but there is a very low inclination to give to your particular organization.

Hereas an example. A prospect of mine was initially given a rating of $100,000a"$249,999. Our research staff, based on data they had collected, figured that this individual was able to donate between $20,000 and $50,000 a year to the organization, or $100,000a"$250,000 over a five-year giving period. However, it eventually became clear that we could confidently approach a million-dollar conversation with this person, based on her own admittance.

What happened here? Why were we so far off? The research team came up with the calculation based on the normal criteria: profession, real estate, and other philanthropy. She was the chief information officer of what we thought to be a somewhat small (although self-funded) company, and her husband was a self-employed artist, but we werenat able to gauge his financial success. They owned their house, but it was pretty modest. So, the rating was accurate based on the information that was available to the research staff.

The error arose because her employer was a private company doing far more business than we had been able to gauge. Because it was private, we were not able to gain an accurate understanding of how much volume the company was seeing.

The point is that research is essential, but it has its limits in terms of what it can provide you. It is up to the fundraisers to get out there and figure out someoneas inclination. Research provides you with clues, cues, and talking points before you pick up the phone for your a.s.sessment calls.

Tips on Recruitment.