Effective Frontline Fundraising Part 9

IF NO, CREDIT CARD ASK #2: I understand. Itas just that making a gift by credit card does save us the cost of mailing you a pledge packet and allows us to put your gift to work right away. With this in mind, may I ask you to reconsider?

IF NO, PLEDGE: Thatas fine. Iam happy to mail you a pledge packet. Just to confirm, you have pledged [gift amount], correct? And weare mailing that to [address]?

Wonderful. Weare asking everyone tonight if they would please mail their pledges back by [date]. Is that something that you can do?

CONFIRMATION: Great! I have you down for a gift of [gift amount], to be mailed to us by [date]. Mr./Mrs. [Donor last name], thank you so much for renewing your support, and for taking the time to speak with me about the work we are doing here at Green Means Go. Have a terrific evening!

Points to Remember.

The following points are important to remember.

In ASK #2, there is the question: Are you still in support of the work of Green Means Go? The idea behind the afocusing questiona technique, lifted from the sales world, gets the prospective donor to go from saying anoa to saying ayesa again. Founded upon the a.s.sumption that the more a donor says yes during the conversation, the more likely the conversation is to end in a ayes,a you are refocusing the conversation away from the fact that the donor has already said no, and working, once again, to find common ground.

The confirmation at the end of the call seems repet.i.tive, but it is important. Again, chances are that your prospect might be somewhat distracted while being solicited over the phone. You want to say the amount and return date repeatedly, especially with pledges (as distinct from credit card gifts, where you already have the money-in-hand). This is so that when donors receive the pledge packet in the mail, they are more likely to remember having made the pledge.

When making the call, itas a good idea to have the donoras complete giving history in front of you.

The Written Appeal.

When writing the drafts of your appeals, shuttle them around to a few employees. If you have willing volunteers, have them review it, too. Take their responses seriously; they represent your audience. Of course, if a volunteer is asigninga the appeal, you need his approval before putting his name on it.

Once you think you are finished writing an appeal, read it aloud. Do any of the sentences sound clunky or awkward?

Here are some general pieces of advice on writing effective direct mail appeals: Keep the solicitation to one page. Itas okay to have a second sheet to include information, but your appeal, the actual letter in which you ask for money, should be limited to one 8.5 by 11-inch sheet of paper in a readable font, with regular margins, and with your organizationas logo and general contact information at the top.

Write based on the same formulaic elements you would in a telephone script: introduction, purpose, problem, solution, urgency, and ask.

When in doubt, err on the side of formal language. If appropriate, you can change your vernacular and tone in face-to-face meetings; but when writing a generalized appeal, it is best to a.s.sume that the reader is more conservative than you are. This is especially true if a trustee or your executive director is signing the letter. The written appeal is not a place for clever word play. It is all about simple, direct, and frank language that is unashamed to ask for what your organization needs.

The Electronic Appeal.

The e-mailed appeal is last. Itas fast, itas efficient, and it provides you with very quick feedback on its effectiveness.

Here are some tips on e-mail appeals: Spend some time thinking about your subject lines. Youall need a subject line that: Is inspiring enough to get people to open it.

Is not misleading or disingenuous.

Will not get picked up by spam filters: avoid all capital letters, or numbers.

Satisfying these three conditions is harder than you thinka"it is worth your time to work with your team to shoot some ideas back and forth. If you have a dry erase board or butcher block paper, toss up a bunch of subject lines and see which ones satisfy these three parameters; it can be tougher than you think.

Keep it short. Shorter than you think. Peopleas attention spans are limited when it comes to reading e-mail. You have no guarantee that that your appeal is the only thing they are looking at. With face-to-face conversations and phone calls, it is a safer a.s.sumption their focus is on you; but by no means guaranteed.

Keep the length within a single window. If your audience has to scroll past one single screen, it is too long.

To help keep it short, you can include links to other pages on your organizationas website. This should obviously include a link to the giving page.

Of course, the challenge is to communicate your goals and aspirations convincinglya"yet briefly. Here again, we return to the utility of the subject line. The subject line can introduce any of the necessary aspects of a good written appeal. Most often, the purpose or the problem can be summed up in a compelling subject line, such as Calling all loyal supporters (purpose) or Help us stop deforestation in the Amazon (problem and purpose).

Again, be sure to vet your data and perform at least one test send before sending it to your entire donor base.

If you have software that allows for a mail-merge, such that you can have the donoras name a.s.sociated with an e-mail address so that the e-mail reads aDear Jeff,a instead of aDear Supporter,a so much the better. Including names in the subject line is. .h.i.t or miss though, since sometimes spam filters pick that up as spam.

This chapter has provided you with useful tips on how to write effective solicitations for telephone, direct mail, and e-mail solicitations. In the appendix, I have also included examples of effective appeals that both work and meet the necessary criteria. Each one contains the elements of a good message, but, like any real-world example, isnat perfect. I do a brief a.n.a.lysis of each, to call attention to what works and what doesnat work for each.

Letas now turn our attention to stewardship, where the gift cycle ends a and begins.

Stewardship.

The End and Beginning of Every Gift.

I know what youare thinking: why are you talking about the stewardship of giving before you talk about the aask,a the solicitation? You havenat even gotten into the nitty-gritty of the face-to-face gift conversation, so why are you skipping ahead to saying thanks? Isnat it a bit presumptuous to be doing the victory dance before the victory?

I put this section ahead on purpose, because itas easier for an organization with a million things to do to overlook the importance of thoughtful stewardship than it is to overlook the importance of asking for money.

I also want to talk about stewardship first because stewardship is the last step in the gift cycle, but it also reinitiates the cycle anew. The more compelling the stewardship, the more effectively you narrate your case for follow-up giving. Good stewardship is indispensable not just for resolicitation, but also for asking donors to increase their giving to your organization. If you havenat thanked them well enough for their current level of giving, donat expect them to step up their level of support.

By giving donations aflesh and blooda through stories of how the gift has helped, you are restarting the dialogue and rebuilding the case for giving again. In the chapter on major gifts, I will focus a lot on storytelling, and youall be able to use parts of what you read here to come up with your narratives for major gift solicitations.

The new frontier is actually to create synergy between stewardship and events, combining them into a department known as adonor relations.a Itas a logical combination, truth be told. Youare a.s.sembling a team of folks whose job it is to engage donors and to keep them connected to the work of your organization beyond the explicit gift conversation. Events are an important way to do this, so Iall cover that at the end of the chapter.

Big advancement shops have entire teams devoted to the art of astewardinga donors, which boils down to communicating grat.i.tude as well as bringing life to the gift. It isnat enough to issue a sincere thank you to donors, especially your bigger ones. You really do need to provide them with content-rich examples of how their philanthropic commitment is positively altering the landscape of your organization.

The Art of Proper Thank You(s).

Let me begin at the basic level. Every donation needs to generate a gift receipt, which can either be mailed or e-mailed. The receipt needs to include the amount, the designation of the gift, the method, and the date of payment. This receipt should be accompanied by a form letter (or text in the e-mail) with a note of thanks. It can be signed by the executive director (ED), the director of development, or others. It can be a few sentences or a single page.

Here is a sample of a short text: Dear Randall: You will find attached a receipt for your generous gift of $25. Per your request, we have designated your gift to support our after-school athletics program.

I would like to thank you for your support of the work of Keep The Kids Safe. The generosity of you and others makes it possible for us to carry out our mission of making the city of Milwaukee and its surrounding towns safer by engaging our underserved youth.

Please know that your support has a direct and positive impact on the work that we do here at KTKS and merits our deepest grat.i.tude.

Sincerely, Jeff Stauch Your frontline fundraisers, both in annual giving and in major gifts, should be writing handwritten thank-you notes to their prospects as well as to donors who arenat a.s.signed to them per se, but with whom they have had personalized contact.

If your organization has set up different giving levels for annual gifts (and it should), you need to determine best practices regarding which gift levels receive thank-you notes from whom. The highest-level annual gifts should receive a thank-you note from your ED or president. The next level should receive notes from the director of development. The next level down should receive notes signed by one of your frontline fundraisers (and include his or her contact information). Again, the actual levels that you set will be dependent on the const.i.tution of your donor base; the point is to take time to figure how to divide it up.

Of course, these letters can be templates that are then altered slightly for each individual gift. In fact, one of the tasks of the stewardship department should be ghostwriting these templates for the president, ED, or director of development.

Thank-you notes can be mailed or e-mailed, depending on your gift officersa and donorsa preferences, so long as the thank-you notes get out the door in a timely manner. Many of my colleagues prefer to write handwritten thank-you notes. As for me, I have very atrocious handwriting, so in the interest of legibility, I either e-mail my thank-you notes or print off short notes and sign them in pen. My opinion is that it wonat do much good to send a thank-you note if the donor canat read a single word of what I wrote. Itas also an efficiency questiona"if I do want to make my handwriting legible, my thank-you notes take a long time to write, both because I need to go slowly to make it legible and because I make mistakes and have to start over again. Typing thank-you notes, for me, ends up being quicker, and I donat think there is much decrease in qualitya"it is clearly my voice that comes across, as opposed to that of the president or vice president. It will be up to you to figure out which you prefer and what your standard operating procedures will be. I wouldnat be nervous about thanking people by e-mail, especially if the majority of your correspondence with that individual has been via e-mail.

At lower gift levels, you will want your stewardship to be standardized, especially if your office has strained resources. Create a small set of interchangeable templates that are easily customizable, with a limited number of fields that can be changed. As uns.e.xy as it is, it makes sense to think of this type of stewardship as an a.s.sembly line. You have to standardize in order to keep up with your volume. Again, here Iam a.s.suming that your shop, at least in its nascent stages, will be scrambling to keep up with all the work. As noted earlier, without a system in place, it is easy to gloss over the thank-you process, which you do at your own peril.

All Phases of the Gift Cycle Are Related.

As fundraisers, in terms of our decision-making logic, we know we are primarily responsible for bringing in money first, with all else being secondary in importance. We know that our work has budgetary implications: certain aspects of our organizationas programming depends on us. .h.i.tting our goals. So, first and foremost, we need to solicit. Everything else is subordinate to that.

The trouble here is that all parts of the gift cycle are interconnected, such that if you cut corners on any of the seemingly secondary items, you sacrifice your ability to resolicit with confidence.

Not long ago, my office had to do some damage control with a top prospect who wasnat happy with the reporting that we had provided on her funds. This delayed our ability to resolicit her until we were able to show her the impact of her giving in a way she found inspiring.

It is for that reason that I am stressing the importance of setting up a cottage industry of stewardship activities as you build your shop. In other words, you need to professionalize your back-end shop (stewardship, records, and data) at a rate in proportion to the rate at which you professionalize your front-end shop (your direct fundraisers). If the front lineas operations expand too quickly for your back end to keep up, there will be fallout (even when you are fully staffed, there can still be fallout). This will become especially true at the mid- and top-levels. I know it sounds very intuitive, but donors want to be thanked. They want to feel validated by their giving, and, of equal importance, they want to know how their giving is impacting your organization. This is one way in which philanthropy has changed over the last decade, and especially so since the 2008 recession. Donors are viewing their philanthropy as investments, and they want to make sure that their investments are performing well. The stewardship shopas job is to construct a narrative and provide evidence that this is the case.

The Three Levels of Stewardship.

One of my senior colleagues talks about the athree levels of stewardship,a which Iall dissect for the bulk of the remainder of the chapter.

The first level of stewardship will apply to the vast majority of your donors. It is the basic level stewardship to all of your annual, partic.i.p.ation-level donors.

The second level of stewardship is for your donors who have established legacies, named funds, or have otherwise had a significant, longstanding relationship with your organization.

An example of the latter would be a donor who has given you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, but has designated it all towards general usage.1 This level of stewardship merits individualized reporting on the impact of the donoras fund or impact on a certain program. You want these reports to appear individualized, although you should create a process of standardization that streamlines the process.

The third level of stewardship is for your megadonors, the very top of your pyramid, or, as we say in the industry, those who have made transformational gifts. This level of stewardship might actually not apply to your organization until later on in its life, once you have cultivated those mid-range donors to become huge donors. This level of stewardship is more often than not customized, because these types of gifts, as the name transformational implies, are having an impact at the frontier of your organizationas programming, making it inherently difficult to have canned templates on hand. Of course, if one of your megagifts goes to a traditional, existent program, you will have a template on hand from level-two stewardship, but take some extra time to think creatively about how you might add on to that report.

At this level, you can actually ask the question outright: how do you want us to thank you? Itas a valid question, and while it might sound awkward, it can actually be an empowering question to pose to the donor.

One final thing to note: donors receiving level two and level three stewardship should also be receiving that level one stewardship.

Now, let me spend some time discussing at greater length what you should be offering your donors at each of these levels.

Level-One Stewardship.

Let me begin by exploring the basic annual level stewardship. I want to reiterate: level-one stewardship will be the type of stewardship that applies to the vast majority of your donors. Remember the 80/20 rule? This is the stewardship for 80 percent of your donors.

At the basic annual level, donors should be receiving, in addition to a gift receipt (which includes a form thank-you note signed by the director of development or other appropriate personnel), an annual, bi-annual, or quarterly newsletter (or e-newsletter). This should be written by the stewardship office with input from the director of development and other departments within your organization, such as your Communications or Public Relations department, as appropriate.

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1 This can actually be a very challenging stewardship situation: how do you thank someone who has only given to general usage and hasnat designated any of it to a specific purpose? I donat want to be prescriptive, but I do want you to think about this.

The newsletter should include informational updates on what the organization has been doing since the last newsletter, with an eye towards highlighting specific examples of philanthropic support that have made certain accomplishments possible.

The newsletter should open with a short thank you from either the executive director, or director of development, which frames the rest of the content of the letter.

If s.p.a.ce allows, it makes sense to include a profile of a current donor. The type of donor can vary, whether itas an annual donor, a major gift prospect, or a planned gift prospect.2 Or, it could be a volunteer. The profile should include what the person is supporting and a paragraph or so on why he or she helps the organization in this way and at that level.

The donor profile serves two purposes. On the one handa"especially if it is a major gift or a planned gifta"you are providing donors who are currently just giving at the annual gift level with an example of folks who are giving more than they are. We call that asight-settinga or asight-raising.a Youare presenting annual donors with an example of someone who has increased their giving beyond an annual check; the implication, by featuring the major or planned donor and giving voice to their testimonial, is that youare inviting annual donors to step up their giving, especially given how happy and satisfied the interviewed donor will (hopefully) sound.

Secondly, the act of asking a donor to be featured in this newsletter is a form of stewardship in and of itself. You are asking her to be an example to other donors and prospects out there. You are saying to her: we want to feature you in hope that more will emulate what you have done to help our organization. In fact, in your outreach to such people, when you pitch the idea, use language to that effect: we want you to narrate why you give, so that others will do the same. It should feel empowering to the donor. Of course, some will say no to this offer, as they would prefer to remain anonymous, or at least under the radar publicly. Even if they say no, it is likely that they will be flattered by your asking.

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2 Planned giving, which is not covered in this book, refers to gift vehicles such as trusts, annuities, as well as estate gifts and gifts of property.