Is It Really Better to Travel?

These journeys are complex and often need to be tailored to the individual. There are many starting points and various routes to the destination — but you need to be able to describe the next move with the destination in mind.

One place to start is to map the journeys your donors have historically taken. I recently took this approach with a charity, basing my method on a few years’ of faithfully recorded gift and activity history. It was revealing, both to see what people went on to do after that first engagement (in most cases it was nothing) and what kind of initial engagement was more likely to lead to a long and healthy donor relationship thereafter (an open-ended recurring gift, in their case).