International Voices on Fundraising: How to be 15 Minutes Ahead
What follows is a short selection of ideas you can use to enable your nonprofit organisation to be just far enough ahead of all the others to ensure you have all the success you need.
Please note: This list is very far from definitive. Use it to stimulate thoughts and ideas and add your own ways to be “15 minutes ahead.” Look not for big ideas and major breakthroughs. Instead seek out the easy wins and incremental advances that can be found in abundance whatever your field or fields of endeavour. All of what follows will not be relevant for each organisation. Adapt these ideas to suit your own needs and circumstances. Good luck!
In understanding and listening to donors
* Meet your donors at every opportunity. Ask their opinions and listen to their advice. (Obvious, I know. But most don’t do it. Yet, it’s the best form of regular research. And it builds trust, confidence and loyalty. And it’s free!)
* Make yours a listening organisation (train yourself/colleagues in donor care; offer your donors a say in formulating your strategy; encourage feedback, comments, questions and complaints; regularly research your donors’ views and lapsed donors too; survey and measure donors’ satisfaction, keeping simple indices which in time will become key performance indicators, the regular data you use to monitor fundraising performance — you’ll be ahead in this, because most fundraisers only measure their performance in money received now).
* Set up an annual rolling research programme so you can monitor your donors’ attitudes over time. Improvements in donors’ understanding of and feelings for your nonprofit can be one of your KPIs.
* Get your thinking right (and encourage your colleagues, too). Work on attitudes as well as techniques. Make the 90-degree shift, to see everything you do through your donors’ eyes. This takes constant practice.
* Make sure you are giving your donors what they want, not what you want them to have.
* Here’s another example of the 90-degree shift. Your donors also have to understand you, so they can trust you and have confidence in you and your organisation. This will be essential if donors are to let you have the information and permissions you will need from them, to practise true donor relationship management.
In providing an appropriate, responsive, customer-led service to your donors
* Set high standards for donor service in your organisation. Publish these, and make sure all staff know of them. Let your donors know, too.
* Make sure your “thank you” and “welcome” procedures are the best anywhere. Get a hold of Penelope Burk’s book, “Donor Centred Fundraising: How to Hold on to Your Donors and Raise Much More Money”.
* With a little help from Penelope’s book, create the best “thank you” and “welcome” policy ever, in your organisation.
* Get “thank you” letters and acknowledgements out within 24 hours (48 at most).
* Take action to secure the vital second gift. Remember a donor’s prime needs are to know the gift was received; to know the gift was set to work as intended; to know the project/programme is having the desired effect.
* Set up a donor support helpline. Have it operate at times most convenient for your donors, not for you. An answering machine outside office hours is a start.
* Show your people. List named individuals, their job titles, photos and their phone numbers in your annual report, newsletter or wherever appropriate. Invite contact on appropriate issues. The message is, “We’re here to help you.”
* Switch from monologue to dialogue. Ask donors to give their views. Put a contact number and name at the end of every article in your newsletter and annual report. Offer further information or follow-up.
* Teach your staff how to be loyal to donors. Involve everyone from the receptionist/switchboard to the CEO.
* Be proactively accountable. Publish “the standards we set ourselves” in your annual report.
* Make sure all your job titles and donor segment descriptions are the kind donors would be comfortable with (I have come across organisations that, in addition to that hideous sounding group, “lapsed donors” — would you want to live next door to a lapsed donor? — have labelled groups of poorly performing donors as “the residue,” “the sediment” and even “the dead pool.” That’s almost as bad as the fundraiser who signed his letters under the grand title of “Director, donor targeting and segmentation.”
Ken Burnett is an internationally known fundraising consultant based in the U.K. This article is excerpted from an article that appears on the White Lion Press Web site.
