Unexpected Gifts: Best Practices for Managing the Aftermath

If your organization is fortunate enough to receive an influx of unexpected gifts, it’s important to know how to effectively manage and embrace the opportunity as a time to develop best practices, cultivate new donors and strengthen a major-gifts program for the future. Use the strategies and best practices listed below to learn how to maximize the opportunities and minimize the challenges.

Best practices for capitalizing on the influx
It’s not realistic to expect to make a personal connection to every new donor; however, you can choose how wide you cast your net. Pick a threshold ($1,000 and up, for example) and develop an action plan for those donors — how many personal touches will each new donor receive and by whom?

One major challenge for development professionals is finding the time to make calls and speak with donors. Dedicated calling periods, or “prime-time calling” (Thank you Thursdays, etc.), is an effective tool to carve out time and talk to donors. Use your board, staff and volunteers — who often are eager to do something helpful — to assist you with this. Provide names and numbers and five talking points. Any questions that cannot be answered can be redirected for follow-up.

Invite new donors to special quarterly or biannual conference calls with leadership, program staff and field staff. This takes a bit more prep work than prime-time calling; however, it is a great cultivation tool for donors that can be utilized for both your high-end donors and, in this case, new first-time donors.

Create cultivation and stewardship plans that can be staffed with existing resources. Your plan should include:

Acknowledgement

• Prime-time calling: Use staff, board members and volunteers to thank your new donors.

Communications

• Mail or e-mail stewardship reports, outlining the impact of donor generosity.
• Hold special quarterly or biannual conference calls.
• Script leadership, program staff and field staff messages.
• Create auto-replies to e-mails and special messaging on your Web site to address potential questions and avoid delays in response.

It’s important to remember that special-circumstance donors require special cultivation and retention efforts. This specific group of donors gives to a “need,” and therefore it is important to communicate how their gift is meeting that need and the importance of continued efforts, as well as their continued support.

Donors will renew their gifts if they feel:

• personally connected to the mission;
• appropriately thanked;
• like they’re giving back to their community;
• like their gift will have an impact.