An Exercise in Transformation

Airplanes and on-ramps. Talk to Atul Tandon about fundraising, and you get a lot of metaphors about movement.

Whether it’s drawing a picture of specific programming as on-ramps to the highway of donor engagement, or comparing the development of an overall donor-centric attitude within an organization while also keeping a variety of strategies robust to repairing an airplane while it’s still in the air, the senior vice president of donor engagement at World Vision U.S. is clear about his point: Fundraising is far from a static endeavor and, to keep up, an organization — even one as venerable and stalwart as the 57-year-old World Vision — has to keep moving.

That’s why Tandon is not a fundraiser. Sure, he spearheads the division that’s responsible for managing a file of 3.5 million names and 1.5 million donors. And, yes, the direct-mail folks and the major-gifts team and the planned-giving pros et al, look to his leadership on a daily basis. But the World Vision U.S. development team recognized a few years ago that it really is in the business of drawing donors in to the mission of the organization as much by their heart strings as by their purse strings. And it bought into that idea so completely that it changed its name from Marketing & Communications to something that seems somewhat, well, bigger: Donor Engagement.

“Marketing, communications, major gifts … all of these things belong together because they all face outward to the donor, to the public. And so how do we organize them? I came up with the name ‘donor engagement’ because we’re not really marketers in the sense of packaging and selling something. Our job really is to engage and excite people to — in the case of World Vision — serve the poor.

“The core job of everybody involved in the organization really is engaging our current and prospective donors with our work, and not only with our work but with the poor directly,” he explains. “We are simply enablers of that engagement, so we call ourselves ‘donor engagement.’ Frankly, I’d like to call us ‘donor excitement’ but that is, I think, a bridge too far in today’s world.”

Not that Tandon is shy about pushing the proverbial envelope, especially when it comes to the way World Vision U.S. relates to donors.

Founded on a solid history of sustainer giving — the organization has nearly 800,000 monthly donors in the United States — World Vision U.S. certainly wasn’t a stranger to DRM when Tandon came to it seven years ago from his job with CitiBank. But the self-proclaimed “old banker” saw an immediate need for change. The programs were working, but the approach, the attitude needed a kick in the pants. The organization, he says, was singularly focused on its mission. How can that be a bad thing? It’s almost counterintuitive to suggest otherwise. But he does. Sort of.

“The world of charities seems to focus solely on the beneficiary. In World Vision’s case, we are a global organization — a Christian humanitarian organization — whose primary focus is building a better world for children. So I found that we are very exclusively focused on the beneficiary — in our case, the children and the communities,” Tandon says.

“But as we focused [so intently] on the beneficiary, we had our back to our donors. We thought of the donor as an ATM machine, as simply somebody who we are going to plug in to the direct-mail piece and money was going to spill out, and we were going to turn around and use the money to do our primary work.”

And that might work for a while. For a long while. But especially in today’s climate of ever-increasing donor demands, organizations that don’t tone down that ’tude eventually will hit a wall. One cause for support for that notion is hidden in the numbers on giving that we read every year. On the surface, it looks great: The U.S. office of World Vision raises about 50 percent of the $2 billion-plus annual budget for the entire organization globally. But …

“When you look at the inflation-adjusted dollars, simply as a percentage of [gross domestic product], for 40 years from 1965 to 2005, giving [overall] has been stuck at around 2 percent,” Tandon explains. “That tells you that the underlying motivations of donors are not changing fast enough.”

Changing the name of the division went hand in hand with a change in positioning, Tandon says. Rather than turning its back to the donor, the organization now “sort of stands sideways, as a bridge, holding hands with both the donors and the beneficiaries, the children.”

“We have a two-sided vision and strategy: one side focuses on changing the lives of children, and the other really focuses on changing the hearts of donors,” he explains, often using the environmental movement as an example. “The green movement is tackling global warming. But you can only tackle global warming if you tackle the hearts and minds and attitudes of the people who caused global warming — which happens to be all consumers. That’s the change that’s happening.”

(Tandon talks more about the concept of fundraisers as a bridge between donors and beneficiaries, among other topics, in his story, “Is Change an Uphill Battle?” from the July issue of FundRaising Success.)

It’s about relationships
There simply is no underplaying the role of relationships in fundraising — with donors, naturally, and within development departments themselves. But it took Tandon a few years to realize that there was more relationship building that needed to be done to complete the circle he was trying to create at World Vision U.S. While things were all lemonade and sunshine among the donor-engagement folks, and while those folks were busy building the bridge between donors and beneficiaries, there was a distrust of the development division simmering under the surface in the projects division — the people who actually put the programs into play and have hands-on contact with the children and communities World Vision U.S. serves.

The problem? The projects folks feared that the fundraisers were so intent on serving donors that they would make concessions to accommodate donor demands that might actually undermine the organization’s work.

The solution took time, and it started with a challenge to, frankly, shut up. The projects division asked the development team to visit projects around the world and, basically, keep their mouths shut and listen. And that’s just what they did.

“We realized, in the middle of that, that because the two divisions had not been listening to each other, projects had a very different idea about what we wanted to do. In their minds, being donor-centric meant that the fundraising division was really willing to accommodate donor wishes to a degree that would, in fact, harm children and communities,” Tandon says.

“And when that realization came, it occurred to me that what we really needed to do is build a bridge of trust between these two divisions,” he adds. “That they can look at it more collectively and, together, one can understand the other — that the marketers, the fundraisers, the donor engagers can understand the needs and concerns of the project staff and the children, and the other way around. And that took time.”

It also took some serious communication efforts. But the result — a passionate, unified development team working hand in hand with the projects team to engage donors to help poverty-stricken children around the world — was more than worth the effort.

Tandon can’t stress enough that the starting point of all this was 1) a realization and acceptance of the underlying problems, and 2) creating a clear, unified vision that everyone could get behind — a multilayered “bottom line” that is broad enough to include the interests of all the involved parties but still very mission specific.

“Really what we want is to change the hearts and minds of our donors, and that was the vision that we created, and we called it ‘donor transformation.’ Because we are in the transformation business, right? Originally, we sought to transform the lives of children. Then we said, ‘What if we extended that to donors? If we sought to transform the lives of donors? From a project manager’s point of view, what would it look like if we said that we’re not only going to change the life of a child who is living on less than a dollar a day, but in doing that we are going to change the life of a donor who actually might be living on a hundred dollars a day or a thousand dollars a day?’

“And that vision is what really led to where we are today; it’s the vision of mutual transformation of children and donors,” he explains. “And now we call it ‘supporter transformation’ internally. I think that’s what galvanized the organization.”

Faced with a multipronged transformational challenge like this, it would be tempting to put things on hold until everything is in place — lock the doors, turn out the lights, stop mailing, shut down the Web site and tell both donors and constituents you’ll be back in a few months with a new and improved version of yourself.

But this is the real world, and not many organizations can afford to try a stunt like that.

Throughout the transformation effort, Tandon says, it pretty much has to be business as usual as far as specific fundraising programs go, and certainly in regards to on-the-ground projects.

“It’s like fixing the engine of an airplane while it’s flying,” he laughs. “And it’s not just any airplane; it’s an airliner. There are lots of people on board. If it goes wrong, they’ll all crash and burn. You have to keep the organization running; you can’t just let it all fall into the ocean.

“You do that by being individually focused and understanding what the parts are, picking out the most important parts first and then going down the hierarchy,” he adds. “It really was a phased program that we went through and are still going through. I will not pretend we’re there. We’re still doing it, and it will be a journey we’ll continue on.”

But how?
But what about specifics? Tandon says the whole internal process was, well, a process - one that often took on a “one step forward, two steps back” approach that pushed him and his team to the very core of World Vision U.S.’ mission. It was lacking a clear articulation of the brand, which made consistent messaging next to impossible.

In the midst of tackling that problem, they realized they didn’t really understand what their donors wanted and needed. So they veered off to do some research on why donors give. And they worked closely with the projects division every step of the way.

As an example, Tandon offers a change in the way the organization sends annual community progress reports to donors who support World Vision U.S.’ immensely popular child-sponsorship program. Previously, the project staff wrote the reports from a more universal point of view, talking in the third person about new developments and successes that occur because of the donor’s ongoing support. By listening to donors and relying on the research into donor motivation, the team realized that the progress reports would be more effective if they were written from the perspective of the child beneficiary of a particular donor’s gifts. The development staff took the request to the project staff, and the collaboration began.

“Now, sure enough, when you look at annual progress reports, they are written from the child’s perspective,” Tandon says. “The child is saying, ‘Yes, I’m going to school. This is what’s happening in my class … this is what’s happening in my community. A well was dug; I don’t have to walk three miles to get water. I can get water right away … No children were able to get health care in my community, and now we have a local nurse and we have a school teacher, etc.’

“We started with the journey of the donor: How do we transform the life of the donor? We really laid it out,” he says. “We invented it, we researched it, we did focus groups, and then we grasped the essentials of the journey and took that right back to our project staff. The project staff asked how we would measure it … so we now do surveys twice a year on how satisfied our donors are with their relationship with World Vision U.S.”

Those surveys have shown 90.5 percent donor satisfaction, up from 80 percent just a few years ago. Tandon says they ask donors basically three questions: How satisfied are you with your relationship with World Vision U.S.? How long do you foresee maintaining that relationship? And the one that he deems the most important — would you recommend World Vision U.S. to a friend as a charity to support?

What’s keeping World Vision U.S. from a 100 percent donor satisfaction rating? According to Tandon, some donors want to hear more from the children they sponsor, which as stated previously, the organization is working on. And others simply want to receive less mail — a wish that it is quick to accommodate. It’s a delicate balance with which most organizations struggle.

Most World Vision U.S. donors receive two e-mails and not more than two direct-mail pieces a month — not all of which include an ask — in addition to a quarterly magazine. Opt-out and preferred-mode requests are taken seriously.

Up next?
With that satisfaction rating, one might be tempted to think that World Vision U.S.’ “transformation” is complete. The parts must be working together pretty smoothly, so can Tandon and his team rest on their laurels a little bit? (Come on, you already know the answer to that, right?)

Of course not. The process is not finite and will always need refining and redefining. And the donor relationships that evolve from it are anything but static. Tandon calls the next step in that evolution obvious — transitioning donors (people who give money) into supporters (who give time, talent and influence). Take, for example, World Vision U.S.’ Acting on AIDS campaign, which has nothing at all to do with fundraising. Instead, it focuses on spurring U.S. college students to connect with members of Congress to change U.S. policies on AIDS in Africa.

It’s no deep, dark secret that many nonprofit organizations, due to fear or budget constraints or short-sightedness or any of a number of reasons, hesitate to expand beyond the actual and immediate intake of contributed dollars. They would love to friendraise, be on MySpace, put time and money into efforts that raise awareness or encourage participation in physical events that don’t include writing checks.

But where to start? And how to justify those efforts to management and board members who have their fists wrapped tightly around the bottom line?

“To get on a highway, you need an on-ramp. For some people, the on-ramp [to donor engagement] is writing a check; for some people the on-ramp is writing to their senator; for some the on-ramp is standing up at a community meeting and talking about what’s on their heart; for other people it might just be listening to a speaker,” Tandon says. “Getting supporters on board is the first part, and once they get on board then, based on what their motivations are, you grow them in the journey.

“We have a pretty great history in the world of nonprofits of doing friendraising and fundraising,” he concludes. “If you think of the entire environmental movement (going back into the ’70s), that was about fundraising and friendraising. I would even argue that in America, the whole civil rights movement was about friendraising and, to a degree, fundraising. We have a real storied history of being able to do both within the world of nonprofits. So I would say, ‘Hey, let’s join the party.’”