Donor Relationship Management

It’s amazing to me the wild stories nonprofit leaders and fundraisers make up in their heads about why donors are not giving. It’s like you’re trying to develop excuses not to go out and fundraise — and you’re a fundraiser!...

I am writing this — call it a lament, a plea, a whine — not as a grant writer or as the co-author of a book about how to write grant proposals, but as a donor. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a zillionaire philanthropist. I do, however, donate relatively small (not to me) sums to numerous nonprofit organizations...

There’s no turning back from the behavior changes and disruption brought about by the pandemic. Savvy companies are leveraging this digital transformation to build audience-centric strategies and grow their organizations as they re-emerge from the pandemic-driven recession...

We regularly speak with clients about how they talk to supporters to activate or “prime” their identities as people who support their organizations. We’re often asked if reminding donors that they are a “donor” or a “volunteer” is a good idea...

A fundraiser asked me this question: “Do you need to send monthly receipts to monthly donors?”...

I know this is personal. This is about you, how you work and what you pay attention to. And this is part of your work that has nothing to do with strategy, the quality of the donor or what you have to offer the donor...

We have a number of major donors in our database that, because of their age or illness have stopped giving, but over their lifetime have made significant gifts to our organization. I feel like we can’t just forget about these people, but what should I do?...

A meeting started out negatively with the finance person saying that a personal relationship with a donor doesn’t really count – it doesn’t positively affect the retention or contribution of that donor. Now, to be fair, he didn’t exactly say it that way. What he said is that the investment in a major gifts officer (MGO) was not worth the result in revenue in the first two years of the MGOs tenure — and that those donors were better off just being communicated with by direct mail...

As much as we all dislike encounters with me-focused people, we can sometimes slip into the same kind of mindset when talking with our donors in our online and offline fundraising programs. The use of the word, “talking” is deliberate here because your communications should sound like a personal conversation you are having with your donor...

Typically, we see clogs in that pipeline in the mid-level range of giving. Donors get stuck at a mid-level point of giving because even though they are giving at higher levels, nonprofits are still cultivating them like a $20 donor. So, the major gift program suffers because you’re not feeding major gifts a healthy diet of qualified major donors...