Donor Relationship Management

Do loyalty “clubs” really matter to today’s donors? With or without a club or membership, there are success factors, or consumer needs, that I believe good fundraising strategies have delivered for a while and must continue to deliver...

If you have been trained correctly as a development professional you are taught to be donor-centered, provide outstanding customer-service and essentially strive to say “yes” to donors. I mean, just about every blog post that Richard and I write emphasizes in some way how to best serve your donors. We say it over and over again because, as industry professionals, you still don’t have putting donors first ingrained enough in your DNA. You’re getting better, but we still have work to do.

A charity that spends 20 percent on overhead and knocks its mission out of the ballpark is not less worthy of support than one that spends 10 percent on overhead but helps relatively few people. It’s one way of assessing things, but not necessarily the most meaningful...

Twice in the past month I visited with a CEO who had the sinking feeling that it was time to replace the nonprofit's chief development officer. The reason in both instances: a failure to connect with people. Both explained that unless pushed, their chief development officers would go to events and prefer to sit at their tables and not connect with the guests...

In the past, philanthropy was predicated on the not-so-average person doing a not-so-average thing. Giving his or her money to people and trusting us with his or her investments. Many times, this was done in what I call blind faith, meaning that the donor saw an organization doing good in the world, wanted to make…

If you’ve paid even the tiniest amount of attention to popular culture in the past decade, you’ve surely noticed that a lot of people really, really love comic books and superheroes. What was once perhaps looked upon as "nerdery" is now embraced as mainstream. And so it stands to reason that comic behemoth Marvel will…

"All you care about are the numbers! Relationships really don’t matter to you!" or "All you care about are relationships. We do need to secure our budgeted revenue, you know? The numbers do matter!" These two statements—these two positions—came into sharp focus for me when a good friend and colleague told me he had been part of a discussion about how some folks just care about the numbers and others just care about relationships. Hmm. Interesting, I thought. At least there’s a discussion about this important subject...

I hear this all the time. “Where do we find rich people to give to us?” Ugh. No. No. No. No. If you’re looking for rich people, that tells me you care more about the money than the donor, and, my friend, that is backward! If you want to be wildly successful at fundraising and…

I once worked with an 85-year-old philanthropist who liked to communicate by text. Forget everything about seniors avoiding technology. Forget that some of our elders believe that email and text are a rude replacement for good, old-fashioned conversation and letters. This particular octogenarian liked to text because it was hard for him to hear on the phone...

You have a donor offer you a gift before you are in a pending major campaign. What do you do? The ideal result of ongoing cultivation and engagement is for a donor to say, "How can I help you?" It is important that you have an answer where the donor can be a hero and make an impact. And this opportunity needs to be in the near future to keep his or her interest, create momentum and honor the offer...