Embrace Your Donors

Do you like the people who provide major financial support to your organization? Are you giving them enough love? Are you sitting down and having conversations with them, on their terms? Are you asking them why they support your organization and then listening to their answer? Are you taking them out for a coffee or lunch and a substantive talk about your mission? Or are you looking at your donors as data points, and measuring them numerically to define their capacities to support your institution? I hope it is the former, and not the latter.

Supporters of non-profits are often looking for real connections — connections with communities, connections with ideas, connections with motivated executives and program managers, and connections with the services that your organization provides. Why stuff their in-boxes with mass emails, and invite them to large, impersonal events? To be sure, it may seem more cost-effective to communicate with them using mass-marketing tactics. But, in the long run, treating donors as mere data points may cost you their support, and cost your organization money.

Of course automation is essential to drive a development program forward. But relying solely on your CRM to manage donor relations is a mistake. Most development professionals understand that major donors need a person-to-person contact with leadership or programmatic staff several times a year. How often you are able to do that depends on the size of your team.

And what about those mid-level donors? Shouldn’t you be in touch with them on a personal level too? After all, your next major donor may currently be giving at a more modest level. One-on-one conversations with these generous souls nearly always pay off in terms of either a larger gift, more consistent giving, or connections with other donors. So, go ahead, and give them some love too.

It takes time and thought to set up a major gift program of person-to-person meetings. Time constraints and scheduling alone can be a challenge. If this is an area where your organization needs assistance, I can help.