Blueprint Fundraising

You invite your supporters to a special event. It’s a part of your stewardship plan — to spend some time with your donors and get to know them on a personal level. As you look around the room, you have no idea who is there. People come and go. You don’t know if your top donor even showed — you’ve never met them. Ack! This wasted opportunity could have been avoided by adding a few elements to the event:

An RSVP process. Ask people to let you know if they plan to come to the event. You can better plan the event and if you notice that some people are not coming, you can phone to invite them personally or say you hope to see them next time.

A registration table. Even for informal events, having people register lets you know who came. It also allows you to personally welcome everyone.

Name tags with stickers. Name tags help everyone network and they help you identify your supporters if you have never met them. (Be mindful of what style will work best for the type of dress at the event. No pins or stickers on fancy dresses — use lanyards instead.) If you want to make further use of the tags, use stickers to identify types of people. For example, a red dot indicates a donor, green dot for a sponsor, blue dot for someone who is not a member or donor.

Assignments. Ensure that staff and board members know that their job is to network and be ambassadors for the organization You could even assign them to specific people or types of people. For example — you welcome all the red dots and encourage them to join our group, I’ll talk to all the green dots and ask them if they have been happy with their sponsorships.

Follow up calls. If you didn’t get a chance to speak with everyone who came to your event, use the registration list to make a few calls the next day. Ask people what they thought of the event and thank them for coming.

To be successful, fundraising has to be highly organized. If you need help in this area, I want to point you to an excellent book. It’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. A colleague recommended it to me a few years ago and I’ve been following its advice ever since. The concept is simple: you can get more done when your mind is clear. You can clear your mind and feel less stress by getting all your actions, ideas, random goals and anything else that keeps popping into year head, into a reliable system where you can get through tasks with focus and efficiency. It takes a little time to set up the system, but I don’t know how I would work without it now. Normally I’m not into self-help books and the following for this one is rather cultish, but it’s been very helpful to me!

Anyone who knows me is probably completely sick of hearing this! But here’s the easiest way to show gratitude for your donors and encourage their loyalty to your cause: phone them to say thank you the day you receive their donation. If you’ve tried this, you know how great it is! On a practical level, you let them know that their gift was received and that the tax receipt is on the way. On a personal level, you honour them with appreciation and get to know them better. The result: they will be impressed, flattered and know that their gift matters. You don’t have time for this? Well make time! Ask a board member to help. Recruit some volunteers. Set a limit and at least do it for all gifts over a certain amount. It’s important. If you want some stats on how important, email me or read Donor Centred Fundraising. OK people stop rolling your eyes at me now.

I read an inspiring article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy. It was about how a US charity, the Chicago Lighthouse for People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired (what a mouthful!), capitalized on a media story. They were featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. They had worked hard to get the paper interested in the story but when it appeared they didn’t consider their job done. They jumped into action — pulling staff from communications, fundraising and other areas together to capitalize on the attention for the day. Here’s what they did:

• Drank some champagne to celebrate the story (always have some champagne on hand)
• Contacted other media to interest them in the story/scheduled several interviews and follow-up stories
• Phoned board members to alert them to the story
• Phoned donors to tell them about it
• Purchased copies of the paper (enough for all major donors)
• Sent out copies of the paper with a note from the president or executive director

This is so smart. Don’t just hope that people hear you on the news or see you in the paper. Point it out to everyone who matters to you — and do it quickly because it will be old news in about 24 hours.

If you are reading this, you probably have a long list of blogs you check regularly. It can take a lot of time to visit all your faves. When I found myself spending more than 30 minutes a day checking blogs, I decided it was time to get help. That’s when I made a new friend: the news aggregator.

A news aggregator is a software program that allows you to subscribe to your favorite blogs (using their XML or RSS feeds), check for new entries, and browse through recent content from within the aggregator. It saves so much time and is especially great for keeping track of blogs (like mine) where the posting is on an occasional schedule. I use NetNewsWire — an amazing aggregator for Mac users. For the rest of you I have heard that SharpReader, AmphetaDesk, and NewsGator are good (but I have never used them).

Here are a few blogs that I subscribe to:

The Tyee
CBC
Guardian Unlimited
Grist
Gift Hub
Nonprofit Online News
The Artful Manager
Dooce
Go Fug Yourself
Gizmodo

If you are looking to develop your fundraising skills, the Association of Fundraising Professionals is a great resource. In Vancouver, where I’m on the local chapter board, we offer frequent professional development sessions on all sorts of fundraising topics. Many sessions are open to non-members. If you become a member, you have access to even more (including a mentorship program, job postings, audio and web conferences, an international resource library, and discounts on conferences). AFP’s international website has tons of fundraising news, research info and extensive information on how to practice ethical fundraising. AFP has members all over the world – check here to find a chapter near you.

I’m starting a new feature — the Tip of the Week. Every week I’ll share a tip big or small to help with your fundraising. This week it’s a little one, inspired by the $90 bottle of salad dressing posting below. If you have a tip to share, please email and I’ll post it.

When creating a fundraising event budget, include a realistic portion of staff salaries in the expenses. Unless your event is entirely run by a third party, staff are spending time on the management, administration or execution of the event. You should account for this to gain an accurate picture of the event’s real costs. Could you be raising more by devoting that staff time to another type of fundraising? Maybe not, but you should ask the question! And remember the measure of success is whether your event meets net revenue targets (not just gross revenues).

Last night I taught a class on capital campaigns in the BCIT Fundraising Management program. We talked about many things including “gift charts.” What is a gift chart? Basically, a planning tool to tell you how many gifts and prospects you will need to raise a specific amount of money. By creating a chart, you can see if you have enough prospects at each donation level to meet your goal.

Charts are not built on this math: to raise $100,000 we need to ask 100 people for $1,000. Instead they are built like a pyramid — we need one top gift, several major gifts, and many smaller gifts.

Here are a few guidelines for building a gift chart:

• The lead gift is at least 10% and maybe up to 25% or more of the goal.
• Build the chart downwards by cutting the gift size in half and doubling or tripling the number of donors at each level.
• Roughly 80% of your goal will come from 20% of your donors.
• For each gift you need 3 or 4 qualified prospects (not everyone will say yes to the amount you are seeking). Qualified means that you have some reason to believe the person would consider a gift at that level.
• As you go down the list, you need fewer prospects because people who said no at higher levels may give at lower levels
• Round numbers up or down to avoid bizarre gift amounts.

Sample Gift Chart for a $1,000,000 Goal

This chart does have some bizarre gift levels, so you would want to round those up or down. But I think you get the point — the chart allows you to see that you need a certain number of prospects at each level to meet the goal. If you have an established donor base, your chart may be heavier at the top. If you are just building your donor base your chart would probably be heavier at the bottom, with fewer major gifts. My next step would be to start putting prospect names at each level.