Dangerous Assumptions

Lately I've been on a giving spree again. I've been making gifts at conferences for live online giving presentations, and also for some blitz or one day campaigns that have popped up on my radar. And some of the responses have contained some dangerous assumptions. We often think we know what donors want, believing in good faith that we know what is best. After all, we do this for a living so we must be right? 

Well, I go back to my wisdom from my dad, who always says he can't spell (which is scarily true for a man that ran a fortune 500 company) be he can always spell ASSuME. Here are some presumptive behaviors I've come across recently.

Remember that most million dollar gifts start with an annual fund or first time donor test gift of less than $100. Michael Bloomberg's first gift was a $25 annual fund gift.

I made two online gifts to universities as part of a presentation where I honestly critique online giving sites and the donor experience. both of these universities followed up with emails that stated "we can't find you in our database, tell us why you gave to us and who you are". AHEM. Seriously? The end here has had two drastically different results. One school I forwarded this response to was genuinely shocked and apologetic, after all, not only is an email like that a surprise to a donor, it's quite offensive. They are working on fixing their process and the way they contact their donors that aren't "known" to them. BRAVO.

If I give to Charity Water or American Cancer or the Wounded Warriors, they don't send me an email and say they can't find where they solicited me so why I am supporting them? 

The other school truly blew my mind. I received a response from their advancement services department explaining why I was causing them difficulty, explaining their process, and that my gift could potentially be a fraudulent transaction. It was about THEM not ME. There was a sentence in there about not wanting duplicate records in their database and about my donor category. I was flabbergasted. All of this could have been solved with a button on the form that asked me to explain my relationship to this institution. It also could have been solved by telling the donor that regardless of their policies and procedures, they could see why this is problematic. I wonder if their leadership knows this is how they treat first time non alumni donors. Needless to say, I won't be supporting them again.

I also participated in some one day giving challenges, a huge trend that is brilliantly working all over the country. I received my gift receipt for one and a sticker/magnet that reads "Proud ____ Alum". I clearly checked the "friend" box on their giving site. I'm not an alum. I feel like I should go find one of their alumni and give them the item. Don't assume folks, it's dangerous ground.

How do we take away assumption from our daily work? Well, we implement a simple fundraising principle we've all heard many times before. "Don't ask, don't get." if we don't ask our donors what they want or expect from us, we won't get to the truth any time soon. It's ok to ask them about their giving experiences, their passions, and how they prefer to be thanked and recognized. It's not ok to just assUme anymore.

What are your thoughts? Where are there dangerous assumptions in your work?

Cheers,
Lynne

Exciting Announcements!

Happy Monday Everyone!

I am pleased to announce that www.donorrelationsguru.com and donor guru the blog have undergone complete transformations! They both have clean new designs, a new format and an easier to use format for searching and finding samples, webinars, etc. I hope you enjoy the work we have done to make donor relations guru a leading source of practical advice and resources for you.

In that light, I would like you to help contribute to the cause! I need new ideas for swaps- We already have acknowledgments, stewardship reports, surveys, creative communications,invitations, videos, websites and more. What are we missing? Send me your best work by emailing it to me here: lynne@donorrelationsguru.com if the file is too large, send me a link to dropbox or google drive!

The more sharing, the more we all benefit-

Here are some of the items I would like you to share with others:

• Annual or impact reports
• First time donor packages or cards
• Gift Agreement Policies
• Work you're particularly proud of

What would you like to see? Add it in the comments below and I'll take action. Don't forget to also join our amazing LinkedIn group here.

Also, check out the new website redesign and know I'm open to all types of feedback.

I'm doing this for our community and am really proud of the work, but it's only as good as what we share with each other. Thank you for being a part of a vibrant community of caring fundraising professionals!

Cheers,

Lynne

PS For those of you who read this far... Donor Relations Guru the book... coming early fall!

Fundraising as a Vocation, Not a Job

There are two types of people that work in nonprofit fundraising. Distinct and telling differences emerge when you examine those two types of people. Many times I am often asked why I do all I do in addition to my full time employment. My first answer usually revolves around insomnia, my second answer strikes at the core of who I am, fundraising is my passion. I fully feel that there are two types of people working in our field. Some who feel it is their day job and the rest of us that feel it is our vocation or calling. 

Growing up, I was the kid who never knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. Among my lifelong dream careers were the first female NFL referee, the next Ernest Hemingway, and a  restaurant critic. Growing up, never did I say I wanted to be a donor relations professional. After trying many things from a boat captain to a pastry chef to a teacher and a bartender, when I found philanthropy, something in me changed.  We now have the opportunity to teach others about our profession, to hire the kinds of people that inspire us to do better. 

So why am I on this vocation kick? Because I meet people who are just in it for other reasons and I'm baffled. You won't become rich working in nonprofit fundraising, but boy is your heart full. The dictionary defines vocation as "a strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation." The first time I heard vocation it was in 8th grade when I had to take a series of all of the vocations, including wood and metal shop, agriculture, home economics (am I dating myself?), typing, and auto shop. But I am now convinced more than ever that fundraising is my vocation. I chose higher education as my specialty for a deeply personal reason that I won't go into in this blog (let's just say it involves my Dad) but one day if you catch me at a bar over a glass of Malbec I'll try telling you without crying. 

The folks I tend to do business with, those whom I admire, and those whom are my mentors all are in this profession and see it as their vocation. I actively choose not to spend my time on and with those who see it as another job or a means to an end. They exhaust me. As some might say, they don't
"get it". 

A job is defined as, "the work that a person does regularly in order to earn money" this designates a few differentiations from a vocation. The first is that the end goal is money, anyone in nonprofit will tell you the benefits are great, the pay is not that fabulous. The second thing about a job is that it seems to have a finite end and purpose, I just cannot say that about a vocation. My vocation consumes me at times, for better or worse.

Maybe I can relate it in philanthropic terms. People who work in nonprofit fundraising as a vocation are donors, and those who see it as a job are non donors? Is that too bold a statement?

As I wax philosophical, I would love to hear your thoughts. What drives you in your career? why do you do what you do? Is it a vocation, a job, what? How do you define what you do and who you are to others? 

Cheers,
Lynne

Moving an inspiration forward, I'm holding you accountable!

In the past twelve days, I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to traverse the country and spend some great hours speaking in front of some audiences that I’d never thought I’d meet. The audiences included a diverse bunch, from my mentors, to a nun in full habit to camp directors, people I admire and follow on Twitter to friends and colleagues. I’m so lucky to know that at every stop along the way I was able to see light bulbs pop overhead frequently of the attendees. I even had my own light bulbs ignited over a great word or catch phrase I hadn’t heard before.

This even happened to me and made my day, week, month, year, life:

I inspired some buzz worthy moments with my eloquent phraseology saying things like: “gift societies are dumb sometimes”, “if your leadership doesn’t believe in thanking donors, get your resume together”, “donors don’t thank themselves”, “your challenge this year is to thank your donors in a way that doesn’t require a #10 envelope”,  “stop begging people to be philanthropic and thank the ones who are instead”, “donors want access, information and experiences”, “donor relations and stewardship are not synonymous, you can steward a gift, not a donor”. These little nuggets of wisdom have been culled off of my twitter feed. I appreciate each and every person out there who has helped me share the good donor relations word. The question remains,  we have groups and groups of dedicated non profit fundraising professionals, eager to learn, to take away one item that will make their conference experience worth it. There’s no room for disappointment.

What happens when we return to our offices? Where does the motivation and inspiration go? What happens to the buzz and hum of conference excitement? DO we go back to our daily work and get lost in the grind? How do we challenge ourselves not to let that happen? I think we start with one small change and move upward from there. Set a goal with a tangible deadline and push forward. So you have a notebook or iPad full of ideas, where do you start? Start with the low hanging simple victory. Take one step forward with your new idea. Have one meeting with the teams you need and build a mini task force. Implement your idea, after all, ideas plus implementation equals innovation, and make it happen! Then CELEBRATE! You did it, reap the rewards and be thrilled that you did something about it. You have 60 days to get it done. When you do it, report back here. Accountability is key. So for now, I want you to tell me a new idea you’ve had in the last 30 days and list it in the comment section below. In two months I’ll repost it to check in on you and see how you’re doing. Do you accept the challenge? Great, now make it happen!!

Cheers,

Lynne

Recognition, Stewardship and Trust

I am fortunate that as part of my travels I have the wonderful opportunity to listen to many wonderful speakers. This past week, one of the speakers I had the good fortune to hear was explaining the relationship between major donors and organizations. Among his many salient points was the following nugget that I quickly added into my iPad to discuss with you. "Recognition is not motivational, stewardship is, Trust is experiential" profound in its simplicity eh? But it really strikes at the core of not only what we do as fundraising professionals but also why we do it. 
Let's boil it down into its parts and then look at the whole in terms of the relationships we ask people to have with our organizations. Recognition is not motivational: this strikes close to home, especially when you examine the amount of time fundraisers spend on public recognition of gifts, falsely believing that entrance into the platinum giving society over the titanium one will motivate a donor to stroke and extra big check this time. It also relates back to my post last week on donor honor rolls. Very very seldom do these types of recognition motivate donors to give, yet we seem to spend a great deal of time in their service. 
Stewardship is motivational: amen. If you as a nonprofit, spend my money according to the purpose it was given, tell me how you spent the money and then tell me the impact it had on others, I'll give to you forever. Stewardship builds loyalty, it reinforces good behavior and builds trust in the organization. As many of you know, I think Charity Water is the best in the business at this. They not only tell me how they spend my money, they send me the GPS coordinates of the well my funds helped drill! They do this regardless of the amount of my gift. How come other nonprofits, universities included, fail so spectacularly at this? We ask, nearly beg, for unrestricted funding, yet these are the folks we communicate with about the impact of their giving the least. How does this make sense? If there is truly an area of greatest need, then for the love of all that is holy, tell me what that need was and how my money made a difference! It doesn't have to be glamorous, tell me I paid the light bill. Bought reams of copy paper, anything, but tell me something! 
Trust is experiential. If you've ever been burned by giving your trust too freely you can literally still feel the sting of betrayal. It's a palpable feeling that never does seem to recede all the way. When an organization breaks a donor's trust, the road is long and hard and full of  painful rocks. Many years of good relationship building is lost in one simple breech of trust, and safe to say in many cases, people aren't forgiving, nor should they be. You solicit a donor for money and then don't spend it because your department chair is saving for the day Bruce Willis arrives on a spaceship? Well that's a tough second ask now isn't it? There's forgiving, and then there's blind trust. Your organization must be trustworthy in order to have donors invest in it and maintain their giving.

How do you feel about the significance of these words we use very often in our world? Are there other profound simplicities here? I'd love to hear from you.
Cheers,
Lynne 

Why Honor Rolls of Donors are the Most Wasteful Donor Relations Practice Possible

There are many things I believe we do in donor relations that make absolutely no sense. Top of my list is the honor roll of donors. I hope you read this post and share it with as many others in the nonprofit world as humanly possible.

In all my time in donor relations, I have never heard of a donor who gave an organization a million dollar gift because their name was in a textual list of donors. Yet I must get asked at least once a week what I think of honor rolls and their place in donor recognition and stewardship.
 
I think they have no useful purpose, they provide opportunities to make costly mistakes, they are a huge waste of human resources, time, money, and they are otherwise foolish.

Why Honor Rolls Don't Provide Any Benefit

Time and time again, we have asked donors what they want and how they want to be recognized, and the three things that appear most often in their answers are:

• Access
• Information
• Experiences

Donors want handwritten notes from students. They want to meet those that benefit from their philanthropy. They don’t care about your honor roll, only you do. Just because you have always done them does not make honor rolls a great idea.

"A list, a list of names, does not tell a story. If an image is worth a thousand words, a donor honor roll is silence."

Why Honor Rolls Actually Hurt Donor Relations

In major cities, honor rolls are passed around from research office to research office, basically telling your competitors where the money is.
Talk about a privacy violation!

"From the donors' perspective, you might as well put a blinking neon sign above each of their heads that says 'I give money away!'"

What You Should Do Instead

If we took the time and effort that goes into producing monstrously ineffective honor rolls, and pooled those resources instead into a piece on the impact of a gift, the story behind the gift, and the story behind the donor, then we would be much more effective in recognizing the people behind the gift. Those people and their stories are what truly makes philanthropy possible.

I have yet to hear a person who works at an organization that produces an honor roll say, “It's so easy, I just push a button and voila!” or “I've never heard a complaint.”

So I ask you in the clearest, most relevant way I can to stop it.

Stop doing them.

Eliminate all honor rolls, all the time.

I’ve helped to eliminate honor rolls at many institutions. Every single time, we have saved money, staff time, and other countless hours of grief. Every time, the honor rolls went away without a complaint. In their place, we have been able to build robust and meaningful donor relations programs, with tangible ROI and with storytelling that is meaningful to donors.

I'd love to discuss this with you, and I’m open to a civilized debate. Please email me at lynne@donorrelationsguru.com for more information about discontinuing honor rolls and replacing them with more meaningful forms of donor recognition.


I originally wrote this post for my friends at Academic Impressions. You can view it here.

Thank and Give Day- Best Practice in Action!

To celebrate National Student Engagement and Philanthropy Day on February 27, 2014, the University at Buffalo held its first-ever TAG Day (Thank And Give Day).  

We had several goals going into this multi-faceted project: educate students about philanthropy, expose students to the impact of giving at UB, recognize faculty and staff giving and thank current donors.

The Office of Donor Relations and Stewardship and the Office of Annual Programs began planning for TAG Day together in November 2013.  Once our basic ideas were formed, we assembled a larger committee, with representation from development staff in our 14 schools and units.  The committee gave great input and helped to formalize the plan.

TAG Day Stations:  We originally wanted to keep it simple and set up 2 or 3 “TAG Day Stations” in high traffic areas on each of our campuses. After forming our larger committee, the excitement grew and so did our plan.  We ended up with 12 stations total!

Goal #1:  Engage, educate and expose students to philanthropy

·       At each station, we used price tags to tag items and spaces on campus that have been supported by donor dollars.  Since we are a large, public institution, it is very difficult for us to find the exact cost of items.  Instead of exact prices, our tags featured a few different phrases such as “Did you know?” facts.

·       We also tagged physical items (a police bike and a microscope for example) and large signs that were made for the day with photos of scholarship students or endowed faculty.

·       We handed out lollipops and bracelets that encouraged students to “Think About Giving”

Goal #2:  Thank donors

·       Students were asked to sign thank you banners that were ultimately left behind for display at each station.  They were also asked to write handwritten messages on pre-printed thank you cards.

·       Students (and faculty/staff!) had a lot of fun using props and signs to take “selfies” saying thank you to our donors.  We had hand-held signs made up to use in the photos.  Students could take their pick of what sign they wanted to use.  We encouraged them to post their photos to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using #UBTAGDAY.  To further incentivize them, we offered $100 campus cash to the top 3 winning photos.  In the end we had 64 photos on Instagram, 336 posts and photos on Twitter and 43 posts on Facebook.  

Goal #3:  Recognize faculty and staff giving:

·       We wanted to both recognize faculty and staff donors as well as show students that faculty and staff give back.  We mailed a letter with an explanation of TAG Day along with buttons that said “I GIVE, TAG, you’re it! #UBTAGDAY” to current faculty/staff donors and asked that they wear their pins on February 27^th.   There was much more buzz from our faculty/staff donors than we anticipated!

The BIG Day:

Students were very responsive to our message and happy to sign our banners and write thank you notes. They were very excited to take photos with our props and post them to social media. Our volunteers had just as much fun as the students taking “selfies” and pictures of their stations – it sort of became a competition between the stations. At our Student Union station, our university president and a few other university leaders stopped by and posed for pictures with students. 

Every station had their own thing going for them – some received more thank you notes than others, my station got a lot of signatures on our banner, and other stations had amazing student photos that were posted! We even had donors who were not in Buffalo posting #‎UBTAGDAY and telling people why they supported UB.

In all, we are calling #‎UBTAGDAY a success! We are already working on a plan for next year’s TAG Day. Next year, would like to do a little more investigating into what days certain groups of students are on campus, such as our pharmacy and law students who are only on campus certain days of the week. TAG Day was a lot of work but we had a great team behind us and we had fun! We encourage all schools out there to do something for National Student Engagement and Philanthropy Day. It’s important to educate today’s students about philanthropy as they will hopefully be tomorrow’s donors.

For more UB TAG Day information, please feel free to contact Katie Camm in UB’s office of Donor Relations and Stewardship at kehunt@buffalo.edu or (716) 881-7483.