Donor Relationship Management

It’s annual report season, for better or for worse. Often it’s for worse, since many of them are long, boring booklets that put your donors to sleep. You don’t have to do an annual report, but you do need to share accomplishments with your donors. You may opt to nix the annual report and send…

An email recently landed in my inbox, and it was all about the ask. As I’m sure you can imagine, it wasn’t the first email I’ve ever received about it, and it surely won’t be the last. The ask is such a nuanced thing, and it lives in a gray area, which is often the case when there’s no one-size-fits-all approach for doing something the right way...

More donors than you know are feeling that they have become strangers, only valued for what they can give. When my business partner Jeff sent me this letter, I took a little trip in my mind. I went to this lady’s home and sat beside her as she was writing. It was a very sad experience. Take a moment to read what she wrote. I have faithfully reproduced it here with slight edits for clarity...

Donors give to organizations for a variety of reasons. They also choose not to give to organizations for a variety of reasons. Successful nonprofit professionals need to understand their organizations from both a need and want perspective, plus measure the impact their organizations are making in the communities they serve...

With online donations becoming the go-to way for donors to make contributions, it’s not surprising that donor stewardship should include ways to cultivate relationships online. Online stewardship adds variety to your outreach. By using online stewardship, nonprofits can reach donors on platforms they already use to communicate with friends and relatives. Here are five techniques…

Today, are your donors feeling like they made a mistake by giving to you? If so, it could be because too many nonprofit organizations have forgotten that the donor experience goes beyond taking a donation and doing wonderful things with it. It has to loop the donor back in—not just ask for another gift. It needs to tell the donor what he or she is making possible...

It is important to be metrics-driven in fundraising. Yes, fundraising is relationship-based, but it is vital that metrics, including the number of visits and the number of asks, be included in goals and performance reviews. This is not just for accountability—it is a very useful tool of focus for the fundraising professional...

I was recently talking to Susan, a development director for a regional nonprofit, and she was lamenting that she had another gala to put together. Even though this gala takes an enormous amount of time and effort from the staff, the executive director and the board want to keep it going because it brings in almost half of their revenue each year. Susan wasn’t upset about all the time and effort it took to pull it off each year, but the fact that the revenue generated by the event was really in transactional gifts, not mission-oriented gifts...

The development world is acutely aware that some people will never give. Naturally, we assume these non-donors are of no value to our organization. The reality, though, is that we’ve just presented them with a stimulus that does not match their expectation to take the desired action we request. They may never respond well to being asked for money, but we might be able to come up with something that would work better—if we could get past the idea that philanthropy is a sector without a product...

At the end of November, I made year-end donations to 25 organizations. Because I was worried about people who would be left behind in the new administration, 11 of these were new donations. I wish I could tell you that all these organizations sent glowing thank you letters and have been following up with engaging updates…