Author: guest

…a guest posting by Andrea Kihlstedt

What personality traits make up an ideal nonprofit fundraiser? In my last post, I discussed the common misconception that you’ve got to be an extrovert to connect with donors. In that post – and in my most recent book – I’ve shown that many of the introverts among us can bring unique strengths to the fundraising table.

Today it’s time to talk about another common misconception about fundraising: the idea that, to get the gift, you have to be able to speak from the heart. You know the kind of person I’m talking about – whether a famous orator like Martin Luther King, Jr. or your organization’s executive director when she gives a talk that brings people to their feet, some individuals have the gift of moving hearts to action.

Few of us doubt that a person like this can become a great fundraiser. As you know, fundraising is about building relationships – and who doesn’t want to have a relationship with someone who knows how to make them feel wonderful and inspired?

But what about the people in your organization who lead from their heads rather than their hearts? I’m sure you know many individuals like this – those folks who want “the facts,” and who prefer thinking logically to thinking emotionally. They care about details and want to know how things work … and why.

You might think that someone like that would bore donors to tears – and if allowed to take the analytic side of their personality to extremes, they might do just that. However, it is also true that, with the right training and encouragement, the analytical thinkers in your organization can be very effective at motivating some donors to give major gifts.

When I was first coming up with the Asking Styles system, one of the first people I thought about in this regard was my husband, Tyko. On the surface you might not think Tyko would be a good fundraiser; he’s a retired academic who prefers the logical approach, rather than the emotional.

On the other hand, Tyko would be the perfect person to send to meet with donors who, like him, are interested in the facts about your organization and exactly what their gift will accomplish.

By their nature, analytic thinkers would never consider meeting with a donor unless they have a firm grasp of the facts about the organization they’re about to represent. If the donor wants to know the rate of return on your endowment investments last year while considering an endowment gift, your analytic thinker won’t just have the simple answer. He or she will probably also be able to explain your investment strategy and your fund’s projected earnings for the next five years.

So yes, an analytic thinker has the potential to bore donors who prefer to lead from their hearts. On the other hand, donors who are more interested in the facts aren’t likely to connect anywhere near as well with intuitive, emotion-based presenters.

As a heart-based, intuitive thinker myself, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished I had an analytic thinker with me while being peppered with detail-oriented questions by donors!

While I am generally well-prepared with stories and basic information, talking about facts takes me out of my flow and actually makes it harder for me to connect with a donor. But combine an intuitive person like me and an analytical thinker like Tyko, and you’ve got a team that can both inspire and inform a donor no matter what their style.

With more than thirty years’ experience in this field, I’ve discovered that virtually anyone can become a successful fundraiser – introverts as well as extroverts, and analytical and intuitive thinkers alike.

The real key is to encourage every person who helps with your organization’s fundraising to be their authentic self, to create teams with complementary personality traits (or as I call them, Asking Styles), and to pay attention to your donors well enough to understand which approach(es) will work best for them.
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Want to find your asking style, use Andrea’s Asking Style Assessment; and, if you want to read more about Asking Styles, take a look at Andrea’s book, Asking Styles: Harness Your Personal Fundraising Power. You can contact Andrea at Andrea Kihlstedt.

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Have you seen
The Fundraising Series of ebooks ??
They’re easy to read, to the point, and inexpensive ($1.99 – $4.99)
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A Guest Posting by Sue Smith

An issue was raised in a listserve: “As someone more used to working with the clients, I have become more and more concerned about the exploitation of clients and ‘their stories’ as fundraising tools. I am constantly being asked to ‘provide a client or two’ who are willing to be interviewed, photographed, [and] have their story shared. One part of my brain understands the necessity, and I have rarely felt the results were anything less than tasteful. But another part of me is very uncomfortable with the notion of ‘using’ our clients to get money from people.”

Susan responded:
The decision to make a gift is, above all else, an emotional one.

People don’t support agencies like yours because they like the idea of it or what it does. They support you because you have a track record in making a difference in people’s lives. They support your organization because it helps people.

How do they know that? They know because your organization takes the time to illustrate what they do by telling people’s stories.

Although we’ve all heard people say that they support an organization because they “like what it does,” what they really mean is, “We like what you do for people.”

You’ve heard it zillions of times before — people give to people. They don’t give to equipment, programs or bricks and mortar — they give to [obtain/maintain] equipment that saves people’s lives, or [to fund] programs that make the neighborhood a better place for people in which to live/work, or to [erect/renovate] buildings that will provide shelter for people, etc. etc.

Telling an appealing story about a person or family who has received support, help, and services is a powerful way to illustrate what your organization does.

If you say the same thing, but in the abstract, via the words of the Board president or Executive Director (i.e., “Our program is unique because it, blah, blah, blah…”) you’ve distanced your potential donor from a powerful experience — the actual experiences of a person who receives direct benefit. That’s what encourages people to give.

Second, by allowing your agency to use a personal story, you provide a consumer/client/patient with a good way to give something back to the agency and to help the agency do something it needs to do on an ongoing basis — raise funds.

Most clients/consumers/patients would love to have a way to help the agency that has helped them. Not all can volunteer time or give money. But many people who have received services are delighted to share their personal stories to help other people who may be in a situation similar to their own, or to help the agency that has been so helpful to them.

Of course, when we tell people’s stories and they are good enough to allow us to do so, we should be mindful of the fine line between telling a good story and exploiting a person’s misfortunes. We should also be careful not to compromise a person’s right to privacy/confidentiality.

But you shouldn’t assume that every time a PR or fund development person approaches you for [the name of] a good client to interview, or for a possible anecdote involving clients, that the request constitutes exploitation or is in some way using them.

I used to ask rehab staff, nurses, physicians, teachers, etc., in various NPO’s where I have worked as a development director to think about people who used our services and whose stories were compelling. They would come up with several suggestions and they would talk with that person on my behalf to see if they were willing to share their stories. I never had anyone say no.

In almost all cases, they allowed photos, were able to read/approve the copy I created and, for direct mail, I told the story in the first person and asked the client/consumer to sign the letter.

We had wonderful results!

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Sue Smith, a long-term development practitioner and consultant,
currently serves on the staff of the Mohawk Valley Community College.
Sue can be reached at Ssmith@mvcc.edu
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Have you seen
The Fundraising Series of ebooks ??
They’re easy to read, to the point, and cheap ($1.99 – $4.99) ☺
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If you’re reading this on-line and you would like to comment/expand on the above, or would just like to offer your thoughts on the subject of this posting, we encourage you to “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of this page, click on the feedback link at the top of the page, or send an email to the author of this posting. If you’ve received this posting as an email, click on the email link (above) to communicate with the author.

A Guest Posting by Mari Lane Gewecke (The second of two guest postings on this subject)

A client contacted me after being approached by a donor database sales representative with a proposal to solve their donor retention challenges by replacing their current database.

The feature in the new software that most interested my client was an automatic pop-up alert when they have lapsed donors. They felt that this feature was much simpler than making the effort to run a query in their current software and, thus, would help them retain donors.

I am intrigued by the notion that actual human contact with our donors could be replaced by software. But then, I am old-fashioned enough to think that donor stewardship is the way to retain donors.

Knowing the specific needs of the client organization, my suggestion was to review the new software for the following:
• How many options can you use to code a constituent?
• How are grants, campaign pledges and pledge payments recorded?
• How does campaign pledge payment invoicing work?
• How does the software handle importing of new records and/or data elements,
such as phone numbers or zip+4 codes?
• How and in what formats does it export data?
• How is annual development income tracked and reported? By program?
• How does it manage annual appeals?
• How are grants tracked and reported?
• How does report generation work, and what types of reports can be generated?
• How does the mail merge work?
• How do you search the database using multiple criteria?
• How do you segment a group of constituents?
• How are special events managed and reported?

A good software database can satisfactorily address all of the above questions, and can track donor retention through reports. All you have to do is run the appropriate query.

Of course, if a database is too complicated for staff to use it effectively, then perhaps it is a good idea to switch to something easier to understand.

It is better to have something that is limited in scope but usable than something that can do everything, if only you knew how.

In the end, donor retention cannot be accomplished by software. Retaining donors comes from effective donor relations, which involves recognition and communication, not automated pop-ups on a computer monitor.

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Mari Lane Gewecke, of Lane Gewecke Consulting, has been advising client organizations on their strategic and fund development planning for more than 20 years. Read more about Mari at http://www.incolor.com/mlg/
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Have you heard about
The Fundraising Series of ebooks.
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If you’re reading this on-line and you would like to comment/expand on the above, or would just like to offer your thoughts on the subject of this posting, we encourage you to “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of this page, click on the feedback link at the top of the page, or send an email to the author of this posting. If you’ve received this posting as an email, click on the email link (above) to communicate with the author.

A Guest Posting by Ken Ristine
(The first of two perspectives on this subject, by two guest writers. The second piece will post this Thursday.)

Ever since desktop computers became common, nonprofits have found it a challenge to evaluate and adopt new technology. During the early years my major questions of organizations requesting grants for computers were: What software do you plan to use, and how is it applicable to your operations?

That was important because few software products really worked well for nonprofits and, more critical in those days, not all software worked on all computers.

All too often the answer revealed that not a lot thought had been given to those questions, and that many nonprofits got caught up acquiring technology before they really understood how they were going to use it.

Today hardware is much more flexible, so the major concern is software. And with the “new normal” that’s emerged in the last several years, the key software for nonprofits tends to be fundraising-related.

But, when choosing fund raising software (a database), many organizations fail to consider what information they have, what information they can gather, and what they will do with that information.

I’m in the final stage of helping a small organization, where I’m a board member, to adopt a fund raising database. I say final stages because there have been several key steps.

First, this organization’s key volunteers, such as the board, had to understand the basic changes facing the organization. In our case it is the decline of foundation and corporate grants and the need to grow individual giving.

Second, it was critical make key changes to the board’s monthly financial reports to clearly reflect those revenue sources and trends. The new reporting made the trend clear and has allowed the board to see the changes over time.

This understanding was critical to the third step, a commitment to our future.

The organization has chosen a path for where it needs to be in 3 to 5 years. That plan, and the organization’s commitment to it, tells us what kind of information we are going to need in 3 to 5 years. Knowing that, we know what information we need to be capturing and putting into a database today.

That commitment is critical; information doesn’t fall into a database by itself. It takes work; it requires mundane things like forms to capture information, and data entry. It means a commitment to taking the time and effort to collect and enter that information into the database.

It also takes a commitment for an organization to keeping that information stored and to retrieving it in meaningful ways. That commitment means paying attention to computer backups, report designing/writing, report running, and security issues—as in what information are you going to collect and who is allowed to see any-or-all of it.

Do you want to host your own database? Should it be on a network server? Should you look at a cloud-based system? You can only provide the best answers to those questions for your organization if you have looked at your past and your present, and made a commitment to the future.

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Ken Ristine is a senior program officer with a private family foundation in the Pacific Northwest. He has worked in nonprofits for over 35 years with experience in program development, fundraising, organizational development, and technology. He writes Ken’s Corner, a blog for the Puget Sound Grantwriters Association and can be reached at kenristine@hotmail.com

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Have you heard about
The Fundraising Series of ebooks ??
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

If you’re reading this on-line and you would like to comment/expand on the above, or would just like to offer your thoughts on the subject of this posting, we encourage you to “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of this page, click on the feedback link at the top of the page, or send an email to the author of this posting. If you’ve received this posting as an email, click on the email link (above) to communicate with the author.