major donor

Breaking down the “my donor” mentality between direct marketing and major gifts

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The first thing that many major gift officers will instinctively do when they see their donor portfolio is to shut down direct marketing efforts to those donors.  After all, you want the donor to take your call and don’t want them mistaking you for a telemarketer.

Imagine if you tried this in any other walk of life.  Imagine going to Jeff Bezos and saying “this person has been buying a lot of stuff from us on Amazon.  Let’s make sure they never get another email from us, because I really think that I can sell them the Lladro Niagara chandelier for $100,000 (plus $4.49 shipping, which is either far too much for shipping or far too little).”

bond_villainHe would laugh at you until he got stomach cramps.  Or he would have an underling, possibly with a mechanical arm, throw you in a vat of piranhas while he stroked a cat.  All depends on the mood.

Bottom line, it’s silly to take someone who has been donating routinely by one means and, by all available evidence, been satisfied with it and cut them off from that means in the hope they might give more.  You should only change this if the donor asks you to (in which case, you should do so immediately, while smiling) or if you have a relationship with the donor to the point that there’s an alternate communication strategy in place.

That said, the major gift officer is right.  You don’t want to treat a potential donor the same way as a potential $10 donor.  This is not a defense of sending someone with the capacity to give a transformative gift the same 12-mail-pieces-and-a-cloud-of-dust approach that everyone else gets. It means:

A donor newsletter.  You hopefully are doing this already.  And you hopefully are basing it on Tom Ahern’s Making Money With Donor Newsletters.  In case you aren’t, your donor newsletter should:

  • Focus on “you” — you being the donor
  • Focus on what “you” did — progress updates and impacts
  • Have short articles
  • Be written for skimmers — white space, bullets, and compelling headlines and images
  • Have a return envelope but not be as “ask forward” as a traditional mail piece.

This more cultivating newsletter will help you make money from these donors.  But it also creates a holding pattern for your major gift officer.  You’ve already made the segue to what impact the person can have, leading to a more natural conversation when the officer is able to get in front of the donor.

Higher-touch communications.  This can be simple things like crossing out the impersonal salutation on a letter and writing in “Dear Nancy,”.  Paperclips in your mail pieces show that the piece has been touched by human heads.  First-class postage is a nice touch, as is expedited postage to get the mail piece to the donor.  One nonprofit of my acquaintance has their CEO write a holiday letter in blue ink, then copies it on the color copier for a handwritten appearance.  These are techniques that can segue naturally to higher-value communications with a major gift officer.

Higher-value communications.  We’ve discussed the supreme value of exclusivity.  A major donor may want to be able to get a sneak preview of your upcoming report or have an exclusive briefing call with your head of government affairs.  These types of velvet rope communications can build to events where major gift officers can meet with them face to face.  Once natural enemies, direct marketing can set up the major gift relationship.

Helping define the major gift portfolio: You are looking for one of two things: a long giving history with multiple gifts per year, increasing gift amounts, and participation in the mission or someone who makes an unusually high first gift.  Usually the first group will be better prospects.

Thank extremely well.  Have you ever heard a potential major donor consider not making a major gift because they were thanked too well or too often?  Me neither.

Overall, you are looking to create a spirit of cultivation with these donors.  And you should give of your donors to your major gift officers.  By being a strong resource for them, you prevent them from trying the nuclear suppression strategy with you, allowing you to maximize revenue from these donors over time.

Breaking down the “my donor” mentality between direct marketing and major gifts

“Our donors” and channel conflict

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According to psychological studies, human territoriality is a multifaceted concept that includes physical space, possession, defense, exclusiveness of use, markers, and personalization.   

giphyI think of Milton from Office Space.  He possesses his personalized red stapler in his tiny cubicle fortress than he does not want to leave and eventually fights to defend. 

How often are we like this with our donors?

Even the phrase “our donors” is illusory.  A donor no more belongs to your organization than I belong to Google just because I am dependent on their search engine and mail programs for even the most basic forms of knowledge seeking and human interactions, respectively.

OK, bad example.  But you get the idea.

A donor doesn’t really belong to your organization; they are free to leave at any time (and frequently do).  

And they certainly don’t belong to any one aspect of your organization.

Yet we aim to possess donors, erect walls for their defense from other types of fundraisers, even mark our territory on them.

The thing that got me thinking about this is Joshua Benton’s excellent piece with NiemanLab about NPR’s decision not to promote the NPR One app or its podcasts on its terrestrial radio stations. 

They will not ask for any downloads or mention podcast hosts in a way that would be seen as an endorsement.

Part of this is understandable.  Radio stations pay the bulk of NPR’s bills.  These stations want to hold on to their share of ear and make sure that people listen to radio stations.  They exert pressure; NPR folds.

But this feels very much like the classic Theodore Levitt article about Marketing Myopia:

 

The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented…

 

OK, a virtual show of hands.  Who thinks that NPR’s long-term future is in traditional radio-wave-based radio?  OK…  OK… thanks.  Hands down.  

Now who thinks their long-term future is in online radio, podcast, and things we haven’t even thought of yet?  OK… OK… keep them up… there are a lot of you to count…

Yep.  Exactly.  Yet because of territoriality, they mortgage the future for the present.

So what business is NPR in?  Are they in the radio business?  Or are they in the informational (or entertainment or thought-provoking) business?

The same is true for your nonprofit.  You put up barriers to protect your walk donors from being over-solicited or make sure your major donor prospect don’t get mail pieces that might soil their hands.  You make sure that national/local doesn’t get their stinkin’ mitts on “your donors” because that money should stay local/national.  As if it matters which pocket gets filled.

In what business are you in your direct marketing?  If you are not in the loving-donors-and-being-loved-by-donors business, might you be in the wrong business?  If a $20 mail donor becomes a $500 walk team captain, and that fills that donor up with warmth, do you view that as a $20 loss?  Then you are in the wrong business.

So this week, we’ll try to explode some myths about “our donors.”  They are not only your nonprofit’s donors.  They are not permanently destined to stay in a single channel.  They are not national’s or local’s.  They can be communicated with both personally and through direct marketing.  And so on.

And we’ll discuss some solutions, including a potentially radical (ironic) solution on Friday.  You won’t want to miss it.

Or, if you do want to miss it, hopefully we’ll catch you next week!

“Our donors” and channel conflict

It’s time to stop… the donor pyramid

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All pyramids are lies.They have a dishonest scheme named after them.  They will not keep your razor blades sharp or apples fresh.  They messed up the four food groups.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs isn’t really true (in the sense that there are fundamental needs, but there isn’t a hierarchy).  Even the Egyptian pyramids were really built by aliens.  I know that last one is true because I saw it on the History Channel and you can’t have lies in history.

They have a dishonest scheme named after them.  They will not keep your razor blades sharp or apples fresh.  They messed up the four food groups.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs isn’t really true (in the sense that there are fundamental needs, but there isn’t a hierarchy).  Even the Egyptian pyramids were really built by aliens.  I know that last one is true because I saw it on the History Channel and you can’t have lies in history.

i-am-not-saying

It’s time to give up the donor pyramid as yet another three-dimensional-triangle lie, something that desperate presenters shove into PowerPoint slides to give the illusion of intelligence.  (See also: clipart of stick figures doing things, photos of people shaking hands, any time arrows make a circle.)

So let’s see and know the enemy:

pyramid-12

It looks innocent enough.  But do not be drawn in by its tetrahedral lies.  These include, but are not limited to:

Steady steps up the pyramid.  Some illustrations even have a person climbing up the side of the donor pyramid like Yodeling Guy from The Price Is Right (I’m sure Yodeling Guy has a canonical name and such, but hopefully the description suffices).  In reality, steps are so frequently skipped as to render the metaphor useless.  Think of the little old lady who gave your organization $10 each year at Christmas, then left you a bequest of $400,000.  She skipped all of the steps.  You didn’t even try to get her to be a monthly donor, because your modeling indicated that she probably refers to going online as “The Google.”  And major donor?  Fuhgeddaboutit.  $10 per year.  She was probably the last person you were going to ask.  Literally, the last person.

I will bet the contents of my wallet (two dollars cash and seven receipts from my trip to DMA) that this experience happens more often than someone stopping at every step of the so-called donor pyramid.  At the point that the worst-case scenario for your metaphor is more common than your best-case, you have a metaphor problem.

More mundanely, it’s probably counterproductive to think that you are moving someone up one step at a time.  Take a look at monthly givers versus major givers.  Yes, you are probably going to invite your monthly donors to make major givers.  But if someone is giving you a thousand dollars through the mail and comes in high on wealth screening and affinity, you are going to start personal cultivation with that person (while not removing them from direct marketing, because you are not an idiot).  That will come at the expense of, and rightly so, an invitation to, and stop off in, monthly donor land.

The donor experience pinnacle is death.  If this is true for your organization, take a good long look at your donor relations processes.

Progress.  The donor pyramid has never heard of a lapsed donor.  When the donor pyramid thinks someone is about to say “lapsed donor,” it sticks its fingers in its ears* and says “lalalalalalalalalala” like a recalcitrant seven-year-old.**  The idea that you would have to get a donor back doesn’t occur to this pyramid – its donors are too busy ascending.

Meanwhile, in reality, lapsed donors are valuable.  They are less valuable than multi-donors, but more valuable than person-off-the-street.  But they don’t fit into the pyramid power’s progress.  So they are left aside.

This last point also shines the way to the better analogy: the donor flowchart.  It isn’t as aesthetically pleasing, but it is true.  In being true, it also helps us better conceptualize our process.  We need to differentiate major donor versus monthly donor asks.  We need to try to get our lapsing donors back.  And death is not the only way the donor story ends.

So congratulations, donor pyramid.  You make our list of Things to Stop Doing.  Now, if someone asks where your donor pyramid slide is, let them know that aliens took it.  After all, aliens are far more plausible than the pyramid-y version of the donor story.

* Yes, in this analogy, pyramids have fingers and ears.

** This author has a seven-year-old and knows of what he speaks.

It’s time to stop… the donor pyramid