Year over year

As each of our fiscal years come to a close, we all have a number of decisions to make - goal setting for next year, campaigns to schedule, programs to fund, maybe even staff to hire or additional dollars to allocate. It has been my experience that mail, phone and personal visits are typically best planned and implemented from campus, using campus resources and personnel. Online programs on the other hand can be, and maybe need to be more mixed at this point. Social media based campaigns are in keeping with that campus approach - assuming that the expertise and time is available on campus to keep up with and execute the work needed. Email based campaigns at very least need to utilize the services of an ESP (email service provider) to ensure delivery and the needed tracking to follow up on/with constituents based upon their actions. Anything more complex than those, most likely needs to be outsourced. While campus resources may be available and may even be able to provide the needed efforts in the near term, the ability to keep up with the changing nature of the technology is rarely dependable. As we expect to see this area continue to grow, we need to invest in it the same as we do the other aspects of fundraising. Consider putting aside additional resources now to grow that next year. Investment today will not only lead to continued growth in this arena but will allow you to develop the internal and external relationships that we depend upon to grow tomorrow as well.

Quick tips: Asks and funds

My fiscal year ends at the end of May so while many of you may have another month and a half or so to go, I am in the home stretch for this year and have things for next year well under way. One of things that I find to be a huge help is to start every year off with some back end work with our database folks. I find that I can save a great deal of time and increase the consistency of our programs by taking the time to create a series of formulas based upon consistency and recency of giving that encourages participation at the lower ends of the gift pyramid, growth of giving for the most loyal donors and increased support from those at the top of the gift pyramid. I test this year over year and use this time to look at what worked - percentages of renewal, increase and growth and then project out those aspects over the areas that did not have the same success. I take a simpler approach on the funds. My primary goal is to standardize the format and names of the funds that each donor last gave to. This usually entails a large portion of the funds that you use all the time and a portion of the funds that you either never use, have closed or have renamed, along with some typos and other errors. By standardizing each of these fields for every record in the database (well almost every one - I do exclude deceased) I ensure that whether lost, committed, Board member or do not solicit status exists now, if those folks are turned over to me, found or otherwise made solicitable, I am ready to go with them. This saves a huge portion of the work on each individual appeal and ensures that I ask for the same thing and amount in every solicitation, through every effort, tool or program throughout the entire fiscal year.

Redbox has it right...

A couple of weeks ago, we decided that we wanted to rent The Descendants for Saturday night. It was a Monday or Tuesday so we went to our Netflix account to see about bumping it up so the disc would be delivered in time. Unfortunately, The Descendants was not yet available on Netflix. We had seen the Redbox kiosks for some time but had never needed a movie that we didn't have access to until then. I went to Redbox.com and they had it. Even simpler, with a minor step to create an account, I could reserve the movie at the box of my choice. I did so, entering my credit card for a $1.30. I immediately got an email confirming the location, charge and title of my rental. I proceeded to pick it up later that day and got an email on my phone while I was still walking back to the car thanking me for picking up the movie, reminding me to return it before 9:00 PM the next day to avoid additional charges and offering me a free rental if made at the kiosk rather than online. We watched the movie and dropped it off the next day and again I got direct and immediate communication offering me additional value/engagement and providing me with confirmation that the movie had been returned - all before I got back into my car. The emails were appropriately designed to be easily read on my droid and were timely, appropriate, informative and useful. This experience led me to question our management of contacts through giving and events and I find we are, as a profession, way behind the curve. If someone attends your event can they check in on social media at each one? When they register do they get an immediate acknowledgement of that payment and a discount or suggestion for other opportunities to be involved in that communication? When they get to the event and check in are you thanking them right then for doing so? When they make a gift are your providing an immediate thank you including a summary of their giving and how much they need to give to reach the next gift level or offering them a benefits or other clear reasons for why their gift matters to you and them? Consider in small steps how you can make and use the social media, mobile communications and post engagement interactions to increase the chances of the next interaction happening right away.

quick hits - FY start communications

For today's post, I thought I would go in a slightly different direction. One of the primary communications that we need to be responsible for is updating our constituents on the impact they are having on our organization. Most of us do a very good job of doing so at the point of the donor making the gift, acknowledgement letters, receipts and thank-a-thons often cover this for the individual donor. We also do a good job in our solicitations, with messaging that covers "why" and "what we did" last year. Hopefully your magazine does a decent job of covering your major donors and ideally includes an annual "thank you for your impact" piece that talks about the impact of the masses and why the $10 gifts were important.

I would suggest that a FY start campaign be built around a public thank you based on some successes from the last year. This needs to be pervasive, covering all media that you fundraise through, coordinated and segmented. The segments are simple and direct - your gift mattered, this is why, thank you or gifts from donors mattered, this is why, and we missed you.

Use social media, create a badge for your donors and ask them to proudly add it to their pages at the same time as you do a voicebroadcast message from a known entity. This can be a campus celebrity, a beloved faculty member, a famous spokesperson who values your organization among many options. Follow this up with a simple direct mail piece - a post card or very small notecard both work, with a "tweet" sized explanation of why they matter and what their impact on the organization is.

Fiscal year start works because it also allows you to share the message of "the next time you hear from us it is for another effort" or "we missed you (implying that we don't want to miss hearing from you this year)".

Cheap and effective, this also provides a fundraising centric effort that is not an ask, a communication that we tend to skip over but one that helps lay the foundation for long term success.

Washing (and drying) your data

It comes up on a pretty regular basis in my experience, be it from the phone program asking why we only have phone numbers for 60% of our constituents, from the VP asking how come he can't find a number on that hot new prospect he just has to talk with today, the gift processing team asking about the address updates from the phone program last night or the direct mail folks asking when NCOA was last run on the data. IT is data quality and hygiene.

We are hopefully all familiar with NCOA and the updates that provides to our mailing data and in the same fashion, we should be treating our e-data at least as, if not more carefully with an opt in process and clear compliant opt-outs as well as utilizing strategies and approaches that properly maintain the reputation of the servers that you are sending through.

Just as important however, is making sure that your constituents and donors understand what and why you need what you need. St. John's is saving almost $300,000 this year by changing all of our forms to authenticate digital transactions on the address + zip level rather than just zip as we have been doing for the past decade.
That requires asking for that information on each and every transaction. So long as you are asking for that, include email and primary phone (allows them to supply a home or cell #) along with spouse information on every interaction. Whenever possible (and it nearly always is) also collect business information - title, employer and email (you can get phone given those!.)

"Drying" your data through social media can be a huge boon as well - LinkedIn and Facebook alone can provide a ton of updates through contests, games and job posting offerings at little to no cost directly through the social media tool. This is not only getting you good data directly from the source but building affinity while doing it!

Inviting your donors to give

The vast majority of fundraising programs have had and I hope are having, success in asking folks who attend events associated with the organization to give. Typically this is done through a thank you effort and it may include a personalized note or letter from a volunteer leader.

Some places are finding success in asking folks to give prior to the event. This is the process that I follow as it has worked far better for my purposes and I call them "solicitivations." These appeals center on the event details and a reason for giving that is directly connected to why the event exists. A good recent example is St. Patrick's Day. St. John's participates as a "marcher" in the NYC St. Patrick's Day parade and we have a brunch gathering prior to the march in the city. That gathering draws around 200 attendees, many of whom are already donors by March. The invitation goes out to around 12,000 alumni who live in the area who fit criteria determined by the alumni office for invitation. We provided a case for support tied to an alum who was clearly of Irish descent who also received a scholarship named for an Irish donor and we asked for general scholarship support.

Total responses were in excess of the total number of attendees at the event and dollars raised exceeded cost of the invitation.

Our new challenge is working to do the same via electronic means. I am looking at creating not just landing pages as we currently do for each event but adding microsites for those events with strong built in participation already. Creating opportunities for folks to engage with the signer, with students and with one another prior to the event actually happening and do it with a fundraising background clearly involved. The first of these that we are looking to do is our Annual Summer concert in July - I will post links and responses to this thread as they become live.

spring is in the air

On the east coast we have been treated to a really warm winter and March has felt more like May than March thus far. The job and stock markets also seem to be heating up early this year and that is nothing but good news for those of us in the fundraising world.

For many of us, the question becomes how to maximize results from remaining resources and I maintain that this is the time of year when it is all about targeting your efforts to audiences that are most likely to respond. Looking to raise scholarship? Talk to your current year donors who gave to another area. Looking to raise brick and mortar? Talk to your past unrestricted donors with a solid example of what their dollars would do. Looking to participation? Identify who is providing you with job updates and approach them with an ask based upon value of degree.

The smell of spring is in the air (or at least around the corner) and planning out the last quarter of the year should be long since complete but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be looking at your goals, your resources and you successes and making sure that your plan still fits, you play to your strengths and that your audiences are targeted by interest and need.