new and renew

As most of us working on campuses look around this week, we can see the renewal of the education cycle - new students are most likely already with you, other students are returning for a new year. Hopefully you are feeling a new surge of energy and interest in expanding your programs and seeing growth in giving and donors.

Many of us are still waiting for "the other shoe to drop" as decisions are still to be made regarding budgets, expense and in more cases than I would have expected, goals. If you are still waiting on final decisions or outcomes in regard to these areas, please take heart - you are not alone. But what to do?

Your first best course of action is usually to focus on renewals - do you have a program in place to renew your donors on the anniversary of their gift last year? If not, consider a very simple letter that goes out to all donors eleven months after their last "annual" gift last year. Thank them for their support, remind them that it has already been almost a year and that you depend upon them to provide support again this year and provide a simple reply device. This has provided upwards of a 25% response everywhere I have been. Over time, you can get more advanced, using this as the opportunity to increase gift amounts and even as an ideal time to get second gifts from donors who "jumped the gun" on giving.

If you already have some version of that in place, take a good look at your SYBUNT population - pull out donors who have a string of more than 5 years of consecutive giving at some point and start survey calling them - find out why they stopped giving and what you need to do to get them to start giving again. DO IT. if at all possible.

Online (that is the focus of this blog) do some simple data mining - who is opening your online communications, who is giving online - are they the same folks? I am going to venture a guess that they are not. Many of your online donors are getting to the giving page via phone and mail solicitations rather than through online solicitations. There will be a second component of this as well - many of your highly engaged online alumni, will be giving through the mail and phone programs. The first group are paying attention to you on their time and prefer non digital media but are comfortable with online commerce so give in that simpler fashion. The second group is where you can make some inroads into online giving. Put a simple case together as to why it makes more sense for the donor (not for you) to give online and put it into the next newsletter - see who reads it and make some follow up effort to those folks to get their opinion on it - these can be personal phone calls or emails directly from you seeking to gain their opinion in a one to one fashion. That will both inform you and serve to further engage the donor.

Each of these steps can be undertaken at little to no additional cost, will provide measurable and notable response while continuing to engage your constituent base. In times of uncertainty regarding budgets and goals, continuing to expand and enhance programs can be accomplished.