Tomorrow's donors

"Simply because they are your alumni today doesn't mean they will be your donors tomorrow." True. But as your alumni, they have the potential to be donors. You have a leg up on other charities because they have an experience with your institution. Sure, they may gripe about a professor, a parking ticket, or a misspelled name in a mailer, but you can overcome that with an effective message. If you can reach them. We can find new addresses, phone numbers and email addresses until the cows come home, but if we don't start to think about how to better steward our future donors... if we don't try to learn and somehow notate how they want to hear from us and what they want to hear about, well, then they will continue to just be constituents.

Eco-Option™, our comprehensive approach to green fundraising, provides a paperless, eco-friendly communication option for your alumni. I'd bet that many of them are concerned about their carbon footprint and would like to have the option to go paperless with their alma mater. And, after giving them the option, some might even cross over from the "future" to the "current" donor category. By giving them the option to tell you how they want to hear from you and honoring that, you immediately open the lines of communication. Now your messages reach them and the dialogue begins.

Sure, this is all easy for me to say - I'm on the other side with the flashy graphics and videos. If the institutional roadblocks are stopping you from taking a donor driven approach - then I'd say look for external help from a vendor to test out the theory so that you have results to back up the need to change things internally. Three client projects come to mind in which the electronic appeal asked for non-donor feedback - two were PURL campaigns with survey questions and one was an email campaign asking for non-donors to email a response back. The first PURL campaign for client A generated 6x greater completion rate for non-donors compared to a previous solicitation we sent to that same non-donor audience (or we can call it a 500% increased response rate from non-donors to sound even more impressive!). The second PURL campaign for client B generated a 14x greater response rate from non-donors compared to a previous appeal sent to the same non-donor audience (1300% increase in non-donor response). Client C's email campaign generated close to a 9x greater response from non-donors compared to a previous solicitation sent to the same non-donor audience (~800% increase in non-donor response). In all three examples, we saw high non-donor completion rates. Why? Probably because we were asking for them to give us their opinion and not their dollars. Now as we follow through and send materials to them that relate to their feedback, we will likely see greater non-donor participation and giving. With client C we're already seeing improved email open rates and completion rates from non-donors. After the email campaign, we sent an e-solicitation and the completion rate increased by 60%.

I believe that it is difficult to become donor-centered in our thinking and even more difficult in practice, but it's a critical step to ensure that today's alumni become tomorrow's donors.

To learn more details about Eco-Option™, click here.