Words from the road

I write from a hotel room in Indiana - my family and I are on the way back from a trip to Denver for my sister's wedding. In the course of countless miles of travel, I have had much time to think about many things. What I have learned first and foremost is that there are many rest stops along interstate 80 - everyone of them with a bathroom and when traveling with a recently potty trained 2 year old, you get a great view of every one.

Immediately after that thought had finished processing, I realized that this is a great time to take a look at the priority points in peoples lives and what impact that has upon our fundraising success. By priority points, I am referring to the points in our lives when events occur that impact our decision making process. This trip is a minor version of that - I and my family have extended our vacation this year and allocated substantial additional financial resources to this trip in order to be in Denver to celebrate my sister's marriage with her and her new husband. That decision is going to have substantial impact on our disposable household income for the next 6 months.

While in my case, this was associated with a siblings life event, these priority points would include birth of a child, death of a parent, job change (new or lost), sale or purchase of a house - there are many more that I have not listed but I think that the idea is clear. These points often have dramatic implications on the philanthropic behavior of our donors by changing both the focus of their philanthropic support - think having a child or losing a parent, and the amount of available resource - think my vacation example or losing a job.

Stephanie did a good job outlining how using surveys and other contact points can be of great importance in identifying folks with interest from populations that have not been engaged with you recently. I think that we all need to take these a step further and really focus them on current and recently lapsed donors. Developing the streams of communication that will lead to you being notified about these events so that you can react appropriately (does your alumni office send condolence or birthday cards) and solicit appropriately. If a donor tells you in the fall that they are not going to be able to give that year because of one of these points, think how much more effective your follow up communications can be if you are able to address that reason in future communications. I am not saying not to ask, just to be respectful of their input.

Be it through a PURL, a simple text email leading to a survey of life points, an HTML email leading to a microsite that encourages sharing of these items with other alumni through a mini-blog or even through the phone program, capturing and using these points to increase the value and effectiveness of future communications is an important step to building and maintaining the lifelong relationship that helps to distinguish our alumni relationships from all others.