Leadership Annual Giving communications

So you have your plan for the year - you know what you are sending, who you are sending it to and when it will go out - if you are where we really should be (and this is a do as I say, not as I do item right now) you should have at least a three year plan with goals and expectations and some form of outline on how you expect to meet those objectives.

Within that, I would expect that you have established a process for your mailings, phone solicitations and electronic fundraising efforts. Some of us are lucky enough to have internal assets in place to handle these, some of us are lucky enough to have an established vendor who provides the services that are needed and many of us need to establish who we are going to use on a case by case basis.

No matter the process, in online pieces and process I am a big believer in consistency. Create a look, feel and style that you really like and use a single production process for the entire year. If you are planning to use video, audio or other media files (and you really should be) line up the pieces, people and assets that you need to make that happen and get more recorded than you think you need. Then record a whole bunch more!

The title of this post is Leadership Annual Giving communications so if you have gotten this far, I am sure that you are asking how that ties in. I am putting the final touches on a webinar on leadership annual giving at the end of the month and as I work on that and think about this, it occurs to me that we tend to leave our leadership annual donors out in the "cold" from an online fundraising standpoint. I have seen a couple of pieces aimed in that direction but they have tended to be the same piece that was sent to other audiences with a higher ask and maybe a couple of minor edits to the imagery to make them look "classier."

I would suggest that we need to rethink that entire process. I have several ideas - v-flash, video thank you messages from students who benefited from your support, virtual campus tours, customized HTML - segment your donors by area of support and create segments that are merged into the message based on designation, custom messages from volunteers, messages from deans or other campus leaders, integration with the news feeds - get your leadership donors information at the same time that the press gets it - when they read it in the paper the next day they will feel a part of the inner circle.

What do you all do? What is working for you - it can be associated with stewardship, solicitation, informational, or other communications.