Forget About Donor-Centric
All year long you’ve been hearing various bloggers, including me and Roger, talking up ‘donor-centric’ fundraising … i.e., in various ways, making your fundraising about your donor, not your organizational ‘imperatives’. It’s a mindset more conducive to relationship building.
And with good intentions, you probably filed away a post or two, promising that you’d try moving in that direction.
But now it’s September, and you’re madly planning your year-end blitzkrieg … carpet-bombing your donors with X number of direct mail hits, interspersed with Y number of email appeals, and maybe even Z phone calls to your choicest.
I’ll bet your plan is 95% a knock-off of what you did last year. Probably the only change is that you’re going to try squeezing in two or three extra hits!
What does this approach have to do with being donor-centric … absolutely nothing. It’s ATM time.
You’ve got a number to meet (or more likely, numbers you’re expected to beat from last year). So you’re going to whack, whack, whack at them again. “Your gift will be matched 2x, then 3x, then a zillion times if you give between 11:59:59pm and midnight on December 31st.”
No way are you going to sit back and think about Donor Tom … what would be the best approach to him, given what and how he’s contributed (or not) so far this year?
Perhaps ‘donor-centric’ is a concept that’s only relevant for the first six or eight months of the year. Grow your fresh tomatoes early, then move on to canned or frozen.
And maybe that’s just the way it needs to be. Donor Tom will be so bombarded by appeals over the last quarter of the year that the last thing on his mind will be building a relationship with a nonprofit! And certainly not with a new group. He just wants to dole out some year-end gifts — more from a sense of obligation and to avoid harassment (little does he know your tenacity!), not commitment, He just wants to escape with some spending money for Christmas presents.
Am I wrong? Is anybody actually expecting to build donors’ commitment over the last three months … or do you just want to be first in line at the donor ATM?
Tom
P.S. Our latest on year-end giving was Roger’s August post, Google This. There are some shocker findings in this Google research about how donors are sussing their giving options.
10 responses to “Forget About Donor-Centric”
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Very provocative, and certainly there’s truth here. But I cannot condone forgetting donor-centric. Because if you get all ATMy at this time of year you’re going to lose these donors by this time next year. Or you won’t get them to give more. Or tell their friends how great you are. You want your donors to feel really great after they give to you. So, yes, you’re going to ask — maybe multiple times — at this time of year. But you still have to ask the right way. And that means segmenting your mailings, personalizing your mailings, proofreading and all that good stuff that shows your donors you know them. And with those from whom you’re asking for major gifts you must do this in spades. Most important, you’ve got to be ready with a strong, donor-centric acknowledgment program. After folks give they must receive a prompt, personal thank you. And I don’t just mean a form receipt. Maybe even give them a warm phone call. Or send them a welcome packet.The acknowledgment program is particularly important for the folks you acquire via direct mail, because research shows you’re otherwise going to lose 70% of them! So all this “ATM” activity right now will be a lot of sound and fury, signifying relatively little in the long run. Donor Tom may not be THINKING about building a relationship, but the nonprofits who reach out to Donor Tom in a donor-centric manner will be the ones he begins to think about staying in touch with. It’s the job of the nonprofit to get Donor Tom thinking he really, really wants to be our friend. We don’t just want him giving us a drop in the bucket this one time.
What Claire said.
I agree with Claire, and if you have been spending the last few months building the relationship with your prospects and current donors, they will already be primed and wanting to give.
Last year a new donor gave us a donation of £200. We sent a thank you. Actually it was a hand written thank you as £200 is a above the average.
Later this year we had an appeal. It was genuine in our need to raise funds. Out of the blue came a donation for £20,000. Those don’t happen very often. It runs out the donation was from the husband of the donor who gave £200 the previous year. It was clear from the accompanying letter they do they giving together and are very committed to the nature of the work we do (providing solar light to families in Africa).
I’d like to think that thank you – handwritten – made the sort of impression Claire mentions, and that (not the appeal) primed the way for the extraordinary gift when we really needed it.
[…] hoping they meant to provoke, and were really being tongue-in-cheek with their recent article. Forget About Donor-Centric is very provocative, and certainly there’s truth here. Nonprofits do seriously ramp up their […]
I am with Tom, but for very different reasons. The donor centric movement is almost 10 years old. I am unable to find the data where the “language” around donor centric dramatically improved donor retention for any organization. The concept has used a lot of logical language with zero insights into how to actually shift a culture to create extraordinary donor experiences that would drive both & giving retention that would ultimately increase the ROI on the investment of both time and resources into targeted relationships. I would love to see the evidence behind this highly marketed effort. When I visit the web site I can not find a single example of success achieved by an organization that has implemented this philosophy. Part of the challenge with this topic is that 90% of the time these threads are pecking at the margins of this topic ie the thank you note. I will be hitting this topic hard in an upcoming post. Thanks for the fuel Tom.
Oh, dear. I’m having trouble understanding why a robust donor acknowledgment program is considered “pecking at the margins.” We have a serious donor loyalty problem when nonprofits are losing 70% of their donors after the first gift, and 30% a year thereafter. Yes, “donor-centricity” appears “logical”. But it’s also backed by research — Penelope Burk and Adrian Sargeant come foremost to mind.
For-profit businesses have certainly adopted the practice of “customer-centricity” and I’m pretty certain it works. Look at Zappos, Nordstroms, Disneyland… just to name a few companies that know how to “wow” their consumer. From the Sargeant and Jay study “Donor Retention and Loyalty” comes this: “Donor satisfaction with the quality of service provided by the fundraising team is the single biggest driver of loyalty toward the organization. There are close parallels here with the commercial sector where similar findings have been discovered (Jones and Sasser 1995). It is for this reason that surveys of customer satisfaction are now so ubiquitous. ” http://www.studyfundraising.info/page52.php
Ken Burnett, Judith Nichols, Simone Joyaux and Tom Ahern also have plenty of persuasive material on the benefits of adopting a donor centric culture and practice. I’m not sure what Jay means when he says he cannot find data where the “language” around donor centric dramatically improved donor retention for any organization. IMHO what drives loyalty is treating donors as you would treat anyone with whom you want to build a lasting, friendly relationship. You treat them with respect, kindness and gratitude. They support you; you support them.
Claire,
My observation was that I can not find any data on organizations embracing donor centric concepts actually increasing the amount of time their donors stay on the books. The foundation of my observation is connected to a significant distinction in our thoughts on Disney or Zappos. Neither of these companies “practice” customer centricity…..they are customer centricity……retention is first and foremost impacted by the culture of an organization…not a result of a box to check having completed a task. With the culture shift comes a shift in what is measured. A great thank you initiative will not achieve very much when the metrics around measuring only transactions remains the same. We could learn much from studying the Disney culture. In 1999 I could not find any nonprofit training for donor retention. I took the whole team to the Disney Institute. After that everything changed and we improved lifetime on the books by 288%. Best of luck on your wonderful work in helping orgs see the light.
What I’ve observed personally and often is that the use of “donor-centered” writing (as opposed to the organization-centered writing that is typical of the way charities write to donors) can immediately produce different, far better, results, particularly from “relationship” communications like newsletters. Which leads me to question: Are we using interchangeably two concepts that are in fact different? Are we saying we hope to improve retention, when what we actually mean is, we hope to improve LTV? Adopting “donor-centered” language in a newsletter improved giving 1,000% immediately for a children’s hospital in MN … but did it improve retention of those same donors? Maybe. Maybe not. LTV soared, yes, thanks to the application of “donor-centered” ideas to the execution of their newsletter. But retention might have been unaffected; I don’t have the data, so I don’t know. Until today, I’d blithely assumed that LTV and retention marched in lockstep. Now I wonder if improvements in LTV can come without any special improvements in retention.
All organizations would be donor centric if they could afford it. In my experience, donors are prioritized by ROI because of limited hours in the day. I think most organizations would love to build strong relationships with donors, but that costs money. So they focus on the donors that will produce a large donaion. This is the catch 22 – personally thanking, talking with donors and meeting with them takes time. If your staff is limited, much of that time is spend organizing the various fundraising campaigns and handling mundane, but necessary administrative tasks. NPO also are scrutinized for spending too much on staff and administrative tasks, which is where the donor centric work would be charged. It is a difficult plan to implement with our current budgeting and evaluation processes.