In the process of answering the essential “who”, “what”, “when”, “where” and “why” questions in planning a fundraising program or campaign, most of us begin with the identification of the prospective audience. In short, “Who” is the most likely prospect for a monthly giving program, or a major gift, a bequest, or a special giving club?

Although the process and tools for identifying the most likely prospects for a particular program have evolved considerably – thanks to analytic models, data enhancement, screening, etc., etc. – I remain firmly convinced that only a change in fundamental mindset and a willingness to more aggressively use technologies now available will result in true breakthroughs.

I’ll explain why in a moment.  First a very brief evolutionary summary to get us to today.

If your organization’s mission is focused on providing services to a small, local community in which your group is based, the “Who” process is relatively simple. Take the list of donors and prospects, sit with members of the board and other knowledgeable volunteers, gather their insights on those in your file, then slice and dice the list into segments that match the criteria for the fundraising efforts you want to undertake.

But…if your organization is one with thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of supporters spread around the country or the globe, the process of identifying “Who” takes on the characteristics of looking for needles in a haystack.

Thanks to generations of fundraisers willing to share their experience through books, conferences, trade publications and blogs, a body of knowledge and general principles on prospect and donor identification abounds. Want to identify “Who” is most likely to make a bequest? Then identify women over 60, without children, who have given 3 or more times a year to your group over the past 5 years and you have a very likely prospect. And on and on … the advice and experience is out there in abundance.

In last week’s Agitator posts and comments on the Donor Pyramid there was plenty of good advice: John Sauve-Rodd from the U.K. served up advice on spotting and calculating time from a small to a $1500 gift…Rick Malchow weighed in by citing the odds of what types of donors are most likely to be the most productive based on their entry gifts…John Whitehead warned about the upgrading pitfalls of donors who enter with cash…and Lisa Sargent illustrated the practical value of recognizing and rewarding longevity and loyalty with an example from the M.D. Anderson Medical Center.

Masters of the craft like Tony Elischer and Ken Burnett have taken the experiential and anecdotal lore and further codified it into helpful taxonomies of the donor species that better enable us all to organize our thoughts and more clearly explain our actions.

Yet, despite these all these theoretical and technological advances, I believe we’re still trying to perform the medical equivalent of brain surgery with a brick.  Or worse yet, with leeches.

I’M WONDERING WHY???????

…WHY is the identification of those folks we place into prospective slots on the donor pyramid almost entirely focused on the donors’ behavior within our own organization?  Have these donors no other causes in their life? Give to no other organizations? And if they do give beyond our organization, how much do they give and to what types of programs – annual, capital, planned giving, special projects?

Not many of us ask those questions, let alone try to figure out the answers.

Consequently, we find ourselves and our bottom lines trapped in the conventional reliance on such approaches as RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary amount) and other data analysis internal to the organization. A vicious organization-centric cycle no matter how sophisticated the analysis and no matter how adept we are with our Excel spreadsheets and statistical software programs.

In an effort to gain deeper understanding we take the next step of enhancing our database with demographic and wealth data. This sheds some light on capacity, but none about actual giving or proven philanthropy. So, wealth screening alone is not enough. [And these days, since 80% of most wealth screening services rely heavily on real estate data for creating their scores, I wonder how good even that approach is given the crash in the property markets.]

Until we can answer questions about the donor beyond his or her behavior we will never really know what “donor share” we can shoot for, or even what share of the donor’s wallet we’re currently receiving. Instead, we’ll stay stuck in the old mindset that focuses on ‘market share’ instead of ‘donor share.’
 
Fortunately today many of these questions can be answered.  Firms like DonorTrends, the parent company of The Agitator, have solutions for pinpointing the actual giving of your donors to other organizations or building predictive models based not only on wealth and potential, but on proven and actual giving, or even identifying the size and influence of donors’ social networks!

One of the reasons I’ve been heralding the arrival of the Age of Donor Conservation and the end of the era of churn and burn of donor acquisition is not just because inexpensive acquisition is a thing of the past. It’s because I’m convinced there’s a far, far better path to the future. We just have to pay more attention and invest more skill and innovation in learning more about who is living in our pyramid.

Roger

P.S. Next: thoughts on “What” to say to the “Whos” and the importance of “When.”