A collaborative capital campaign created an entire new arts and business district in Cleveland. Photo: Gordon Square Arts District

Collaborative fundraising takes time and trust. That’s what we heard over and again in our interviews with seven nonprofit executives in Rhode Island, Boston, Cleveland and Spokane, each of them successful collaborative fundraisers.

We looked into the topic at the prompting of our friends at New Roots Providence and presented our early findings at a New Roots workshop on January 19.

The short version of what we learned from our informants:

• Successful collaborations flow from a deep process of trust-building among the partners. The right partners may take years to self-select, discover their shared goals and commit to combined action.
• Detailed legal agreements help establish trust and smooth functioning by exploring and resolving the partners’ deepest worries in advance. (These also take time)
• At the same time, good partners must be ready to make commonsense adjustments to agreements when they create unfair or unproductive results for some partners.
• Long-term and permanent collaborations need to form an independent organization to fundraise and distribute revenues. (Another time-consuming process.)
• The collaborative case must promise more than the sum of its partners: new funders respond to a transformative vision.
• Truly successful collaborations can reach more and larger funders and generate more income at lower cost than the two partners could achieve separately.

Our cases covered five forms of joint fundraising: grants, workplace campaigns, events, capital campaigns, and, finally, our elusive ideal of truly integrated annual fundraising. We’ll tell you more about three very interesting cases in future posts:

• The YWCA and YMCA in Spokane, Washington created a fully integrated capital campaign to build new shared buildings in two locations.
• The Gordon Square Arts District in Cleveland, Ohio brought two theater companies together with a community development organization to build not just theaters, but a whole theater-oriented arts district with major economic benefits for the city.
• The Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts began by building new shared performance space for the the Nora Theater Company and the Underground Railway Theater. The partnership then went on to take on all fundraising, business and back office operations, leaving both groups free to focus on their artistic missions alone.

If you have had a good – or bad – experience with collaborative fundraising that you think could help others, please send me an email. We’d love to hear from you.

Did you know that the typical major gifts officer meets with 7-10 donors a month?

I’m just wondering how many donors or prospective donors your organization – whether that was your Executive Director, your fund development staff, or your leadership volunteers -  visited last month?

For many small organizations I know, they’d be lucky to visit that many donors in a year!!

No wonder most of us aren’t raising the money we’d like to raise.

Want to see the metrics that universities use? Take a look at this slide deck presented by Eduventures at a 2011 CASE Conference in Vancouver.

We can create giving pyramids all day. We know that we need 4 or 5 qualified prospects to realize one gift. What those gift pyramids keep telling us is that we have to find, qualify, cultivate, solicit, and steward a heck of a lot of people to reach our fundraising goals.

It’s really hard to do that from your office chair. Or during a committee meeting.

So, let’s finish up the plans, polish up the case, and then get down to the really important work — those one-on-one conversations that are essential to our fundraising success.

Wondering where to start? Start with the people who already love you… your donors, your volunteers and your board members. I’ll bet that list will keep you busy for a while.

“The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for ‘the least of these.’ “

Since then, the gap between the rich and poor has only widened in the US.

The rich and poor rarely live in the same neighborhoods anymore.   Heck, the well-off don’t even need to mingle with the less fortunate or use public services if they don’t desire, with private schools, private beach clubs and swimming pools, private country clubs, gated communities and isolated vacation enclaves.

So, if you are an affluent individual who never sees the poor or has no need to associate with the less-well-off, and if you are relatively immune from the cutback in government services, how do you come to understand the desperate lives most people live each day?

I worry about the impact of this social isolation on philanthropy.

Yes, as the sheer numbers of the affluent continue to grow, charitable giving grows. But where does the money go? What institutions, serving what classes of people, benefit from this giving?

If we are most influenced by the people we hang out with, and the wealthy don’t know the poor, and the poor don’t have access to the wealthy, will we continue to see great stratification in resources among the nonprofits that serve the less-well-off and those that serve the poor?

At the AFP Massachusetts Chapter conference last November, I listed to a panel of development directors from prestigious private universities and medical institutes share details of their billion dollar growth campaigns. They noted they were aided by close to 200 fundraising staff.

As I listened, I couldn’t help thinking about the homeless outreach program and food pantry I consulted with, that, with just about 3 staff members, none in development , is serving the exploding food needs of individuals and families in my city. In just over a year, they went from serving 250 people a month to over 6,300, half of whom are children.  Their total income? According to their 2010 990 it was $176,848.

Obviously, not all of those with great wealth have turned a blind eye to the poor — the Gates come to mind. But as a profession, we need to be at the leading edge of a sector wide dialogue about how to help the isolated affluent discover and fund the other extraordinary and deserving nonprofit institutions — those that serve another segment of people who also deserve great education, great art, food on the table and a place to call home.

We owe this to our neighbors. And to the legacy of Dr. King.

“In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Too soon, you say. Mustn’t bother our donors but once a year, you protest.

I’m with you that it might be too soon for those donors who always send you a generous gift at the end of the year. (Though many direct marketers would dispute that).

But what about the donors who haven’t responded to your annual appeal?

In our work, we often encounter small nonprofits or new fundraisers who believe that the “annual” appeal is just that, a once-a-year request for a donation.

These small organizations often don’t analyze the giving patterns of their donors. They may have no useful donor database, or haven’t thought about what just how much work it might take to get donors to give again.

If an “annual” appeal raises the same amount of money or even just a bit more than it did the year before, it’s considered a success. But what isn’t known is how many of last year’s donors gave a gift again this year. Because that mailing list often contains donors and not-yet donors, new gifts from new donors will offset donors who failed to give again this year.

Keeping more of your current donors is one sure-fire way to raise more money.

According to fundraising researcher Adrian Sargeant, if nonprofits just increased donor retention by 10%, they’d see up to a 200% gain in revenues over donor lifetimes.

Yet Jon and I still bump into organizations of all sizes that can’t tell us what percentage of their donors renew from year to year.

While there are many ways of increasing donor retention by increasing donor loyalty, I’d like to put in a good word for just getting better at one of the technical aspects of raising money — don’t ask just once a year! Especially from your lapsed donors.

In my own experience, and that of my direct marketing colleagues, it might take anywhere from two to five renewal requests to get the vast majority of your donors to renew. I know of one grassroots organization that saw its membership returns increase by $40,000 in a year after they invested in a decent donor database, started tracking renewals, and increased the the number of times they asked not-yet-renewed members to renew their gift.

Think about your own response to fundraising appeals. Do you rush to the checkbook when you open a letter? (Thankfully, many donors still do.) Or do you put aside that appeal to respond at a later date and then forget to send a check, even if you had the best intentions?

Don’t you often need to be reminded that you haven’t renewed your membership, or made a charitable gift this year? (I wonder how many donors there like me who keep a running list of contributions they make throughout the year. I do it to speed up my tax filings, but it also helps me keep track of which of my favorite charities I haven’t given to yet this year.)

So before you think you’ve finished writing appeals for another twelve months, please reconsider.

There are probably a majority of your donors who haven’t make a gift yet who are waiting to be reminded.

Related post:

Give donors something worth reading

However,  it looks like our basic animal nature actually includes a generous dollop of do-goodism, judging from this NPR Morning Edition report. Lab rats at the University of Chicago have now proven to the satisfaction of scientists that they will sacrifice themselves to spend hours of persistent effort to free another rat trapped inside a small tube within the larger cages.

Not only do helper rats selflessly devote themselves to comforting their stuck buddy, they also work urgently to find the hidden button that springs the trap. They’ll do this even when the other rat gets released to a different cage, removing any social benefit. They’ll even help a pal when they could be working on liberating chocolate instead!

The scientists were thrilled to have discovered such pure altruism in another species. (I guess they never read Old Yeller.)

Let’s take this as a reminder to give our  left brains a break as we compose our year-end and other funding appeals. Before you start to pile up facts and arguments, seek out your organization’s deeper appeal to our basic natures as creatures on earth: ”Here’s another person in pain. Here’s how you can make it better.”

And then there’s this: Even though I really do brake for others, I am still an animal.

• Use your “heart and instincts.” Think about what would move you to give money, and write accordingly.
• Make your case succinctly right up front. Be very “crisp” right from the start by defining the problem and how you are planning to address it. Show why your organization has the credibility to address this problem. Don’t lead with a boilerplate mission and history.
• “Use bullet points.” Explain the need, why the need is important and how it is not being met, whether anyone else is addressing this, and why the money should go to you.
• In writing about your mission, explain why it is important. Would some other group have to come along to address this if you went away? Would anyone care?
• Show your passion.
• Explain your expertise, the commitment you’ve already demonstrated to this issue, and how it fits in with what you do.
• Explain how many lives will be affected and the impact you seek to have, not just how many people you plan to “touch.”

Good advice for making your case to any donor, don’t you think?

Have any success stories of corporate grant seeking you’d like to share? I’d love to hear them.

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P.S. Of course, if the funder has a specific format they want you to use, remember to follow that.

P.P.S. Formerly the President of Lesley University, Ms. McKenna talked about the lack of understanding about nonprofits she encountered when she moved into the corporate sector. She noted that of the foundation heads of the Fortune 100 companies, only 3% had nonprofit experience. And, that most had spent a good portion of their working lives within the corporation whose foundation they were now leading.

Overall, she felt our sector had a lot of work to do teaching the corporate sector about the nonprofit sector. (I agree. And government too.). Joking, she mentioned that PowerPoint presentations with lots of graphs and charts were very influential tools in corporate culture.

But never just assume lack of knowledge about your issues or the sector… make sure that you know who you are talking to. Remember to do your research on the background of your grants officer.

Related posts:

How we got the grant Part 1

How we got the grant Part 2

You can hear a lot by listening

A while back I was facilitating a workshop on donor and member renewals. To get started, I asked the room — board members and staff of environmental organizations — to explore their own personal giving by sharing their own experiences as donors or members. I asked them to think about experiences that really stood out, good or bad.

Bob’s* wife, an artist, was interviewed by the local newspaper. In the article, she shared her fondness for a particular repertory theatre which she said was one of the things she loved best about her State.

Not too much later, the couple attended a play at the named theatre. As they arrived, they noticed an envelope on their seat. Inside the envelope was a note to his wife from the theatre, thanking her for mentioning her love of this theatre in the newspaper article.

Also inside was a gift certificate for coffee and dessert after the show at a nearby restaurant.

WOW!

An unexpected and lovely thank you. A real show of gratitude. Needless to say, this particular act made a lasting impression… and really cemented the love of a fan.

I just finished reading the recently released report Growing Philanthropy in the United States. The report summarizes two think sessions held with top leaders in the nonprofit world this past year.

While I’ll have more to say about this report in coming posts, it’s worth underlining the major problem the report seeks to address:

While overall, the dollars given to charity have increased, individual charitable giving in the USA as a percentage of after tax income  (2%) has remained stagnant for the last 40 years.

The report noted low retention rates, especially for donors new to a cause. It recommended that charities need to do much, much more to understand the individual behind the giving and build relationships that matter.

So what does this all have to do with saying thanks?

Past studies have shown that a top reason that donors say they stop giving is indifference by the charity they give to – a feeling that they and their giving don’t really matter.

In her book, Effective Donor Relations, my friend Janet Hedrick CFRE, eastern region development manager for the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, strongly pushes the attitude of gratitude as an essential factor in building donor loyalty.

What is gratitude? It’s meaningful, thoughtful, heartfelt and individualized appreciation.

And when that appreciation is unexpected, it packs a powerful punch.

What thank you has taken your breath away lately? I’d love to hear.

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*Not his real name. But definitely a real person.

Our friends at the Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council here in Providence are carefully nurturing a small, but happily growing annual event, the Woony River Ride. This benefit bike ride took place on September 24, showcasing the environmental organization’s two proudest achievements, the 5.4 mile Woonasquatucket Greenway and Bike Path and, of course, the much-restored Woonasquatucket River itself. (The lower river is the setting for Providence’s famous WaterFire performance).

Soon after my muscles recovered from the 50 mile loop, I sat down with Executive Director Alicia Lehrer to find out how the team at WRWC measured success after completing their second annual Woony River Ride.

This was the Woony Ride’s second year and the 2011 results put this event in the “small but growing” category. The Woony Ride attracted 90 riders this year, up from just 37 in 2010. They ride brought in $18,000, half from corporate sponsorships, the rest from registrations and fundraising by riders. That’s a giant jump from the $5,000 they grossed in 2010. The team is happy with the results. (But not satisfied!)

On the other side of the ledger, the Council kept cash costs to a minimum (just $2,000) thanks to generous support from business friends who provided just about everything needed– from advertising and graphics to snacks, lunch, water and prizes. All that in-kind support means that WRWC can keep most of their future growth in gross event revenues.

What else did WRWC get right?

They relied on volunteers. WRWC’s three-person staff put in lots of time on the Ride, but without the sustained work of 10 core volunteers, including one who took on the task of mapping and marking the three ride routes (50, 23 and 10 miles), they would have done little else.

They kept it simple. While WRWC aspires to a triathalon event like one that takes place along the nearby Blackstone River, they realized that three sports would be much more than three times as difficult to organize and monitor.

They showed courage. In the face of torrential rains the day before and discouraging predictions for the event day, the Woony Ride began on schedule while other events planned that day were cancelled. Lucky or smart, the gamble paid off. It never rained.

They planned to do better. In addition to a debriefing among staff and volunteers, organizers also invited participant feedback. It’s tempting to just toss your banners in a box and move on after a big event, but WRWC’s post-ride reflection will pay off at next year’s ride.

Here are some of the lessons learned to make next year’s ride even better:

• Riders will hear more about the major landmarks and water bodies along the route, helping to educate them about how the hills riders climb and streams they cross connect to the river they are raising money to save.
• Organizers will corral returning riders long enough for them to hear a quick pitch for the work of the Watershed Council before they leave.
• Sponsorship efforts will start much earlier (January instead of late spring) so that materials can be printed with every sponsor listed in plenty of time for the ride.
• WRWC will recruit interns specifically to handle major ride assignments like sponsor recruitment, freeing up more staff time.

The intellectual and social capital that WRWC staff and volunteers accumulate from year to year makes every ride-related job easier and the rewards larger the next time around. That’s the slow but steady way to grow a reliably fruitful annual event.

The authors, both professors at Indiana University, home of The Center on Philanthropy, lament the depressingly statistic that giving in the US has been static for decades at just 2% of GDP. They suggest that more robust interaction between academic research and practice — and more academically educated fundraisers – is a potential solution to lifting us out of this giving doldrums.

We can talk more about this at another time.

But what particularly caught my eye was an assertion, that if true, every fundraiser should be aware of now.

The authors stated:

“… by simply changing the words in their solicitation to provide donors with social information, [fundraisers] could increase the value of giving by an average of 10 percent.”  (Emphasis added)

WOW! What fundraiser wouldn’t want to increase solicitation returns by 10%?

Immediately intrigued, I wanted to know how to do this. First, I had to decode what the authors meant by social information. (You might have been asking yourself that same question.)

So I read a few of the research studies available online that had been conducted by one of the authors, Jen Shang, PhD.

Providing social information, it seemed, was letting a donor know what other donors were doing.  The idea is that we are influenced by what other consumers similar to us have done – a concept that’s not unfamiliar to most of us, think of social media driven marketing like Foursquare, for example. Or the research on peer influence that we talked about in a recent blog post It’s not what you know, but who you hang out with.

In the papers I perused, some of the fundraising tactics mentioned by Dr. Shang included:

• Telling alumni in a fundraising appeal what percentage of the class has made a gift. Doing so apparently gets a bigger response than not mentioning this information.
• In Dr. Shang’s research, prospective donors to a public radio station were told what another donor had given during the same pledge drive before they were asked about their donation. Example: “We had another member, he [she] contributed $240.”  This led to higher giving levels, in some instances.  (I’m grossly simplifying, but that’s the purported gist of the research).

The papers I read seemed far from definitive on the topic. Some of the conclusions were based on experiments that involved using questionnaires to ask how people might act or be influenced in a given situation.

But nevertheless, I was still intrigued. I’ve often thought that one of the missing pieces to lifting US giving overall is the lack of community-wide benchmarks for personal giving. Is 1% a year enough? 5%? 10%?

If we knew how much other people gave, would we give more?

We have some examples of how this might work in practice:

• The tithe requirement of many religious organizations sets a benchmark for giving by members of the congregation. Higher personal donation amounts by state seem to correlate with areas where religious giving and participation in tithing faith traditions is high.

• Another notable example of the use of benchmarks is Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s challenge to US billionaires – the Giving Pledge- to give the majority of their wealth to charity. 69 of the 412 billionaires in the US have signed the pledge to date (16.7% – is that good?).

• A more common fundraising example that came to mind is the participation of peer donors on a solicitation team – not only so they can talk about why this program is important to them, but also so they can tell how much they were giving to the campaign.

• The invitation for that big gala fundraising event may list the host committee members by their giving levels, again, providing a benchmark for others to give.

But do we have any reliable data documenting a difference that these practices may have made in improved giving?

I’m not at all familiar with the use of this type of social influence in direct response programs like mail or telephone solicitation. Once, long ago, in a new member campaign for an environmental organization, we included a list of some neighbors in the same town who were members (with their permission, of course). I can’t say that after all these years I remember whether it lifted response or not – which makes me think the results weren’t terribly amazing.

It seems to me that with all of the fundraising activity going on in this country or abroad, there must be more real-world, tested examples of using social information in this way.

So I’d love to hear from you.

Do you have experience using social information to influence your solicitation requests?

Has it worked for you? Do you have data to back it up?

If we lifted giving in the US by 10%, that would be another $30 billion. No small change.

1. A gift pyramid is really helpful to determine the level of effort you need to raise money. It’s not just for big campaigns. You can use it to plan for special events and even annual giving programs. See how one works online at blackbaud.

2. If their website doesn’t list them, you can discover what grants foundations made in what amounts to what organizations by looking at their 990-PFs. You can find those on Guidestar or The Foundation Center’s 990 finder.

3. The Center for What Works has free sample logic models for 14 types of nonprofits.

4. You can find a lot of really helpful data through the Census Bureau, e.g. how many wealthy households are in your community. Get acquainted with their American Factfinder.

5. You can get low cost technology products (and free advice) at TechSoup.org