philanthropissed

I have a lot of money to raise from individual donors before the end of the fiscal year on June 30. There’s too many prospects to really be able to focus intensely on all of them while juggling grantwriting and event planning. Ah, the perils of being a one-woman DIY development department.

So which group do I focus on?

• Subscribers?
• Individual ticket buyers?
• Prospects suggested by the board?
• The segment with the highest dollar value out in asks from the last appeal?
• The segment where we have the deepest relationships?
• How do we judge that last one anyway?

I think the answer is obvious: I shouldn’t guess.

For context, I began this job a couple months ago. I don’t have important institutional knowledge that longtime development directors do yet. But I still have to do the job and raise the money.

I should not guess at which segments to focus on.

If I had more time, I would interview my organization’s best, longtime donors – and my organization’s best new donors. I want to know how they became donors. Is there a common pattern or two that will emerge and help me figure out the most successful methods of identifying and developing donors for this theater – and in tough times, choose who to focus on and how to make the approaches?

I want to know:  Did they subscribe or buy tickets before donating? What was the vehicle for their first gift?  Their most recent gift?  How have they been involved since donating that first time?

I don’t have time to do interviews, analyze the results, and implement a course of action between now and June 30. But I can ask my other resource – my executive/managing director, who is a fount of institutional knowledge, to brief me on the answers to the questions above for 15-20 major or longtime donors, and make sure I’m not missing anything huge. I can’t get stuck in analysis paralysis right now. It’s too costly, especially for fundraisers, where time literally is money. I must do.

But interviewing my donors is now something I plan to embark on as a long-term project – and now that I have time to flesh out the concept of the donor interview, there’s so much more that I want to ask. Like:

What angles or marketing approaches that we use appeal to them? Is it the ones that staff and board think are appealing, or is it something else – something that we’re too close to the organization to see? Do they respond to our messaging about the art, or weathering the financial storm, or neither? Do they even care what we’re doing to fight the downturn? Are they annoyed when we ask for money by email if they usually write checks?

I think the answers to these questions could have implications for our fundraising far beyond the current economic crisis. I spend so much time trying to figure out how to motivate donors that sometimes I forget that some of them like us enough to let me flat out ask.

And you know that old fundraising adage…”If you want advice, ask for money. If you want money, ask for advice.” So maybe my long-term strategy will pay off in the short-term after all?

Fundraisers: what would you ask your donors in an interview about their giving – and how would you choose which donors to ask?