3 Campaign-Style Ways to Engage Donors BEFORE You Ask for a Major Gift

A common refrain in fundraising is how important it is to engage donors before asking for a gift. And yet, engaging donors is easier said than done.

Engaging Major Gift Donors, Campaign-Style

Experienced fundraisers know they are supposed to ask donors for advice. In other words, ask them for something other than money. Asking for advice is one of the key engagement tools fundraisers use.

That said, it can be challenging to determine what type of advice to ask for. You certainly don’t want to ask for advice you really don’t want or need. Your request needs to be authentic.

One of the most authentic opportunities to ask donors for advice is prior to a capital campaign. That’s because the capital campaign planning process provides a unique opportunity to seek out your donor’s advice.

Now, even if you’re not planning a campaign at the moment, stick with me here.

Capital campaigns are simply major gift fundraising efforts on steroids. You can (and should!) use campaign principles to raise major gifts as part of your annual fund. So keep reading…

When planning a campaign, your organization is trying to do something more impactful than ever before. That will require raising more money than you ever have in the past. Therefore, you need your biggest donors and community leaders on board with your ideas and your plans in order for that vision to become a reality. This isn’t a small endeavor. It takes many people to make a campaign work.

That’s why feasibility studies rely on asking donors for advice long before nonprofit leaders ask for gifts.

3 Types of Feasibility Studies to Inform Your Engagement Strategy

Even if you’re not in a capital campaign, you should consider taking some of the best campaign practices and applying them to your donor visits as you work towards raising major gifts. Let’s see what we can learn from feasibility studies — a key engagement tool used in capital campaigns.

1. Traditional Consultant-Led Feasibility Study

The traditional model is where you hire a consultant to interview your key stakeholders and donors. The consultant asks your potential donors for feedback about your campaign plans, their thoughts on how you might accomplish it and if you can. And, what role they might be willing to play.

The problem here is that you’ve outsourced (or worse, avoided) the relationship building. By sending in an outsider, you’ve missed a unique opportunity to get to know your donors prior to asking for a gift.

2. DIY Leadership Interviews

If you’re doing a smaller campaign, have tons of campaign experience, or have board members who simply don’t want to pay for a feasibility study, you should conduct your own, informal feasibility study. At the Capital Campaign Toolkit, we call this style of donor engagement DIY Leadership Interviews.

Again, this do-it-yourself approach isn’t a formal feasibility study. After all, your team probably doesn’t have much (or any) experience with this type of donor engagement. However, it’s so much better than doing nothing.

You never want to “skip” the idea of a feasibility study. You need feedback on your plans from those who have the ability to make or break your fundraising efforts. This can easily be applied to smaller efforts, like when you’re not in a campaign. Simply talk to your donors and ask for their feedback on your organization prior to asking for a major gift.

3. Guided (Hybrid) Staff-Consultant Collaboration

The combination of the above two provides you with the best of both worlds. A Guided Feasibility Study is when you hire an experienced consultant or advisor to coach you through donor interviews, which the leaders of your organization conduct with donors.

This model allows you to feel confident that you’re approaching the right people, asking the right questions, and have the ability to collate and synthesize the responses into a credible report and series of recommendations prior to launching a campaign. The outsized benefit of this approach is that you — not a consultant — are the one building relationships with your donors prior to asking them for a major gift.

Scaling a Fundraising Campaign to Meet Your Needs

As I mentioned at the top of this post, a capital campaign is major gift fundraising on steroids. So, if your organization hasn’t had a capital campaign in the last ten years, it’s probably time to plan one.

Capital campaigns are used to propel organizations to the next level of service. You don’t need to be buying or renovating a building to have a capital campaign. It’s simply about building capacity for your organization (which may or may not include building a building).

You Might Consider a Mini-Campaign

If you are not ready to embark on a large-scale capital campaign, why not plan a mini-campaign? You’ll use the same strategy, structure, and methodology, only it’s scaled down to meet the needs of your project.

Simply pick something specific and conduct a mini-campaign within your annual fund to raise the funds for a special need. For example:

• Raise $100,000 to buy a handicap accessible van for your senior center
• Raise $100,000 to install new computers, improve the WiFi, and other technology for your after-school program
• Raise $100,000 to fund a veterinarian at an animal shelter

Twice a year, the Capital Campaign Toolkit runs a Mini-Campaign Boot Camp. The goal is to raise $100,000 or more in just 8 weeks. And once you learn how to do that, you can apply those principles over and over again at your nonprofit.

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Whether you’re doing a full-blown capital campaign or raising major gifts for your annual fund, you’ll want to find genuine, authentic ways to engage your donors. Asking for their advice when you really need it is a great way to do that.

What do you ask donors for advice about? Let me know in the comments.