Cultivating your potential major gift donors builds and strengthens your relationship with them.
Cultivation is a fundraising art, and today you’re going to learn tips on Cultivating Donors.
Assuming you’ve been following the Major Gifts Challenge, you already should have a list of your top prospective donors ready to cultivate. If you’re new to the Challenge, check out the introductory video here.
Why Do People Give to Your Cause?
Cultivation includes preparation. You can’t just ask for a gift without knowing something about the prospect. You need to know what motivated them to give to your organization and what will motivate them to give more.
Plan on meeting with them two or three times before asking for a gift. In those meetings you ask thoughtful, open-ended questions to learn more about your donor and their philanthropic goals.
You also want to further engage them in your work.
Building these relationships won’t happen organically. A cultivation plan will strategically build a relationship between each prospective donor and your organization.
You need the right tools and materials to cultivate, and there are some common mistakes to avoid, let’s review them first.
Common Cultivation Mistakes to Avoid
One mistake you can make is to share everything you know about the organization with the donor. Telling stories, facts, and figures, until you are blue in the face and the donor is bored to death.
Think about the best relationships you have in your own life. There’s some degree of back and forth. That’s what you’re aiming for with your donor. You need to come away knowing as much about your donor as they know about the organization.
Another mistake is believing that your donors aren’t interested. Most people want to help but they don’t know how. Your job is to be a matchmaker between helpers and great causes.
A good cultivation strategy will provide relationship opportunities. It will provide opportunity for your donor:
- to get more involved with your organization
- to learn more about what you’re doing
- to get their questions answered
And it will allow you to learn more about their goals and desires.
Remember, the ultimate goal is to move your donor toward making a larger gift by having them feel more engaged and connected with your work.
A Simple Cultivation Plan, Month by Month
Here’s an example of a simple cultivation plan, one month at a time. You needn’t start in January. Apply this plan any time of the year. Apart from a holiday card in December, these actions can be done anytime.
January – Invite them for a tour.
Of course, not everyone will need a tour, especially if they are already an active volunteer and are very familiar with your programs.
February – Send them a Valentine’s card.
A hand-written note on a card will remind your donors why they are important to your organization.
March – Invite them out for coffee.
Invite them to coffee to meet with a board member or the executive director. This allows you and others at your organization to get to know the donor. Ask lots of open-ended questions about why they gave the first time, why they continue to give, and what changes they would like to see in the world.
We’ll cover a first meeting in more detail in a future video.
April – Send them the newsletter with a personal note.
Be sure to pull the newsletter addressed to your top 20 donors out of the bulk mail – whether snail mail or email. Personalize it. Add a post it note or line at the top of the email letting them know you are thinking of them.
May – Personalize their gala invitation.
Let them know you’d love to sit with them, or that you hope to see them there. Request that they buy a table or offer to comp their tickets. Whatever you decide to do, treat them like a friend.
June – Invite them to volunteer.
Ask them to serve on a committee, speak to your clients, or help with a long or short term project.
July – Give them a personal update.
Call with a program update or send a newspaper clipping about your organization.
December – Send them a holiday greeting.
Send them a personalized holiday card. See if you can include a reference to something you’ve learned about them while building your relationship.
You get the idea … cultivate each relationship. You don’t need to do something every month, but you should be in touch consistently throughout the year, regularly working to build your relationship.
If your donors live out of town, use video chat to stay in touch. Let them know you’d love to see them if they are ever in your area. If you plan to ask them for $10,000 or more, it’s well worth a trip or two for you or someone at your organization to visit them.
Challenge Yourself Action Item
Step 1: Create a 1 page cultivation plan.
Create a single page cultivation plan for your top 20 prospective donors. Use the month-by-month sample plan as a template for your plan.
Step 2: Schedule your action items each month.
On the first work day of each month, check all 20 plans and add the appropriate task or action items to your calendar. Then stick with them.
Going Further with Major Gifts
Want even more details on how to cultivate donors? In Mastering Major Gifts, students receive detailed templates and worksheets to create their cultivation plans. Sure … you could create your own templates, but why reinvent the wheel?
If you’ve been searching for a way to supercharge your major gift program, Mastering Major Gifts could be just what you’ve been waiting for.
Act, Comment and Participate
Now it’s your turn to share your progress with the Major Gifts Challenge.
How do you cultivate donors? What’s the best experience you’ve had building relationships with donors? What are some challenges you are facing?
Let me know about your experiences with cultivation in the comments.
Thanks for some great ideas. My biggest cultivation obstacle is my donors are employees of the institution. I struggle to share things about the institution they don’t already know or sharing how their gift is making an impact, they see it daily.
Interesting! Are your employees your biggest potential donors? If not, I would let them do what they are doing and focus on other donors. Not sure you would have much to share with them as they already know the cause inside and out. Maybe use employees to help spread the joy to other donors.
Personal notes have worked very well for me with people born before 1945. They fully appreciate the personal touch and have told me so. Tend to invite me into their homes.
I’ve found a more frequent call (every other month or so) to baby boomers works well – they’re happy to visit a few minutes and typically share life stories as I share an organization story. They tend to want to meet at their offices.
Have not used texts with younger donors – anyone find success with this?
Tips on securing emails for this group (and any others)?
Lorrie – Thanks so much for sharing your wonderful experience!
As a millennial who is also a fundraiser, personal notes go a long way for us because we don’t receive them often. It’s easy to get lost in the electronic ease of communication, but these pieces stand out.
I will note sending me a large package of a notepad, calendar, what seems like 5 appeals, a bookmark, and more as a cold appeal (having never given, subscribed to the organization, and frankly don’t know what my direct connection to them would even be) isn’t the best route and is seen more as wasteful and ignored. However I realize this works wells for my grandmother.
Learning so much from these videos – THANK YOU! My biggest obstacle as the Major Gifts Manager is that we are a national organization and connecting with donors is mainly by mail and some will entertain a call. However, as a 40-year-old organization, the culture is that they don’t get contacted and those initial calls are sometimes met with “we don’t give over the phone” and a click. 🙂 I would enjoy learning about anyone’s experience with breaking the ice and creating a relationship with individuals 100’s if not 1,000’s of miles away.
Thank you for all of these videos. I have had some great luck cultivating gifts over the phone. When I worked at a national organization, this was what I did starting out. I found it very fun and had some great conversations that lasted anywhere from an hour to two hours. At my current organization, we are just starting to implement some strategies to steward donors. I am eager to apply some of the things that you are talking about and to share my results with you. The biggest thing on my horizon is starting a donor e-newsletter. I can’t wait to see what happens once we start sending out a quarterly newsletter. We also just had a large annual event. So, it will be interesting following up with some of the more generous donors from that event. I will let you know what happens with that.
Thanks so much for your work!
Our donors have been with the organization since its founding in the 80’s. We really haven’t gotten anyone new since then, and our donors and board members are aging and far less engaged. When we ask them to help us spread the word, all we get is the same geriatric population living on a fixed income, preparing their legacy giving. I’m new to this agency and am positive we’ll go under if we don’t get some new blood giving – and fast. Tips?
Not sure what the mission is, but generally when people have been supporting an organization for a long time, it’s something that’s important to the family. Start talking to their kids and grandkids.
We are going to begin inviting major gifts prospects and donors to participate in some of our center’s group activities. I took inspiration from Amy’s video chat with Tammy Zonker, and her suggestion to engage in Story-living, as well as storytelling with donors.
Cultivating donors is actually the whole reason I started this series. I am looking for better ways to cultivate other than direct mail pieces. We send thank you videos by email and text, email blasts, text blasts, personalized thank you cards, and we just recently started making phone calls to new donors. I want to put together a solid cultivation plan, and this video has helped give me some ideas on how to further our plan for that.