If you Close a Gift, Invite Everyone to the Party
Congratulations! You’re a frontline fundraiser and you’ve just closed a 5, 6, or 7 figure gift! Now, you’re surely developing a stewardship plan for the person, family, or entity who has made a considerable philanthropic investment in your mission, and you will go forth employing verbal and written expressions of gratitude and recognition, and you’ll plan events or experiences that expose the donor to the ways their philanthropy has advanced the organization’s mission.
What if you also planned and executed a stewardship plan for your colleagues that demonstrated the impact that their labor has made toward fulfilling the mission of your organization? What if you took as much care with your internal team, across not only your division, but across your organization, as you do with donors? Try this:
-Pick a gift, any recent gift!: And it doesn’t have to be a 5-7 figure, but maybe a leadership annual giving leap, a new member of your giving society, or first-time gift that you closed. (Of course, if you’re going to be sharing with someone outside of your division, make sure the news is fit for public consumption and not in the case where a donor requests anonymity).
-Fly backward through the winds of the butterfly wing: Reflect on the steps you took to grow the relationships and ask yourself who else was involved operationally or otherwise (frontline, back office, other department or divisions, volunteers). Spend 15 minutes in your CRM re-reading the old contact reports, giving history, the appeals they remitted, events they attended, past prospect managers, designations of their support.
-Invite everyone to the party: Reach out, even if by brief email, to share the good news, express gratitude for their specific role in the evolution of the relationship (and name that role they played specifically). Of course, if you’re having a real party, invite them to that, too.
Beyond being the right thing to do, recognizing, including, and communicating with your colleagues:
-Keeps the organization’s mission and vision at the forefront. Folks are motivated by knowing they play a very real role in advancing the shared mission. Especially in large organizations, this too easily can be lost in the minutiae, monotony, or cacophony of daily operations.
-Educates everyone about philanthropy and builds rapport among individuals and departments (I can’t be the only one who has worked at an organization whose development departments were seen as suspect by other members/arms of the organization…).
-Opens up communications to enable collaborations, efficiencies and synergies that you may not have even recognized.
I could write a very long-form prose poem entitled “Don’t forget” that makes visible much of the invisible labor frontline fundraisers rely on for success. For these purposes, I’ll extract a few. Don’t forget: the event manager who bent over backward to accommodate the needs of a donor event; the facilities manager, faculty member, or admissions counselor who toured a space; the data analyst who handled with care all of the proper exclusions for direct response appeals (even when prospect managers missed the deadline to submit exclusions!); the researcher who found the person’s accurate contact information in the first place; the administrative assistant who labored hours over scheduling, travel plans, the gift processor who facilitated communications for a stock transfer on December 23rd. If it’s a really big gift, everyone might hear about it and feel good to have played a part, but the powerful thing is to make sure they know that you know how you value their role. Frontline fundraisers, whether because of ingrained industry cultures or personalities, get plenty of credit and exposure.
Yes, in the past I’ve been in many meetings where the idea that it “takes a village” is communicated strongly, where individuals or departments are mentioned by name, or there’s an office celebration where everyone receives a branded give-away (all of this is good- keep it up!). What I’m calling for here is the same thing that makes a frontline line fundraiser exceptional: personalized, individualized outreach to those people who have made a difference in your organization.
