Advice From a Top Gift Officer: 5 Lessons Learned From a Crisis

When alumnae rallied to save Sweet Briar College from closing three years ago, University of Maryland development executive Stacey Sickels Locke threw herself into the task of raising money to stave off her alma mater’s closing. She had launched her fundraising career at Sweet Briar — first as a student phone-athon caller, and later as a regional campaign director. She even dug up old calls sheets and got reacquainted with donors she had previously known.

Locke is now a seasoned veteran, a senior director of development for the University of Maryland’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. But the Sweet Briar crisis challenged some of her fundraising conventions and persuaded her to shake things up.

Here’s what she learned, and how she changed.

Amateurs can raise big gifts. The leaders of the Sweet Briar effort recruited a number of individuals to raise money who had little or no development experience. Yet the newbies performed well, even at securing major gifts. “Caring about the institution goes a long way,” Locke says.

Now, she says, she’s not hesitant to let a young fundraiser or even volunteers take a meeting with a big donor. “In nonprofits, we tend to assign our most generous donors to the most powerful people in our institutions. The problem with that? Powerful people are really busy. How often do those major donors actually hear from someone? Not very often.”

Don’t wait too long to ask for a gift. During the crisis, Locke sometimes introduced five- and six-figure gifts in the first conversation with a donor. “That just went against everything that I’d been trained to do — or had gotten comfortable doing. But it was successful.

“We had no idea whether the person on other end of the line was ‘ready’ to make a gift,” she adds. “And that’s where many fundraisers fail. They wait until the 20th lunch or the ninth meeting. And in many cases, I think the donor is sitting on the other end going: ‘What on earth is taking so long? I know you’re a fundraiser; let’s get on with it.’ ”

Connect Personally With Donors. During the crisis, Locke would pick up the phone at the end of every work day and plow through a list of prospects. That represented a refreshing change; at this point in her career, she’s focused frequently on large, complex gifts and doesn’t interact frequently with as many donors as she once did.

“It was really fun to build that muscle again,” she says. Locke now makes a point of setting aside time at the close of the day for similar calls. “I do discovery and cultivation, and I reconnect with people.”

Regularly update donors on your organization’s work. Donors and prospects came to rely on Sweet Briar’s fundraisers for information about the college’s unfolding legal and financial situation. At Maryland, Locke has begun an informal weekly email to donors in her portfolio to share news from her college — items about students returning from a fascinating trip, professors getting critical grants, and the like.

The notes don’t include a donation request, but they’ve prompted some individuals to give. “Once a month someone says to me, ‘Oh, by the way, I am ready to give.’ ”

Don’t shy away from a message of crisis. Locke says the rule of thumb in fundraising is that people give to success. Talking about an organization’s struggles will only scare supporters away.

But seeing how donors responded to Sweet Briar’s financial troubles, Locke has made it a point to promote philanthropy-dependent programs in need of lifeline funding. In conversations with major donors, she will talk about the usual capital gifts and endowed professorships. “But I’m also usually bundling in something that directly impacts students and may be at risk,” she says. “It might be part of a gift that makes the donors feel like a hero.”

Generally, she says, “I am much more candid with donors about the full picture.”