A Botanical Garden Seeks Support by Making Appeals in the Green Season

Traditionally, the Atlanta Botanical Garden has sent its annual-fund appeals at the end of the year — which isn’t necessarily the best time to trumpet the garden’s bounty of plants and flowers.

“In the dead of winter, it’s harder to make the case, ‘If you haven’t been to the garden recently, you must come see … insert the fabulous thing that’s in bloom,’” says Fontaine M. Huey, the garden’s director of institutional advancement.

So this year, the organization decided that rather than sending three appeals in the final months of the year, it would send letters in April, July, and October. The change, says Ms. Huey, was prompted both by Mother Nature and by the sudden onset of the economic crisis at the end of 2008.

“As we looked at the economy last year, we decided we just don’t need all of our eggs in that year-end basket,” she says.

To date, the organization has raised more than $22,000 toward its annual-fund goal of $32,000. (At the garden, annual-fund gifts are contributions that people make in addition to their membership donations.)

The target is about the same as the organization’s 2008 goal, but because fund raisers developed this year’s campaign without the assistance of a consultant, more of the money that comes in will go to the group’s programs.

Seasonal Interest

While the April and October letters are relatively broad appeals that talk about the garden’s overall mission, the letter sent in July focused on the group’s education, plant-conservation, and amphibian-conservation programs. Donors could earmark their gifts to one of the three “behind the scenes” efforts, the first time that the garden ever gave annual-fund supporters that option.

Of the 22 gifts made in response to the appeal, only four were directed to a specific program, a result that surprised Ms. Huey. She says she expected donors would welcome the opportunity to say how their donation should be used.

While most of the garden’s annual-fund appeals are printed by an outside company, fund raisers produce letters to solicit people who have given $2,500 or more themselves. The letters are tailored to sound much more like a personal letter from the organization’s executive director, someone many of those donors know.

“We do not want you, Mr. and Mrs. Orchid Circle who give us an annual membership contribution of $10,000, to feel that you got the ‘standard’ annual-fund appeal,” says Ms. Huey.

This kind of personal attention, she says, is even more important now, as many donors consider whether to give some of the money that they normally contribute to arts and culture groups to social-service organizations instead, in view of growing needs in the recession.

Says Ms. Huey: “As they are making those decisions, I want to make sure that I am not doing anything — at the risk of sounding very businesslike — that will make us less competitive.”