March 10, 2014 | Read Time: 3 minutes
Fundraisers are too focused on landing new donors and don’t do enough to keep the ones they already have, the fundraising consultant Deborah Kaplan Polivy says in her new book, Donor Cultivation and the Donor Lifecycle Map: A New Framework for Fundraising. In an interview, Ms. Polivy offers advice:
Do fundraisers do a bad job of approaching donors?
Fundraisers sometimes don’t know what the etiquette is. It’s not that they lack it; I don’t think anybody’s taught them that to begin with. They haven’t had good mentoring.
Unless they have a board or a layperson who’s willing to stand up and say something, things just get passed over.
Can you share an example of an oversight you’ve seen in your career?
I was featuring an article in our newsletter on a family’s gift and I had a picture of the elders in this particular family. I gave it to the person who was responsible for the newsletter and I promised the family I would return the picture. I asked the person who worked for me—she was our major gifts officer—where was the picture. She blew me off constantly. I finally got down on my hands and knees and I found the picture behind her desk.
What is the donor life cycle map you promote in the book?
[When we talk about cultivation] we think about more money and more donors. But what I like to think about are more opportunities for giving. It’s always much easier to work with somebody who’s already made a commitment to give rather than to be constantly looking for new donors.
That’s not to say that we don’t need new donors, but more of an emphasis has to be placed on the donors we already have.
How do we work more definitively with people who give small gifts, maybe just $25, instead of just ignoring them?
Shouldn’t fundraisers be concerned about donor exhaustion, repeatedly asking the same people to give?
Not if it’s strategic. There is a whole list of cultivation tools. How do we use them wisely and creatively to keep a donor involved? It’s not always an ask. It’s inviting them as your guest to an event that happens in the community; it’s writing a thank-you note; it’s learning that someone has passed away in their family and writing some kind of condolence letter. It’s not a solicitation, it’s an interaction.
Who else are fundraisers ignoring?
If you had a huge donor base, in the past we very much chose what we thought was the male decision maker in a family.
Women are very much a part of the decision making in terms of the distribution of assets. They certainly are in family foundations. But most importantly, women are getting good salaries and inheriting from families and husbands.
We have assets and we are responsible for the distribution of those assets. If we own them and we have them, attention must be paid to us.
What about older and younger donors?
Older donors you have to cater to. Are they alone? Can you take them for lunch? Can you send them some flowers? Can you bring them to an event that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to drive to because it’s in the evening?
Younger donors want to bring their friends to events. Ask staff members of their own age to reach out to them.
What can fundraisers do differently?
To approach donors in the way you would like to be addressed. It’s all personal. People want to be paid attention to. They want their opinions to be addressed. They want respect. People work very, very hard for the amount of money that they give, and for development offices, if it’s not a large or major donor, they don’t pay much attention to that donor in the middle because they’re being evaluated based on the amount of money they raise.
