‘We Kept Showing Up’: Volunteers Visit Donors

Behind the approach: Many nonprofits faced pressure to trim spending on fund raisers as the recession grew deeper. But staff cuts made it challenging to coax big donors to keep giving.

What’s working: Amherst College (No. 289) laid off five full-time employees and one part-time worker in its fund-raising department as the economy weakened. But it needed to reach out to a large number of potential donors anyway because it had announced a capital campaign in the fall of 2008, just as the financial crisis erupted. The college knew the timing wasn’t good, but it has overcome that challenge—raising $410-million already toward a goal of $425-million by 2013. It achieved success in part by asking trustees and alumni to step in and volunteer their time to take on fund-raising tasks. For example, a volunteer who was traveling to Hong Kong and China for work-related reasons met with donors there to follow up on groundwork laid by the fund-raising staff; the effort helped secure big pledges and saved travel expenses for the college.

Results: Donations to Amherst rose from $28.8-million in 2007 to $60.4-million in 2010.

Key lesson: “The most important element of our success was that we kept showing up,” says Megan Morey, Amherst’s chief advancement officer. “We kept telling the story, and we used the downturn and how Amherst was deciding to respond to it as an opportunity to communicate.”

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