Lauren Pimpare

What does it take to ensure that community engagement isn't transactional, reduced to a buzzword or checkbox, in building partnerships between healthcare and people with lived experience? Our Power session with the team from INSPIRE is up on the website, you can learn from their research process, best practices, and action recommendations what it looks like to make community engagement more authentic and transformational.

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Are you getting your donation acknowledgement letters out within 48 hours of receiving gifts?   According to CFRE guidelines, that’s what you should be doing. After Mark Chilutti, CFRE’s great stewardship session at ICON, I have been reflecting on some tactics that can speed up your acknowledgement process: 🚀 𝗘𝗻𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀: Break down your procedures, identify inefficiencies, and explore innovative approaches to the process. 🚀 𝗨𝘀𝗲 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆: Tools like Conga Composer or WebMerge can help you drastically cut down on the time it takes to generate a document (thanks Aaron Madow Greenberg!). 🚀 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗩𝗼𝗹𝘂𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗲𝗿𝘀: Get help from board members and volunteers during peak giving periods to manage acknowledgements. For nonprofits, small or large, meeting the 48-hour timeline isn't always possible, and that's okay! What steps have you taken to streamline your donor acknowledgements? #Nonprofitfundraising #stewardship

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Tailor Your Funding Requests to Donors' Level of Receptivity The most receptive: ⏺ Living donors who have made estate commitments ⏺ Multiple major gift givers ⏺ Loyal annual givers of 15 years or more ⏺ Volunteers long-engaged in substantive activities (e.g. board membership) ⏺ Highly engaged in events and actives Moderately receptive: ⏺ Single major gift givers ⏺ Annual donors who have given 6 to 10 years, sometimes intermittently ⏺ Volunteers engaged for 3-5 years in occasional activities ⏺ Occasionally engaged in events in activities Lightly receptive: ⏺ Two recent and modest commitments ⏺ Attended a few events Where you would be wrong to assume receptivity to another funding request: ⏺ First time donors given little or nothing after their first commitment ⏺ Major donors who have not be contacted personally in a year or more ⏺ Someone who volunteered once or twice but never gave ⏺ Someone who attended one event Where you would be crazy to assume receptivity: ⏺ "Prospects" who have done none of the above Strategies that work best with each of these cohorts The highly receptive: ⏹ You can speak to the building blocks of organization because they are so much a part of it and trust in its ability to convert investment into impact The moderately receptive: ⏹ Conduct donor satisfaction interviews or survey's first The lightly receptive: ⏹ Interview or conduct survey to see how strongly they believe in your purpose, direction and leadership; the degree to which they feel they belong and if they see how their giving has bettered the lives of those you serve. Unsure of receptivity: ⏹ Interview or conduct survey asking to which cause or purpose they have been the most pleased and why, what has been their most and least satisfying giving experience, and their receptivity to volunteering. No indication of receptivity ⏹ Stop calling them prospects ⏹ Don't put them in portfolios ⏹ Look for other giving experiences as evidence of what they might be receptive to ⏹ Invite them to a substantive event that tracks with previous philanthropic interests Is this perfect? Hardly, but any effort to segment, experiment, and learn is much better than the spray-and-pray or assuming a "one size appeal fits all." Segmentation and customization are the beginnings of strategic philanthropic facilitation. Defaulting to the usual unimaginative tactical grind is wasteful and depleting for the organization and those engage in doing of that work, and good way to continue squandering your philanthropic potential.

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