Amy Eisenstein — Four Steps to Major Gifts Cultivation

08/17/17 • 26 min

Amy Eisenstein is an ACFRE certified development professional and fundraising consultant. She’s worked with nonprofits of all sizes for the last 15 years. Her specialty? Major gifts. When dealing with major gifts, it’s important to remember these four steps: Have a private face-to-face meeting. This is a must. You cannot discuss a major gift in a group setting. This can be at the beginning of your cultivation or toward the end, but you cannot get around it. More than one person can go on a face-to-face meeting — usually a board member and the executive director or development director. The meeting can take place at the prospect’s home or office and can last anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Invite them to see your program in action. Persuade each of your prospects to take a tour, visit a program, or attend an event. Choose something you think will have the greatest impact on that individual. Engage your prospects to volunteer. Invite your prospects to volunteer. On a committee, in the office, in direct service, one-time or ongoing. Volunteering brings people closer to your organization and makes them more inclined to give. Provide regular updates. Updates about your programs and services can be delivered by phone, email, in-person, or a handwritten note. Updates should be delivered twice annually to all prospects on your list. But before you jump into it, you should know where to start. Randy and Amy talk about cultivating donors and mistakes you should avoid. They also talk about how to set up meetings with potential donors and the best ways to measure success. Speaking of setting up a meeting with a potential donor, it’s important to allocate your time and focus on cultivation. Amy recently launched a major gifts challenge on her website. It’s a free challenge that encourages you to set aside time every day to focus on building up your donor base and taking large steps towards attaining major gifts. To get started, watch each video in the series. Start with the first one and go in numerical order. New videos will appear each week throughout 2017. Commit at least a few hours each week (5 hours is ideal) to taking the recommended action. This step is critical—if you don’t take action, you won’t see results. And share your progress in the comments section; if you add a comment at the end of each post Amy will offer free advice to keep your efforts on track. Remember—it’s never too late to start raising major gifts!

Previous Episode

Tom Ahern — Donor Communications Crash Course

Donor communications guru, Tom Ahern is a copywriter by trade. He knows the ins and outs of donor-centric fundraising and gave us some great tips for nonprofits. People like having conversations, but hate being “talked at.” Donor communications really are a two-way street made up of conversations and working together. This is easy to say, but harder to actually do. It’s important to make your donors feel like they are having a conversation with you. You can do this by sending out surveys on a regular basis, having them take online polls, soliciting feedback readers, holding online office hours for your donors on your website, and including contact information (like a phone number) in all of your donor communications items. Donor retention is important and the first step to that is meaningful conversations. A strong relationship with your donors can make a lasting impact. There are a few things that every nonprofit should do, but a first important step is knowing the different types of donor communications. Tom and Randy talked about Vu Le’s article and how two types of fundraising-- donor-centric and community-centric-- and how the two differ, how they are better fits for different nonprofits and how the two guru’s couldn’t disagree more about the topic.

Next Episode

Amy Sample Ward — The Ins and Outs of Community Engagement

NTEN’s CEO, Amy Sample Ward, and Randy covered a lot of topics in this week’s podcast. Amy referenced her blog, where she writes about the ever-changing world of social media, engagement and the nonprofit sector in relation to generations. It’s no secret that nonprofit branding is important to the success of your organization, but Amy had some different ideas on whether or not it’s the right thing to focus on. Instead, she urges organizations to think about the idea of community. She believes that a community is a group of people that is already directly related to you and should never be something that you’re “targeting.” Your community is a group that has already opted to get content from you; whether it be through a podcast or email, they want to hear from you! Amy says that’s important because they’ve already said, “Yes! We like you!” So what now? Is it like that awkward first date we’ve all been on? Yes, they like you, but what do you do about it? Cue: social media! The point of social media can be confusing. But, for your nonprofit, focus on using it for: Disseminating information about your causes and the organization. Building community and engaging with different stakeholders. Mobilizing actions like donations and volunteer work.