The Key to Building Donor Plans

This blog is part 2 in a 3 part series on building donor engagement plans.

So, you’ve decided to build out a Donor Engagement Plan for your caseload. Great! Whether you’re using the Veritus Donor Engagement Plan template, or you’re choosing to use a different tool you have available, you may be asking yourself the same question: How do I start?

The first thing you need to do is commit time to making these plans. If you don’t take the time to be thoughtful and plan out the arc of your relationship with each donor in advance, it’s easy for people to slip through the cracks. I can tell you from experience that this work won’t happen if you don’t block time to make it happen.

These kinds of thoughtful, individualized plans will not come together if you’re quickly working on this in between donor calls or while you eat lunch before your next meeting. We encourage you to block off real calendar time, enough to allow you to be thoughtful about each donor individually. Ideally, you’ll want to block this time at least twice a year—at the start of the FY, and midway through, to assess where your plans are and what comes next.

Once you’ve blocked your time, there are a few general rules and best practices you want to remember:

1. For Major Gifts caseloads, we recommend that you do one personalized (one-to-one) touchpoint per month with each qualified donor on your caseload (unless they’ve requested otherwise). For Mid-Level caseloads, we recommend each caseload donor get a touchpoint every 45–90 days, depending on their tier. These should be a mixture of one-to-some touchpoints for segments, with occasional one-to-one touchpoints, particularly for higher-tier donors.
2. Remember that you’re planning for intention. You won’t always know what is going to be available within next year, so when you build out your plan, you can capture the objective you want to accomplish and maybe leave the details until later. As you’re starting, allow this plan to help you think through your intentions for the year.
3. You are also planning for a best-case scenario. This is what you hope to see happen. You’ll adjust if it doesn’t happen the way you planned—and often times, it won’t. My next blog will talk you through some tips on how to review and shift your plans as things change.
4. This plan should only include touchpoints that are being personalized and sent directly by you (either one-to-one in MG, or one-to-some in ML). If you know the donor is getting the Impact Newsletter as a part of the direct mail communications, but you’re not personally emailing it, or handwriting a personal note on it, it doesn’t count as your personal touchpoint for the month. It only counts when you as a gift officer have truly personalized the touchpoint.

This doesn’t mean you can’t utilize items coming from your mass communications or direct mail as your planned touchpoints. In fact, we encourage it! But these items are arrows in your quiver. You can choose to use them with personalization if you think they’ll be the best thing for the donor strategy, or not personalize them if it’s not the right fit in a given month.

As you think about building out your touchpoints, rather than going month by month, I encourage you to first think about the elements of your plan. Some touchpoints or activities are more critical to the arc of the relationship. Start with those, then backfill the other months as you go.

Asks: Your ask is the anchor of your plan. Think about How Much, When, and How you will ask each donor. Your asks may look very different for each donor—some a complex proposal and in-person presentation, others as simple as handwriting a note on a direct-mail appeal. The only wrong way to ask is not to ask at all.

Even in Mid-Level, while you might not be making direct asks, you can still plan for ask activities. Consider planning follow-up calls or emails after a direct-mail ask or planning for a complementary touchpoint to a direct-mail appeal as a way to encourage giving.

Meaningful Connections: What steps will you take to deepen your donor relationship this year? Do you need to get a visit, make a phone call, tour your facility, or schedule a Zoom? Both MGOs and MLOs should be aiming to get meaningful connections (especially for ML Tier A donors). Even more so, as MGOs, we encourage you to think about what your relationship goals are and then build out plans to work towards each goal.

Thank-Yous: We presume that you’re thanking your donors for every gift that comes in. But I encourage you to challenge yourself: How can you go above and beyond with a thank-you, particularly if a donor has stepped up in their giving this year? Maybe you can get a card from a program staff member or a client? A special thank-you video from the CEO? For an ML caseload, can you send out an email or video to all donors who increased giving last year, sharing how much that meant to the organization?

Report Back on Impact: Impact reporting is a type of You Made a Difference (YMAD) that specifically spells out to the donor how their gift was being used and how it made a difference. While you’ll likely send out multiple YMADs throughout the year, you want to make sure you have at least one that specifically makes it a point to tell the donor how their gift made a difference. This can be as simple as calling out a specific section of an Annual Report or Impact Report that is relevant to the donor’s interests, all the way up to a custom report if they supported a specific project or program.

You can still report back on impact even if their gift was unrestricted. If you know your donor’s passions and interests related to the work, then you still report on that, even if their gift doesn’t directly tie to it. “Becky, I wanted to make sure you saw the numbers on how many students we served in our after-school program this year. It is because of your support that programs like this have become a lifeline for these students!”

Make the Case: How will you take the time to show the donor that the need for their support is still relevant? These are touchpoints that talk more about the need than they do the solution. You may also hear these called Gap Statements or Needs Statements. These can be anything from a newspaper article sharing some stats or a one-pager about the current gap in funding. These are great to share in the months leading up to an ask.

Once you’ve taken the time to identify and plan out these elements for yourself, you’ll likely still have some months left blank. Now you can go back and fill out the rest of the months with other items you know may be available. These can be items like event invitations, newsletters, or other direct mail communications. Even holiday or birthday cards! We still want to make sure that the plan is personalized and relevant to the donor (or segment of donors in ML) based on their known passions and interests. We can use these other “arrows in our quiver” to plan out other items and fill out the months.

Tackle the above steps, starting with your Tier As and the donors you know best (or in ML, tackle them in tiers as a part of a communications calendar). As you go through the exercise, you’ll find it gets easier in time. And don’t forget, if you’re a Major Gifts Officer working through the qualification process, once you qualify a new donor, you’ll want to build out a plan for them at that time.

Once you have this plan in place for your whole caseload, you will find that you have an easy-to-follow road map for your donor work each month. On the next post in this series, I’ll share some tips with you about how to stay accountable to this plan.