This blog is part 3 in a 3-part series on building donor engagement plans.
You’ve built out a Donor Engagement plan for your caseload. Congratulations! This work is important to your success, and I’m glad you’ve taken the time to complete it.
Now comes the most important part—actually holding yourself accountable to that plan. Everyone in the non-profit world has heard the old complaint about an organization spending time and money on a strategic plan, only for it to sit on a shelf getting dusty in the CEO’s office. We don’t want your DEP to become like that dusty old strategic plan. We want you to USE it as a tool.
Remember, DEP-ing is about planning AND accountability, so whatever systems you have in place for your plan, you want to be reviewing them regularly. Holding yourself accountable accomplishes two things: 1) It ensures that you follow through with all the good ideas you put into your plans, and 2) it ensures that the quiet donors who don’t require much attention don’t fall through the cracks.
A few strategies you can consider when you’re creating a structure to hold yourself accountable to your plan:
30-60-90 Day Review: Look at what you need to accomplish 30, 60, and 90 days out for each donor. Focus on the critical items. What tasks do you need to make? What other meaningful connections or critical touchpoints need to be accomplished? Look ahead and ensure that you have the resources, materials, and bandwidth to complete these plans.
Task Review during each month: If you are a full-time gift officer (MLO or MGO), your annual plans should account for the bulk of the work you do over the course of each month. Establish systems to help you stay on track, completing your planned tasks. The DEP template provided by Veritus has status columns that can help you set deadlines or track if tasks are complete. Ensure that whatever tool you are using has some similar functionality, and take the time to use it to help you work throughout the month.
Goal / Revenue Review during each month: If you have an ask planned, or you expect to see a donor make a gift in the current month, how will you compare your plans to realized revenue in a given month? The Veritus DEP template has Goal and Revenue columns by month to make sure you’re meeting all of your intended revenue expectations. Whatever system you use, ensure you are regularly tracking where you are revenue wise versus where you expected to be. Tracking this regularly is also helpful in catching problems early, such as a monthly donor whose credit card has expired, or a gift from a DAF wasn’t properly attributed to the individual donor’s record.
Adjust Plans as Needed: At the start of a new month, take the time to review your plans to see what didn’t happen the way you intended. Maybe you were trying to get a meeting with a donor, and they never responded. Or perhaps you expected to see a donor’s gift come in, but it didn’t. There is only so much we can control as gift officers, so this is where DEP-ing allows us to remain flexible and accountable. Review your plans and shift them around. Adjust to reflect the new reality and work towards that.
Similarly, if you connected with a donor and learned new information about them, go back to your plans and review them. Does what you have planned make sense in light of this new information, or do you need to add or shift plans? Remember that these plans are designed to help you build and steward individual relationships, so you don’t want to keep an old plan that doesn’t reflect the new stage of the relationship.
Semi-Annual Review: At Veritus, we recommend that you do a caseload refresh twice per year, reviewing donors to move to a different program or remove from your caseload, and adding in new donors from the file. Part of this refresh should also be reviewing your plans for your donors. Look at the last six months of your plans: what worked, what didn’t? What do you need to adjust for the next six months? And make sure you’re building out plans for any new donors that have been recently added to your caseload.
DEP-ing your caseload donors may feel like a lot of work, both in setting up your plans and working to stay accountable. But I promise that if you take the time to do this work and apply the structure and the discipline of the Veritus Way, you can incorporate it into your regular workload. In fact, you may find over time it can become an integral part of the work that you do.