Jeff Schreifels
Welcome to the show and thanks for joining me today. I wanna talk about why qualifying donors before they get into your portfolio is probably one of the most important things you can do as an MGO. So to help me discuss this, I've invited Diana Frazier, our Senior Client Experience Leader here at Veritas, to join me. Diana has over 40 years of a fundraising experience. She's led development teams, she's been an MGO.

And she's been with us for over 13 years, working with hundreds of MGOs, walking with them as they qualify donors. So let's bring her in and let's get ready for some real talk. All right, Diana, here we are.

Diana Frazier
Okay, Jeff, here we go.

Jeff Schreifels
You know, I feel like this is the most important thing and it's one of my favorite subjects because I feel like if everyone could get this right and have qualified donors in their portfolio, major gift officers would be happier, donors would be happier, organizations would raise more money and just

everyone's well-being in the state of development of relationship-based fundraising would be in a much better place. And so that's why I want to discuss this with you. And specifically, I wanted to bring you on because you've been doing this a long time and you have successfully walked alongside of major gift fundraisers for years.

Diana Frazier
You

Jeff Schreifels
in how to navigate this because it's not easy, is it?

Diana Frazier
All right, so what's your question?

Jeff Schreifels
Well, I want to know why do feel making sure donors are qualified before entering a portfolio is really important? Just give us the big reason why this is so important.

Diana Frazier
There are two sides to that. And let's start with the donor side, because I think ultimately that's the most important side when you think about it. From a donor perspective, it means somebody has connected with them and they've had the opportunity to say yes, no, or what they want to hear from an organization. When a donor gets that opportunity to be that clear and specific, it changes the relationship with the organization, because now they'll move into an engagement level.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
based on their terms, if you will. And for the donors who don't want it, they're allowed to be who they are and what level they want. So that's the donor side of it. The gift officer side of it is you're then working with the donors who want engagement and you're no longer chasing things down, beating your head against the wall. And from a leadership perspective, your gift officers are being held accountable to donors who actually want engagement and not being held

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
accountable to a revenue stream for people who have said, who haven't said actually that they want anything. So there's kind of three sides to it. But fundamentally, it's the donor part that matters the most for the long term health with the organization.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Well, why don't you give us a clear definition of what we mean at Veritas by qualified donor first.

Diana Frazier
It's a donor really who has agreed to two-way communication with you. They've said yes to having, taking a phone calls, having a meeting or just to go deeper, even if it's text exchange or email exchange, they have said, yes, I want to know more. having you reach out to me is okay. That is in nutshell what it is. It's not mysterious. Now those donors,

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
are in your giving range for whatever you consider to be major gifts, or at least at the threshold point re-enter. And so there's a giving part of it, and capacity is not part of it. Capacity scores can be helpful pieces of information, but they are not a pillar in this.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, yeah. Now you've worked with hundreds, as I said at the beginning, you worked with hundreds of major gift officers over your career. What are some of the problems you see when MGOs don't have qualified donors in their portfolio?

Diana Frazier
I can think of two that I'm working with right now. One who has been around her organization for quite a few years and has a fairly large number of donors assigned to her. And one who is newer with the organization under one year, but inherited some donors. So let's go with the guy who came in the door and inherited donors. He had probably 300-ish assigned to him. And by going through the gut check,

Jeff Schreifels
Okay.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm.

Diana Frazier
process that we call gut check to dig into what you know, what's in the CRM and what have you already learned. He was actually able to identify quite a few that were truly two-way engagement qualified. What that did for him in his first year, he was then able to create real plans for those people that made sense to the donor, set goals that made sense to the donors. And he's reporting back a much more satisfying experience himself as well as for the donors.

because he knows what they care about. So there's that piece of it. Then he has those who didn't have the two-way engagement and he has a clear pathway how to reach a yes or a no on that. So it gave him instant clarity. Well, the process drives someone to go back and just yay, nay, know, true, what's the true state of this? And when I was a fundraiser, I would do this quarterly to make sure I was on track of, you know, when have I talked to them lately kind of thing. So that's his story. The other person had been there, has been there

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
you know, two decades really, had, oh, easily 400 donors assigned. But because she couldn't tell the trees from the forest, like there was so much data coming at her at any given time that she was unable to focus. And so going through our process turned out under 50 were truly two-way engagements. So once we peeled those off,

Jeff Schreifels
Hmm.

Diana Frazier
and she began to work with the 50, she also gained clarity, revenue starts coming in. It's just a different ball game. And she too has now a process to deal with the others. She's just had so many people assigned to her with no distinction in the level of engagement. And what happens is some of the donors get missed. They just frankly get missed in the month to month communication. It's just too many to handle. And they don't know what to even send them.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, I mean that story seems indicative a lot of stories that I've heard where we've come in and Okay, the major gift officer has two or three hundred people in assigned to them in their portfolio And then what we always do this thing before we start working with them. We call gut check, you know And that is okay. Let's go over all these donors. We want to know who do you know? Really really?

And you might have two, 300 and they know maybe 25 really well. And you're like, okay, what happened here? How did a major gift officer over the time acquire 300 people in their portfolio? Now it could be from management that said, here's 300 people, you know, like a university, here's 300 people.

Diana Frazier
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Jeff Schreifels
They have capacity to bring in $4 million. You have two years to bring it in, you know? Or it's just over time, someone hits a threshold and then they go, well, they're a major donor. They should be in your portfolio. And no one really does anything with that donor. But because they've been giving through other means like the direct response program, or they just give on their own, they keep them in the portfolio because the overall portfolio looks pretty good.

But when you actually get down and go, do you know these people? They don't because there's just way too many people, as you say. They don't know them and they're only gonna work these 25 that they've probably known. So, I mean, this qualifying thing really forces everyone.

Diana Frazier
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
Yeah, that's what it does. It helps. It actually gives the gift officer confidence over time, frankly, because for sure you find out what's your baseline, where am I, whatever the reason doesn't really matter. Let's figure out where you are now. And then you can create plans or they're solid. A lot of times when donors keep getting added in and so the caseload or portfolio counts growing, growing, If there isn't a

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
a really good process for what it means to go through those steps, you get a one and done. I called them once and they didn't answer. Okay, was it their job to call you back? Did you not think about trying again? Right? So that, but that's, that's sheer volume coming at them. So some of that is the volume coming at the gift officer. And when you don't have structure in a system in place, you lose sight of it. You lose track.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Exactly, I know.

Jeff Schreifels
Well, and we lose sight of what the job of the major gift officer actually is. And that is finding out the donor's passions and interests and matching that up with all the programs and projects and inspiring them to give to those projects. You can't do that if you don't know who the donors really are.

Diana Frazier
Right. I think there's another component there, Jeff, and sometimes I see a great resistance for creating customized plans for donors they do know. It's perceived as too much work, but the reality is if you did that work, everything becomes more clear and you spend less time spinning.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Yeah.

Diana Frazier
So yes, you might spend a week really, and not 40 hours by new stretch, but you might spend a week really drilling down and creating custom plans for your donors. that payoff is gonna be there for the rest of the year.

Jeff Schreifels
Okay, I want you to help Take me step by step for those that are listening on a practical level let's come up with a scenario and let's just say you come in for the first time working with someone and they've got You know 200 people in their portfolio And you know what they have to do they have to qualify and they you don't know if they've never gone through a process of qualifying

Diana Frazier
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Schreifels
What are the steps you take immediately with that major gift officer? And then what are the steps to qualify those donors?

Diana Frazier
Yep. Well, the first is that gut check to get the donors into the right buckets, if you will already have two way engagement. But with those, they don't. I even encouraged two different buckets, a bucket of people who, if you sent them an introduction letter, they would think I've been getting stuff from you for years. So we would create another entry point to, to reboot that. And then the people who truly getting an introduction letter would be fine because they haven't noticed you or there's not been much.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yes.

Jeff Schreifels
So going back to the gut check though, what does that actually mean? You're sitting down with the major gift officer and you're going through every donor in that portfolio and say, what do you know about this donor? What interactions have you had and how they've talked to you or not talked to you so you understand are they qualified or not?

Diana Frazier
We don't.

Diana Frazier
Mm-hmm.

Diana Frazier
Right. And if they really know the story, they're qualified. Now there's some that maybe they don't know and a survey tool would be really helpful for them. Right. So there are pieces of what we call our qualification process that can be applied to wherever donors are. But then once we get that established, began what we would, know, set the donors who are qualified aside. We do create goals and plans for them, but let's focus in on the those who are not.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Right.

Diana Frazier
We have a seven step process that if it's really followed, you'll get to one third will say yes to engagement. We've seen it again and again and again. And we also have seen if you stick with those who want engagement, you will raise more money from those who want engagement than from the 400 or 500 that were assigned to you. So it's in some ways, it's a very straightforward process. Introduction letter, three steps. Oh, yep.

Jeff Schreifels
Yes.

Jeff Schreifels
Right.

Jeff Schreifels
Right. Yes.

Jeff Schreifels
Well, hold on now, you get there. Okay, so Lyle, you've done the gut check, you've gone through 200 donors and you've determined that 50 of them truly are qualified. They're put into a portfolio and now you know you have 100 more donors you have to qualify or you have 100 more donors that could qualify into that portfolio, which means, as you said, you need about 300 in the pool

Diana Frazier
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Schreifels
to qualify to the hundred, right? Okay, now go.

Diana Frazier
Well, we don't usually give them $300 all at one time. That's a bit, well, I mean, so we might, work in batches and three months later, we might give them 15 more to get started. It starts with an introduction letter and we do recommend that go in the mail and it's hand addressed and you've handwritten some kind of a note, whatever you can out of your CRM. Thanks again for your support over 10 years or, whatever it is, something to signal to the letter that to the donor, this letter actually is to me, right?

Jeff Schreifels
Right.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
So that does it. Then there's a three step follow-up. And this is critical because the letter goes out and one week later, there are three follow-ups that happened fairly quickly in succession. And we usually talk about phone, phone, email. Some people do phone, email, phone. I don't have a horse in the race which you choose. What I care is there's fidelity to the timing because the timing matters. If you send a letter on February 1st and you don't call until March 12th,

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, no one remembers. Yeah.

Diana Frazier
Right? That's ridiculous. But if one week later you start your three follow-up process, you're going to pick up quite a few people who actually answer the phone to reply to an email. Then we move on about two weeks later, just a content touch, something of content. You don't know what they care about yet. You're trying something. Often we talk about having something evergreen that you could use with pretty much any donor that's core to your organization's mission. And you deliver something to them of value. So they, okay, that's cool. Diana sent me that.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
Right. Then three weeks later, we put a survey in the mail and it's a customized survey to each organization's programs and services. But it has some coherence, you know, no matter what client we're working with and ask a series of questions. It's one sheet of paper, two sides, no more. Not from marketing. These are questions for Diana to ask Jeff for Jeff to answer to Diana. We're not looking for directional marketing decisions here. Then a week later, we begin the follow up.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
for the survey if you haven't heard back. Ideally, you can create an electronic survey, whether that's through Google Forms or Microsoft Forms or Survey Monkey, whatever it is. Then you send an email with a link to a survey and ask them again. Then you resend that. And then if don't hear you do a phone call and ask if you get them on the phone, are you open to answering a few questions on the phone? So here's another three-step follow-up. And again, the fidelity to the timing

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm.

nothing.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
in doing this is the key. That's the key. And then we go to another, you know, content touch and then a final note, a handwritten note. And this is the only time it's actually the donor's job, right? So at the end of the series, Jeff, sorry, have not been able to connect with you over the last several months. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me. At that stage, you're not gonna keep

Jeff Schreifels
crucial. Yeah, yeah.

Now in you. Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
going toward that donor. It's their choice. They've had multiple, they've had 10 opportunities to respond to you and they have not. we're using, put USPS phone, email, text if you can. You can go onto LinkedIn and do a personal message, know, a private message through LinkedIn. That's a way to reach out to people. But you're letting the donor say no by not responding, right? Now some people will tell you no.

Jeff Schreifels
Right.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Right. Yeah.

Diana Frazier
and then some will never respond. And you just move them aside. And if you have a mid-level program, that might be a good place to go. If you're in a major gift team and you have an administrative assistant who does some work, maybe they can go there, say maybe get three or four touches a year, something. But if you do that over time, one third will say yes, and you live with those donors.

Jeff Schreifels
Right.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
And that's a good thing. We want to know those donors that want the relationship versus that don't. Because I think a lot of major gift fundraisers probably get frustrated when they get the rejection or they don't hear back. But that's that's OK, because as you said, if you stick with it, you will see that a third of them will engage with you. Now, how long does that process usually take?

Diana Frazier
They will.

Diana Frazier
For any one donor, roughly five-ish months, or maybe a little less, a little less than that, maybe four months. For all the ones you're doing it, it could be done in eight months. It depends. It's relative to what's going on in your world, where are vacations planned, if there are events in the organization's life that makes you maybe take a pause. So we create a plan so you know when there's an end.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Right. Right.

Diana Frazier
Coach, that's a big part of what I'm doing is cheerleading them on. It's hard, it's hard work.

Jeff Schreifels
Well, yeah, I mean, that's the it is hard. I've had a number of people come up to me, whether I was at a conference or speaking somewhere and they'll say this qualifying thing for them was the most important thing and sticking with it because a number of them would say it took like the fifth outreach to finally get a donor to connect with me. And she's

Diana Frazier
Mm-hmm.

Diana Frazier
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Schreifels
the number of people will say, if it was just left on my own, I'd only probably tried twice and go, they don't want to hear from me or they don't want to engage. so you make up a story in your head and you move on. But this process with like these seven different steps and having a plan and when it goes out, if you stick with that, good things will happen.

and it will exceed your expectations because we don't have much patience for this.

Diana Frazier
And you think about from the donor side, how many people have reached out to him over the years? You might be the fifth gift officer in a row who's never gone the course, if you will. You're trying to cut through the clutter. Just, you you send an email. Remember, most people are looking on this and they're reading your email while they're doing something else. While it's in commercials, when they hit mute, or they're at the grocery store online waiting to pay, or they're in restaurant waiting for their friend to come.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Right.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Right.

Diana Frazier
That's how most people are reading personal email. They are not sitting at their dedicated computer at their desk, reading, waiting for your words. They're just not. We have to cut through that. You have to cut through the clutter and become relevant and takes time to A, they recognize your name over time. So you're no longer a stranger. You're trusted because you've been delivering them some interesting things over time. And then somewhere along the line, there will be a tipping point and it's not unusual to hear even

Jeff Schreifels
Right, I know.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
you write that handwritten final note, I have been meaning to connect back with you, I apologize. I did have one gift officer tell me that when the donor finally got back to me, he I fell off a ladder and I broke my back. That's why he hadn't gotten back, but see, what story do we get in our head? They don't want to hear anything. We forget they have life incidents. Their daughter might be having a baby or their niece or whatever is going on in their life. There's a lot going on. So be patient and be persistent.

Jeff Schreifels
yeah. Yeah, I know.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. So here's another practical question. When you're qualifying and you also have donors already in your portfolio that are qualified, how do you qualify and cultivate that portfolio at the same time? Like, how do you keep it all straight?

Diana Frazier
Yeah, well the more qualified donors you have, you'll probably need to work with smaller groups on the qualification process because every time someone gets qualified, you're creating a goal and a communication plan. So you have to balance that out for time allocation. It also might be relative to the time of year too. So if it's in Q4, the calendar year, it's harder to keep the qualification going full steam. So you might have to take a break.

Jeff Schreifels
Yes.

Diana Frazier
But honestly, it's in your organizational skills. So if you're using your CRM to do it, if you have a code that tells you this is a qualified donor, it's often called major gift prospect. I hate that language because it makes it sound like they're not a donor yet. And you might have something called major gift suspect, which I really hate that language. And that means they're in your pool. whatever your codes are called, suck it in. That's what they're called.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Ugh.

Diana Frazier
but use them to your advantage so that when you're looking in your CRM, it's clear who is who, right? That you have those abilities. If you have the ability in your CRM to create an actual plan and put in your goal and cashflow it, do it in your CRM. If you have none of that, we actually use an Excel spreadsheet that helps do that. We call it the donor engagement plan and it can be done in Excel. It really can. it's not, this is not rocket science. It really isn't.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
but it takes dedication and persistence and sticking to it. That's the magic or the secret sauce, if you will.

Jeff Schreifels
Well, the beautiful thing is once you've gone through the difficult work of qualifying and also cultivating, once you're done with qualifying, it's so much easier, right? Because you now have them qualify. I mean, every year, yes, you will do a refresh, but you probably are then qualifying or if you have a mid-level program bringing in qualified donors, maybe a 10 at the most.

Diana Frazier
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Schreifels
Maybe some more, I don't know, but it's not 150 that you're trying to get. Yeah.

Diana Frazier
Yeah, you'll never have to do that again unless you change locations and you're regionally based and you're starting a lot. Well, there's that. But the change from the officer standpoint is when you have a fully qualified caseload, you know where you're going. You know what your donors care about. You can create plans when something happens, can say, Sam would love this. Like, you know this.

Jeff Schreifels
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Exactly.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yes.

Diana Frazier
And you can get to know, internalize enough, about 150 people where it's amazing what you can look at something and you can rattle off 10, 15 names because you know them. You're not looking at 500 names anymore.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, it's a whole difference. So in your role specifically as a coach, how do you help these MGOs stay focused on this? And what are some of the ups and downs of that experience? And maybe you could give some tips to fundraisers that are trying to go through this, how to stay on it.

Diana Frazier
Yeah. From a coaching standpoint, depending upon how many qualified versus not qualified, I actually allocate the equivalent amount of time in my coaching session. So I'm signaling, you know, if you have 50 qualified donors, you're going to get 15 minutes of our session, we're going to focus there. And we're probably going to focus 30 minutes on your qualification process, unless there's something, a donor we have to talk about. So I'm signaling there about time allocation.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
Part of it is learning to time box, put on your calendar what you're gonna do, when you're gonna do it. Don't make it generic. Say I'll be working on my qualification group 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, put it right on your calendar. So you remember, if you can use your calendar to help you, that's gonna be a big difference. And then over time it shifts. You're shifting more time to your qualified donors, because you have more of them and less time to the qualification process, because there are fewer in the pipeline.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm.

Diana Frazier
But time box, you can't bounce back and forth all day long. You will make yourself crazy. That's what I really do is say, try to focus on this and give it a good hour, maybe two hours, and then go over to something else. The other thing that helps is if you block the time on your calendar, won't be grabbed up for meetings because it's already full, right? Yeah. So those are some basic things. And if you're using a system like our donor engagement plan,

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Diana Frazier
the due dates are built right in there for you. step number one, open up your CRM, open up your donor engagement plan. What am I doing today? And that actually has your due date. So you can filter what's due today. And just get it off. Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, yeah, that's so helpful. So then at the end of this process, and now the major gift officer has been working with a qualified portfolio, what are the major differences you see between after it's qualified then before it's qualified?

Diana Frazier
The biggest change I see is confidence. And I'm not talking about just gift officers who are brand new. They just feel so much more confident in what their plan is for any given donor and what they're doing in a week. And that confidence is translating over into the relationship with the donors too. Because a donor can tell when you're on the mark or off the mark. They're raising more money because they're listening and learning and they have the bandwidth to pivot.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
from, I was gonna ask 25,000 for this, but through conversation and everything I know, I kind of went and prepared and I ended up asking for 100,000. And it's coming from that deeper knowledge of the donor, that preparation you do before a face-to-face visit or a phone call based on what you know. And you just learn how to prepare scenarios. It's like magic in a way. And it's fun to see.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Diana Frazier
It's fun to see the turning point. So last fall I had someone who knew and it was right around the first week of November, everything clicked. And boy did he nail it.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Yeah, because it is funny when we first start this process, there's a lot of pushback, you know, you know, because they're like, this is going to take me way too long. I don't want to deal with this. And, you know, but I think the key is, well, they're they're managers saying, no, this is what we're going to do. But secondly, to have someone like you.

Diana Frazier
yeah.

Diana Frazier
I know.

Jeff Schreifels
come alongside of them and keep encouraging them along the way is just the key to the whole thing. Because there are times, I'm very sure that it could get very discouraging where you might be putting out stuff and you hear nothing for a while. And you're just like, what am I doing? And that's when you need someone who's experienced and say, this is going to work.

You just have to keep fidelity to this thing. And you know, you're doing great. You just gotta keep going here. That is such a key part of it.

Diana Frazier
Yeah. Yeah. So you sent out 25 surveys and one comes back and over time more. You could say, wow, only one survey came back. Or you can say, I now know what this donor thinks and cares about. Like you just have to flip the script on that sort of stuff.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Jeff Schreifels
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So for those listening here, if you really want to know more about qualifying, I hope you do. And I hope all of your portfolios are qualified, but if they're not, and you don't want to keep listening to this over and over on a loop, we do have a white paper on how to qualify your donors. And it is a step-by-step guide.

Diana Frazier
you

Jeff Schreifels
that takes you through this so you know how to do it and I guarantee That it will be the best thing you've ever done as a major gift officer It will make your life easier. You will sleep better at night. You will have better conversations with donors You will bring in more revenue. It will change the game for you So please take advantage of that. That'll be in the show notes Diana

Diana Frazier
Mm-hmm.

Jeff Schreifels
Thank you for sharing your wisdom and all of your experience of coming alongside of those major gift officers. And as I said at the beginning, you you've worked with hundreds of people and the fact that you've walked them through this process, it's got to feel really good that you've been able to help these good people love their job even more, you know? So.

Thank you for that and thanks for being on the show and until next time, we'll see you soon.