This blog post is the fourth in a series of six titled, “The House Your Donor Lives In.”

There are many more donors in your active donor file who want to help more than they are now. This bold statement is met with skepticism any time Jeff, I or our team of frontline coaches say it to a non-profit leader or fundraiser.

But we continue to say it not only because it is true, but because this fact plays out in every situation where we are involved in helping frontline fundraisers manage donors in mid-level, major gifts, and planned giving programs.

And when those frontline fundraisers believe what we are saying and put into practice the simple steps to activate those donors to higher giving, it actually happens – those donors who are ready to give more actually do!

• The regular donor of $1,000 gives $10,000.
• That $5,000 donor gives $250,000.
• The donor who has been keeping a pledge of $100 a month for over 5 years gives $100,000.
• The donor who was very generous decides to give $9 million over three years.

And this generous giving keeps happening. Why?

Because the enlightened frontline fundraiser has now found the perfect program match for the donor’s interest and passion and that reality has found its way into the donor’s heart and mind and released a level of giving that surprises the fundraisers, leaders, and managers in the organization.

“Ah,” you might be saying. “But is it all as easy as you are saying, Richard?”

Well, not falling down easy – but also not that complicated. First you must get rid of the organizational blocks so that this giving dynamic can live and thrive inside the organization. And here is what the major blocks are:

1. Lack of knowledge about donor motivations for giving.

Donors give to solve societal problems. Period. This simple truth is not understood by many staff members in most non-profits. The result is messaging that centers on the organization or the process of helping or a very cool technical aspect about the process of helping that no one else is using, etc. And so, the organization’s website, its annual report, the newsletters, and social media content, etc. biases toward these topics and not the very simple dynamic of presenting the problem, a believable solution, and how the donor’s gift made a difference.

2. A belief that overhead expenses are not part of delivering program services.

This is a big one. Over decades of charitable giving, we have trained donors and non-profit staff to believe that any expense that is not a direct program expense is really external to the program and a nasty waste of money (if the percentage gets above some number in the teens) that shows that the non-profit is not managing well. The fact is that without overhead, the non-profit would not exist. The result of this struggle? We work very hard at avoiding overhead. We value and promote unrestricted giving so that we can fund the overhead. This works against giving the donor what they want: to give to something they care about. This overhead thing is a major problem in philanthropy.

3. Finance and accounting staff who don’t want to be bothered with the work of creating donor offers.

Here at Veritus, we have created an entire system for creating donor offers, where we take the entire budget of a non-profit and package it into meaningful and credible projects and programs that a donor will and can support. But doing this work, especially the first time, is labor intensive. And unless finance and program people can see the value, it will be difficult to secure their support. Doing this important groundwork to create donor offers will give the donor their options for greater involvement and giving.

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These are the major organization blocks you must deal with so that the donor has what they need to give more. Once you deal with these internal blocks, then you need to embark on the program of creating donor offers. We can help you do that.

And once this work is done, you will have everything you need to present to that donor who wants to DO more and GIVE more to your good cause.

Jeff and I urge you to take the steps necessary to make this happen. And if you need help to convince your leadership to take this important next step in the evolution of your organization, then have them use the Donor Journey Health Checklist we will offer you at the end of this series of blogs. The checklist will help you assess those systems, processes, and structure problems in your organization that, when fixed, will result in more net revenue for your good programs.

In my next blog I will address how to think about the investments your organization needs to make in each phase of the donor journey. I think you will find this one fascinating as we, together, explore how to allocate your annual fundraising, communications, and marketing budget to the strategic phases of the donor pipeline.

Richard