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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

TY Thursday: Thank Your Donors by Helping Them

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Help from my friendsIn the nonprofit world, we talk about our donors as “friends of” our organization. But when they hit a rough patch, do we act like friends to them?

Think about what you do for your personal friends when they fall sick, or lose their jobs, or have a death in the family. Do you:

  • Send a card, or flowers?
  • Cook a meal and drop it by?
  • Do something nice for their kids?
  • Refer them to good doctors, or employers, or other helping professionals?

There’s no reason our nonprofits can’t do that too.

How Nonprofits Can Offer Help

Sending a get-well card to a donor who is seriously ill is a gesture that’s always appreciated. Make sure to have people sign it personally–as many people who know the donor as possible!

Sending a sympathy card also matters, a lot. I can tell you that from personal experience. When my brother died in October 2014, clients and colleagues reached out to my wife and me, and every one of them made us feel surrounded by love.

(Be careful with flowers, however. Some people are allergic, and it’s not a Jewish custom. Sending a food tray might be better. Ask someone who knows the mourners well–and find out if they keep kosher, or halal, or eat only vegetarian or vegan food, too. You want to give them something that actually helps!)

If you have a program for children, then it’s a natural to offer the children of the donor’s family a free pass, or transportation, to do something fun for them. Adults need time to themselves sometimes, and that’s a gift you can give the whole family.

And you or a partner organization may be able to give your donor legal advice, or healthcare, or assistance accessing the legal, health, housing, or food benefits they need. The anti-poverty agency where I used to work did just that for a longtime donor and for a friend of a Board member.

What Not to Do

When a longtime friend of your organization is having a hard time, that’s the wrong time to ask them for money. If common decency isn’t enough reason for you to check your campaign calendars and take people recovering from surgery or people in mourning off your list for once, think of this: do you want people to think of their loved one’s death every time they think of you?

If the donor is really a “friend of” your organization, then treat him or her like a friend.

How to Attract Big Gifts–Part I

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A guest post from Tripp Braden, of Developing Serving Leaders

Tripp Braden

Tripp Braden

You don’t know me, but I help nonprofits attract larger gifts for their organizations.

Many of my clients and partners are some of the world’s most successful philanthropists. They give billions of dollars to nonprofits every year. Several are members of The Giving Pledge.
I expect even more to make significant gifts to nonprofits as they move from active business leadership towards their retirement and the second acts of their lives.

Here’s why most of the corporate leaders I know believe it’s important to reinvest in our society.

Why the Biggest Givers Give

One part of my business practice helps my clients deal with creating a lasting leadership legacy that continues for generations. I challenge my best clients to make a difference in the world; it doesn’t end when they retire. I have also given gifts that have exceeded six figures. These gifts helped organizations get significant additional gifts that exceeded eight figures.

Dennis asked me to share what I know about the world’s most dedicated givers. I hope to help you better understand what my affluent clients might look for when they invest their money in your nonprofit.

Excite Them about Your Mission

Let me give you three ideas that can help you get more money and engagement from men and women who can make a gift that changes your organization forever.

The first opportunity to connect with more affluent givers starts with your mission. Most nonprofits struggle when it comes to defining their mission. Let me rephrase that: most nonprofits are very active in being all things to all people. They think what big donors are looking for are big numbers. They believe the bigger the numbers, the greater the chance they will find the big gift.

My experience is the clearer you are on your mission and how you plan to help your community, the better you are positioned to find the right people to support your organization.

Your mission cannot only be on the plaque in your offices. It must be understood and shared with every person who works in your organization.

The Mission Driven Donor

Most successful entrepreneurs are mission driven. If you want to better understand how they see the world, ask them what their mission was when they started their own organization. I’ve never met a successful entrepreneur who didn’t see a business in their mind before they started their organization.

To get people to understand your mission, you must help them connect the dots between their gift and your mission. It is critical that you appeal to the best parts of who they are when nurturing a relationship with a larger contributor.

Most entrepreneurs have strongly held ideas on almost everything. To me, this means you must be willing to stand up and share what you believe. They will be attracted to both your passion and your purpose.

What if they don’t agree on your position? Be willing to advocate it, but also listen to why they feel the way they do. It gives you clues on who they are and how they may be able to help your culture grow to the next level.

I’ll give you the other two ideas on how to connect with more affluent givers in my next post, next Tuesday. See you then.

5 lessons for nonprofits from children’s books

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tweener reading

Does your agency tell stories like kids’ and YA books ?

People say there’s a part of me that’s got to be permanently twelve years old. I love children’s books!

In my house, there’s a shelf of them: some picture books, some chapter books, some classics, some translated into Spanish.

And I should probably take them off my taxes as a professional expense.  They have taught me how to write.

What can children’s books and their big cousins, YA fiction, teach us about telling our agencies’ stories?

Five lessons for nonprofits from children’s books

  1. Start with an improbable hero.  Zoom in on one person.  An ordinary person, because our readers need to identify with him or her.  That could be Harry Potter or Halla from Travel Light–or it could be your nonprofit’s client.
  2. Give them a challenge. It’s not a story if nothing’s going wrong. Here’s your chance to show the problem that your client faces (whether it’s poverty, illness, bad schools, or bad air) and make it real to your reader.
  3. Show their character.  When she struggles, your client shows who she really is.  She has no superpowers or magic: only the qualities that make her human.
  4. Give them helpers.  Of course, this includes your organization.  But this is  your golden opportunity to…
  5. Bring the reader into the story.  J.M. Barrie did that overtly in Peter Pan: “If you believe,” he shouted to them, “clap your hands; don’t let Tink die.”  Most bring the reader in more subtly. But if you have ever refused to come in for dinner until you finished a chapter, you know what it feels like to take the hero’s place.

Great writers make us feel that the ending of the story depends on us.

Above all, you want your readers to feel that they are irreplaceable. If they can see their donations as the key thing needed to ensure a happy ending, they will not only give. They will want to give. So much depends upon their heroic action!

When you write newsletters, appeal letters, blog posts–even Facebook posts and tweets–how do you make your supporters into the hero of the story?

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