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How Do You Attract Big Gifts from the Affluent? – 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, on Thursday. See you then.

Six Stories Your Nonprofit Should Tell

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Andy Goodman believes there are six stories every organization should be ready to tell.

  1. The nature of our challenge story: This story describes the problem that you are trying to address with your programs/services. “Too often, we express this as a number,” warns Goodman.
  2. The creation story: This is the “how we started” story. “It’s primarily for internal use,” Goodman says, “but I think everybody who works in an organization should know it.”
  3. The emblematic success story: This story shares your unique approach and why it works.
  4. The values story: These are the stories through which your organization shows how it lives out its core values
  5. The striving to improve story: This story is for internal use and says “sometimes we fall short, sometimes we outright fail, but we always learn from our mistakes and do better next time,” Goodman says.
  6. The where we are going story: This is a story that says if your organization does its job right, this is what it will look like in five to 10 years.

 

Some of these stories are for your stakeholders.  Some are for your Board, staff, and volunteers.  All of them say more about your organization than any mission statement or set of numbers can do alone.

Can Your Nonprofit Learn from Coca-Cola?

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Running a nonprofit is harder than running a business.  Still, nonprofits can learn lessons for free that corporations have spent a lot of money to learn.

Coca-Cola ad

Coke can give your nonprofit ideas

Take Coca-Cola, for example.  If your nonprofit were as widely known as Coke, you’d have a lot easier time attracting “customers” (clients, donors, and funders). How do they do it, and can you do the same?

Things Go Better with Content Marketing

Jeff Bullas reports that Coke now sees content marketing as the key to its outreach.  Content marketing means you don’t push your message out so much as attract your audience in.  Give people information that matters to them and you will draw supporters closer to your cause.

Coke is betting the farm that they can

develop content that makes a commitment to making the world a better place and to develop value and significance in people’s lives…while at the same time driving business objectives for Coca-Cola.

If Coke can do well by doing good, why not you?

Content Marketing Lessons You Can Bottle

Here are five lessons we can learn from Coke.  Jeff Bullas listed, and I translated them into nonprofit.

  1. Create “liquid content.”  No, you’re not going into the soft drink business!  “Liquid content” means stuff that people love and can’t wait to share.  Whether you create an article, a video, a graphic, or an online game, make people glad they saw it.  (That means you have to know your audience.)
  2. Ensure your content is linked to your mission, goals, and values.  It’s not enough that they love it.  It has to fit what you do as an organization.  People may love that cat video, but what does it have to do with your homeless shelter?
  3. Create conversations.  Don’t just publish. Interact with your audience. They’re asking questions online: do you have answers? They’re commenting on a topic you care about too. Reply.  And let what they say give you ideas for more content.
  4. Move on to dynamic storytelling.  This means you allow the story to evolve as you interact with your supporters. If you are truly engaged with them, they will care more about you.
  5. Be brave and creative with your content creation.  Sure, 70% of what you put out may be tried and true.  20% of it may be new but based on what has already worked.  But 10% of your time, experiment.  Try a new form–video or radio instead of writing–or a new medium–what is this thing called Google+–or an idea that’s a little off the wall.

Be prepared to fail sometimes.  Remember New Coke?  Not that many people do.  If you try something that doesn’t work, people will forget…and you will learn.  And you will come up with the real thing.

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