Raising Friends and Funds: What Your Donor Relationships Ask of Communications

This spring Conservation Foundation of the Gulf Coast debuted a beautiful brochure. For President Christine Johnson it was a proud moment. The brochure symbolized hours of hard work by her organization in strategic planning, and she couldn’t wait to share it with the people who ultimately made it possible: her donors.

Was this brochure a printed five-year strategic plan, a communications platform or a fundraising tool? For Christine, it was all those things and something else — a relationship builder she will use with donors many times in the months to come.

“When you can put your chair alongside theirs at the table and review your plan with them, it’s like reading a book with them instead of reading it to them,” Christine says. “You sit shoulder to shoulder on the same side going over the piece. Your donor gets to share his or her feelings, thoughts and insights — and that is where deep philanthropy happens.”

Strategic Relationships

Christine operates comfortably at the junction of strategy, fundraising and communications. She knows intuitively the point of overlap is strategic relationships — strategic in the sense of being essential to an organization’s sustainability.

For Christine, the activity of philanthropy is equal parts fundraising and friend-raising. It’s an ongoing nurturing of relationships with people who generally fall into one of four buckets: suspects, prospects, near donors and donors.

• Suspects are individuals we don’t have relationships with today, but want to engage.
• Prospects are people we’ve become acquainted with, have the capacity to give and a history of giving to similar causes.
• Near donors have shown interest in our mission and work and only a successful “ask” stands between them and “donor.”

Moving people from unknown suspects to repeat donors requires careful attention to friend-raising. Making an ask before you make a friend can doom a budding relationship. And failure to steward friendships with existing donors tells them they are free to move their charity interests elsewhere.

Friend-raising Communications

Your success at friend-raising rests on the quality and methods of your communications. As traditionally practiced, communications is the art of persuasion—find an audience, send a message and make the case for why we deserve to be supported.

But fundraising isn’t about persuading others to part with their dollars. It’s about showing donors we are here for them as much as they are for us, that we can help them make the difference they seek. That’s what it means to be in a relationship.

Let’s look at some of the fundamental ways a donor-centric or friend-raising approach to communications differs from traditional methods:

• More listening, less talking: Get to know your prospective donor before you launch into why you deserve his or her support.
• More personal, less broadcast: Emphasize more one-to-one communications and less one-to-many. Friend-raising is more about deepening than expanding connections.
• More you, less me: When you engage donors, speak to and about them and dial back the talk of your organization’s importance.
• More heart, less head: Tap into what matters most to your donor. Emotions more than logic influence our charity decisions.
• More stories, less information: If you want to engage the heart, tell and inspire stories. In our media-saturated culture, none of us needs more information.
• More shared, less centralized: Everyone — board, staff, volunteers — can share the role of communicators and storytellers. We never know when the person in front of us may be a potential donor.

Babette Thorpe, former major gifts manager for the accredited Teton Regional Land Trust (TRLT), understands these nuances in communications. Her experience growing up on a family farm in Virginia enabled her to connect with ranchers and farmers in eastern Idaho.

“When landowners talk about what conserving their lands means to them, those are powerful stories,” Babette says. “TRLT has been better at getting out of the way and letting the landowners speak. It’s easy to talk too much and not create space for the landowner to tell his or her story.”

TRLT recently teamed with a filmmaker to create a short film about the deep ties of landowners to the ground TRLT is helping them protect. Donors viewing the film will learn more than how many acres they’ve helped conserve — they’ll see the difference they’re making in people’s lives.

How To Tell Your Story

Video can be an excellent communications tool. It, along with social media, events, media relations, podcasts, newsletters, public speaking and other things could be in your toolbox. How you choose to engage donors will depend on your organizational capacity — personnel, talent, financial — for communications. Favor the channels that promote interaction and work for your unique circumstances.

More than the channels you use, your relationships will hinge on an ability to listen and connect to what matters to your donors.

“I like to find the ‘why’ of my donors,” says Christine Johnson, “why conservation matters to them. I try to listen for their whys and not just tell them ours.”

Because that’s what friends do.