Zimmerman Lehman: "Major Donor Campaigns: The Heart Of Any Successful Fundraising Effort"

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"Major Donor Campaigns: The Heart Of Any Successful Fundraising Effort"

Whether for capital or annual gifts, major donor campaigns are an extremely effective means of raising significant income. Make a major donor campaign part of your nonprofit's fundraising arsenal; it will be well worth the investment of time and money.

Just like a direct mail campaign, special event or phone-a-thon, major donor solicitation is most successful if scheduled as part of your annual campaign effort. You may also do a "one-time" major donor campaign to raise capital funds. If you're pursuing big donors to meet operating expenses or project budgets, this is part of your annual campaign. If big gifts are for building or large equipment purchases, building renovation or land acquisition, then the major donor effort is part of your capital campaign.

What does Zimmerman Lehman mean by a major donor campaign?
Simply this: major donor prospects are not approached in isolation. Rather, they are solicited in a compelling fashion, more or less simultaneously, by trained solicitors who have given sufficient time to planning and coordination of the campaign.

The Campaign Committee
Responsibility for coordinating your major donor effort rests with a committee made up of board members, executive staff and non-board volunteers with a flair for asking. These volunteers may be ex-board or staff members, ex-clients, or folks who have volunteered with your organization in other capacities in the past. It is vitally important that the committee chair be a person who is comfortable asking for big gifts and who is ready to make a sizable contribution himself or herself.

The committee decides the following:

Annual or Capital Campaign
Dollar goal of the campaign
Campaign theme
Amount that will constitute a "major gift"
Whether to hire an outside consultant
How to recognize donors
Time line
Detailed plan with task list
Budget

Training
A sure way to ensure failure is leave out training. Even the best solicitors need prepping and most individuals need much more! If your organization does not use a consultant for the entire campaign it should bring in someone to instruct the solicitors in how best to ask! There is an art and a science to asking; training builds confidence.

Donors
The Committee reviews past donors to the organization for prospects and brainstorms new ones. No stone should be left unturned:.....friends, colleagues, past and present board members, past staff, contractors, vendors, if appropriate clients. It helps to include non-committee members in this brainstorming process. The committee also brainstorms potential solicitors. After some initial weeding, a list of prospects is draw up.

Knowledge is Power
The more that you know about a prospect, the greater the possibility that you will be successful in soliciting a large gift. Once the committee has identified the prospects, a confidential "gossip session" must be convened to discuss each prospect's interests, predilections and ability to give. The committee determines the appropriate amount to request of each prospect.. This "anecdotal research" is a vitally important part of your committee's work, and may be supplemented by formal research conducted by consulting firms.

Making a Match
Once the prospects have been identified, it is important to match prospects and solicitors appropriately. Always send two solicitors to meet with a prospect; if "Solicitor A" can't answer the prospect's question, "Solicitor B" might. Ideally, one of the solicitors should be a friend or colleague of the prospect. If not, make sure that the solicitors and prospects are temperamentally matched. The owner of a computer start-up company with no history of philanthropy, for instance, will require a very different match than an elderly person who has donated to nonprofits for half a century.

Funky or Slick Materials
Many nonprofits make the mistake of believing that their written materials better not look too fancy, because prospective donors will worry that their money is going toward publicity and fundraising rather than program work. Wrong! Major donor solicitation is a competitive business, and your materials must stand out from the competition. While you don't have to use eleven colors of ink and the fanciest paper in creation, you do need to represent your nonprofit effectively. Good paper stock, a few colors, compelling copy and arresting photographs will go a long way toward securing those big gifts.

Fundraising Software
Make sure that your nonprofit has the means to record definitive information about prospects and about the results of solicitation visits. Review your database to see if it is sufficient. Faulty reports or poor data collection will impede your ability to solicit effectively.

The Ask
The heart of the matter is, of course, the "ask" itself. Once the match is made, the materials created, the research completed, solicitors trained - you must fact the moment of truth: the "ask." The beauty of conducting major donor work in a campaign context is that the solicitors can meet during the campaign to share "war stories" and offer emotional support.

Regrouping
Once the first round of visits is completed, solicitors are responsible for reporting back to the committee and staying in touch with prospects. It is very common for prospects to need time to consider big gift requests; they may want to speak with spouses or significant others, visit the nonprofit to see the staff in action, or read over the nonprofit's written materials. This is fine, as long as solicitors stay in touch in a timely--but not pushy--manner. Some may need additional cultivation, follow-up visits or calls or additional materials. The committee meets periodically at this point to keep the momentum going and to review progress.Thanks and Recognition

When the gift arrives, the executive director of the nonprofit should send a letter of thanks, as should one of the solicitors who met with the prospect. A thank you party, plaque, name or other appropriate recognitions takes place. The committee must also spend time thinking of exciting ways to recognize major donors. Listing donors' names in newsletters and affixing plaques to walls are fine, but how about something more exciting? Why not host a party to thank major donors? If this is a capital campaign, naming opportunities are a wonderful means to recognize donors. Even fairly modest gifts can be "named;" in one school campaign that Zimmerman Lehman conducted, we placed a naming plaque on every computer in the school's computer lab!

Evaluation
Finally, soon after the end of the campaign, the committee should meet one last time to evaluate the campaign. Things to consider: Was the campaign dollar goal too modest? too high? Were the solicitors trained effectively? Did the written materials make the case effectively? Did the solicitors have adequate information about prospects before visiting them? Did the solicitors do an effective job of asking? What worked what didn't? What did we learn for the next time?

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