How Does Your Garden Grow?

It's true confession time. I am, at best, a lazy gardener. My garden has never looked so beautiful, nor been so healthy, as the day before I took possession of my home.The previous owners were avid and devoted gardeners (so my neighbours have told me) and the fruits of their labours were, in part, what attracted us to our current home.

The first summer we owned our home, I enthusiastically embraced the idea of gardening - how hard could it be? You throw some seeds/plants in the ground and then they grow. Two years later, I have yet to see even one sprout of a sunflower, despite having planted five packets of seeds, and the goutweed I worked so hard to eradicate in year one has come back three-fold and was still visible when the first snow fell in November.

So it turns out that gardening is hard work, after all. It requires research, planning, patience, and diligence. And sometimes, if you can't get rid of the goutweed yourself, you're wise to call for help. Many parallels can be drawn between growing a gardern and building successful fundraising programs:

• If you're not diligent, the weeds will take over. Your database is your garden, and organizations must be mindful that, without constant care and attention, data quickly becomes obsolete. People change jobs, they move, they die.  Before long, you're wondering what happened to all the roses.
• Sunflowers like sun; hostas like shade. Your donors are the plants and flowers in your garden. They have different wants and needs, and it's your job to determine how to best cultivate and care for them.
• Bamboo are among the fastest growing plants in the world; cacti among the slowest. And some donors will bloom quickly, others will take much more time. You can bet that the seeds of the recent $5 million gift from the Lazaridis family to the Stratford Festival were planted several years ago.
• Perennials, annuals, bi-annuals, biennials - some bloom every year, some only once, and some twice/year; spring bloomers, summer bloomers, fall bloomers, evergreens - if you want a robust garden year-round, you'll have to sow and cultivate a wide variety of plants. The same holds true for your fundraising garden.

Where's Waldo (aka Your Donors)?

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Can you spot the donor? Unlike Waldo, potential donors can't easily be identified by their striped shirts, hats and leggings. And before you begin to cultivate prospective donors, you need to know where to find them.

What often happens with initial donor prospecting meetings is some well-meaning person will say, "We should approach So-and-so (insert well-known wealthy individual's name here) - they have lots of money". And it's true. Mr. & Mrs. So-and-so are loaded. But wealth alone does not a prospective donor make.

Let's pretend, for a moment, that this Waldo picture is a representation of your organization's community. All clients, volunteers, staff and Board members wear blue. Neighbours, suppliers and "friends of blue-wearers" dress in yellow. Everyone else (including Mr. & Mrs. So-and-so) wears red. So now you can begin to build your prospect list and cultivation strategy, with the blue-shirts on your A list, the yellows on your B list, and the reds on your C list.
 
Even though we all know the very basic and fundamental "inside out" rule, we often overlook the blues and the yellows while trying to figuere out how to get to the reds.

Know thy Donor

There has been a fair amount of healthy debate this week, over at The Agitator blog, about the effectiveness of donor screening tools, the use of CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) systems, and the validity of the traditional donor pyramid model, as they relate to securing major gifts.

In his most recent post on the subject, Tom Belford makes what I consider to be the most important point of all:

"Eventually, at all giving levels that vary by organizational experience and capabilities, more personal interaction with donors needs to take over from direct marketing".

I would argue that this "personal interaction" needs to occur sooner, rather than later. While systems and processes are crucial in helping us evaluate the effectiveness of our development programs and in setting achieveable targets and goals, nothing can replace meaningful donor interaction when it comes down to generating sustainable fundraising revenues.

But before we can focus on these interactions, we first need to have donors - or prospective donors. Tomorrow, we'll talk about Step 1. - How to identify prospective donors.

2010 - Year of the Donor?

I'm just now getting around to reading Roy MacGregor's Dec. 21st column in the Globe and Mail. In it, he talks about how we're innundated with at-the-cash donation requests over the holiday season and wonders if this has created donor fatigue - perhaps contributing to the Salvation Army falling short of its 2009 Kettle Appeal goal.

Rather than donor fatigue, perhaps the culprit is donor disconnect. While these corporate-charity partnerships likely help raise significant funds, what's in it for the donor? They receive no tax receipt, no thank you from the charity, no report on how their donation has helped and, in fact, five minutes after leaving the store, most probably can't tell you which organization they just gave a twoonie to. These types of donor relationships can leave us feeling empty and dissatisfied.

But now, with a new year and a new decade upon us, donors are stealing the show. Aid agencies are overwhelmed by the support they've received since January 12th. Websites are crashing trying to process the thousands of donations pouring in. Donors aren't fatigued. Our hearts and wallets are open when we clearly understand the charitable cause, and how we can help.

It's time for all of us who care about the charitable sector to declare 2010 The Year of the Donor. And that will be the focus of our blog for the coming year.