Building and maintaining a culture of philanthropy is hard work. It is deep work that takes years to build and moments to destroy. But having a healthy culture of philanthropy makes work more fun and makes fundraising easier. It’s worth having a periodic check-up to assess how your institution is doing.

Answer these questions for your institution:

Board Support

• Does your board of directors (or board of trustees) support the organization as current year donors at 100% participation?
• Board support is a sign of stakeholder investment. It also shows that your closest advocates are current with their support. The level of the support doesn't matter so much as the consistency and recency of that support. PS - It's easier to ask for others to give if you are a current donor.

Staff Support

• Does your fundraising staff support the organization as current year donors at 100% participation?
• Does at least 50% of your organization’s overall staff (and faculty) support the organization as current year donors?
• Again, staff support is a measurement of stakeholder investment. Does your staff (especially your fundraising staff, believe in the mission enough to back it with their personal funds? The level doesn't mean as much as the participation.

Alumni support (or Grateful Patient support)

• This category assesses whether those served by your organization’s mission give back to the organization later. This is a sign of institutional effectiveness.
• What is your alumni (or similar) participation rate? You’ll know whether this is good for your organization or not. The level at which this metric is outstanding varies widely from institution to institution.

Fun Factor

• Does your organization frequently have concrete signs that fundraising is seen as an enjoyable community endeavor? (For example, an annual gala, a stewardship picnic, a “Dancing with the Deans” competition, etc.)
• List what you currently do to put the “fun” in fundraising.
• Write down three new ideas to improve your fun factor.

Communications

• How often do your constituents hear from the organization without a fundraising pitch?
• Do these communications include stories of impact?
• Are you communicating in different media? Email, print, video, etc?

Stewardship and Donor Relations

• Do you have meaningful giving societies?
• Do you have a person designated to assist donors with any “customer service” type issues? 
• How is your data management and data integrity? Nothing kills a philanthropic feeling like your name being wrong on an invitation.
• Stewardship is not just the purview of the staff member with "donor relations" in his or her title. It is an office-wide perspective of service and connection. From your front desk associates to student workers/interns to your accountants on staff to gift officers and especially advancement services and gift processing staff, improving donor relations should be everyone's primary objective.

Other questions to think about:

• Does your organization show the impact of giving clearly and broadly?
• For major donors, do you create unique reports and experiences that connect for them their gift to the impact in the world?
• Do you see expressions of gratitude at all levels of the organization? Where could your organization do better?
• Are the needs of the institution are clearly expressed for donors of all levels using different media?
• Does the institution set expectations for giving through specific asks, giving society thresholds and endowment minimums?
• Are fundraising goals embraced by both fundraising staff and program staff/faculty?

How did you feel about the assessment? Where are you doing well? Where should you improve? 

As always, comments and questions are welcome and encouraged!

Cheers,

Jessica

PS - If you liked this post, you might also like these: 

• Goals versus projections
• What should a strategic plan contain?
• Planning for the Unexpected
• Conducting a Benchmarking Study
• My Exhaustive Event Planning Checklist

PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my  guide to Call Center Games for Free!​​

1. Select a different signatory. If your CEO or President usually signs the letters, consider having a donor, volunteer, board member, student, scholarship recipient, grateful patient, recent graduate or faculty member sign the letter this year. Write from their perspective.
2. Do an “Ugly Betty”. So named because it isn’t pretty. This kind of mailing looks like those magazine subscription renewal letters you get. Almost no copy but just a perfunctory reminder to renew giving. People do them all the time because they work.
3. Write a copy-heavy letter. Most of the direct mail pieces I’m seeing in higher education are graphics heavy and, in my opinion, over-produced. Take inspiration from small nonprofits and write a long form letter, going into greater detail about your mission and impact. Don’t be afraid of 3 or 4 or more pages of copy.
4. Break up your copy with bold font, underlines, small paragraphs and block quotes.
5. Don’t forget the PS. Everybody reads the PS. Reiterate your call-to-action here. Don’t be afraid to add a PPS.
6. Go super-short. If you normally write a longer letter, try an abbreviated copy that will force you to squeeze the mission and call-to-action in as quickly as possible. The front of one letter sized page with letterhead would be my recommendation. I've gone as short as the space between the bottom of the letterhead and the top of the bottom third (which was a tear off reply card) with success!
7. Put your “updates” on the back. All that great stuff that faculty and/or program staff want you to communicate doesn’t belong front and center in a fundraising letter. A solicitation isn’t their annual newsletter. Put pictures and “talking points” on the back of the letter.
8. Consider doing a planned giving focused letter. Select a targeted group and write with the goal of generating leads for your planned giving staff rather than dollars-in-the-door right now.
9. Test including matching gift brochures in your mailing. Include a blurb about matching gifts in the PS. (You can get brochures here.) 
10. Get inspired by looking at samples on SOFII, the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration.
11. Find and tell the most compelling story you can. Pull some heartstrings. Be emotional.
12. On the other hand, you might need to go to the data. Put in some graphs that show how the cost of an education has changed. Or how much state support has decreased. This might be old news for you but revelatory for your prospects.
13. Write about student debt loads at your institution by checking out your statistics at The Project on Student Debt. Here's my post about how to use student debt data. 
14. Change your focus. If you normally solicit for the college level, consider a general fund letter or a departmental letter.
15. Work with major gift officers to secure a matching donation. Write a challenge letter and have the donor sign it.
16. Research “envelope tricks” and try something new on the outside of your letter.
17. Make sure your institution is doing all that they can with data research to have correct addresses. Here’s a quick introduction to basic research. 
18. Ask your mail vendor to send you a stack of samples. Even if you don’t use a mail processing vendor now, you can inquire with one and they will send you samples.
19. Ban the phrase “make a difference”. Get a large white board and write as many phrases as you can in answer to the question, “What do I mean when I say the donor’s gift will make a difference?” Characterize the difference. What does it look like, feel like, or do in the world?
20. Construct a peer-solicitation strategy. Recruit representatives to sign the letters from each class year and segment accordingly.
21. Put your name on the mailing list of 10 different nonprofits you admire. Within a month, you’ll have a stack of samples. Read them and see which ones move you and why.
22. Write your direct mail FAR in advance. Start writing your fall mailings now. The longer lead time you give yourself, the freer you’ll be to be creative and try new things.
23. Find a story highlighted in another department and expand upon it. A story of a scholarship recipient shared on social media. The story of a bequest that was in the planned giving newsletter. The student highlighted in the admissions mailing because they won the Rhodes Scholarship. It’s okay to re-use, especially if they have different audiences.
24. Try a survey mailing. Ask your constituents about how they feel about the institution, how they like to give, and why they give. Include an ask too, of course.
25. If this is appropriate to your mission, include a petition for a lobbying issue. Ask them to give to the same issue.
26. Stay away from premiums! Giveaways should be used for stewardship not acquisition. If they send you $10 because you gave them a luggage tag or address labels, why would they give next year? You’ll be putting yourself on a hamster wheel.
27. Do a big quality check on your organization’s addressee and salutation fields. If these are wrong or wonky, it can make your organization look very silly and prevent prospects from EVER opening your letters.
28. This one is hard. Consider whether you really need a refresh. Are your donors bored? Or are YOU bored? If the results bear out that your current strategy is working, don’t mess with success. Instead, ask your supervisor whether you can expand your work into another area in order to keep yourself growing and challenged.
29. Find inspiration from the for-profit world of direct marketing. Follow Direct Marketing News on Facebook. Here’s some of their resources. 
30. Research donor-centric copy. This post was pivotal when I was teaching myself to write copy for direct mail: Future Fundraising Now, Some Donor Centered Copy Examples
31. ​Write your donor using engaging narration. You’ve probably heard it before but take your draft and write it again using the word “you” more often. Make it about how the donor is changing something for the better because they gave (or will be giving).

Did you get at least 2 good ideas to pursue from this list?

Which one was most helpful? Do you have any tips for my readers struggling to make their direct mail copy fresh?

Comments and questions are, as always, welcomed and encouraged!

Best of luck in your copywriting! Cheers,
 
Jessica Cloud
 
PS – I TOLD YOU EVERYONE READS THE PS! If you liked this post, you might also like these:

• Spoilt for Choice: Why Giving Donors Direction Works
• Is Direct Mail Really Dead?
• Five Steps to Break Through Your Direct  Mail Writer's Block
• VIDEO Tutorial: How to Set Up Formulas in Excel for Direct Mail Statistics
• An introduction to Evidence Based Fundraising

PPS - If you found this article helpful, please comment and let me know. Also subscribe to Real Deal Fundraising so you don't miss a post! You'll get my guide to Call Center Games for Free!​​

If you haven’t heard, Stanford University ruffled some feathers last week by announcing that is doing away with its phonathon. Here's the announcement from Stanford. Donor Relations Guru and Annual Giving Network wrote about it.

Here’s my take. Stanford is not the first to get rid of their phonathon and they won’t be the last. Does that mean that phonathon is dead? No way!

One friend of mine said “So It Begins” on Facebook about this because with such a high profile university ditching their phonathon, annual giving specialists all over the country will have to go into a new cycle of justifying their programs to administrators who think that their universities are also Stanford.

The truth is that Stanford could afford to stop fundraising full stop and they wouldn’t lose any market share for years. Eventually revenues might drop, but it would take a while. The loss of new fundraising revenue wouldn’t seriously impact their rankings or ability to recruit students for decades probably.

Stanford has two very powerful things that your university probably doesn’t have that make it possible for them to say to donors: “You meet us on our terms. We don’t feel like calling you anymore.” Or as they put it in their paperwork. “Give online. It’s the modern way to give!”

• Brand recognition

They are #5 in the nation. They are in the company of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia and The University of Chicago. They completed a $6 Billion (with a B) campaign in 2012, which means they raised all that money during the economic downturn. If we looked honestly at the brands of our institutions, most of us are regional or national institutions at best. Stanford is a global brand. The simply don't need phonathon to communicate and shore up their brand.

• Endowment

Stanford’s endowment is $22.2 Billion. At a 4% spending allocation per year, that would provide $888 Million annually. The annual operating budget for my alma mater (The University of Southern Mississippi) is approximately $278 Million. And Southern Miss is lucky enough to use unrestricted giving as a value-add and not require those funds to meet that operating budget. Many colleges and universities NEED that unrestricted income and they need to continue to educate their constituents about their needs. Stanford could fund THREE mid-size universities every year with just 4% of their endowment revenue (without touching their corpus).

Donor Relations Guru makes the point that we should be multichannel and of course we should. Giving donors options and honoring their choices should be part of your plan. But if you aren’t Stanford and you don’t have a long game plan to replace the things that phonathon brings you (up-to-date data, donors, positive public relations, dollars, and donor education) proceed with caution. Don’t get rid of any medium that you can afford that gives your donors another way to give. I work for an institution that stopped communicating with donors via phone a while back and now we have to rebuild and repair those relationships. 

Phone calls have significant advantages that haven’t changed:

• It’s personal (much more than a mailing or a Facebook post)
• Dialog not monologue (Phonathon is not passive. It’s active. It’s asking.)
• Cost effective and scale-able (Compared to major donor visits)

Imagine if we just gave up trying to visit major donors and just decided to tell them all to give online. I don’t think we would clutch our pearls. We would laugh and wish that institution the best in their experiment. (I guarantee that political candidates aren't even considering giving up their "Get Out the Vote" phonathons!) Personal interaction works best. We know this because fundraising is about relationships. But it is also about asking. Phonathon allows us to do both and reach a large amount of people at the same time. No other medium does this.

If your phonathon isn’t working, it probably isn’t because the medium is dying. It’s more likely that the problem originates from poor caller training/management, you have poor contact rates or ironically, you aren’t calling enough to make your fixed costs worthwhile. There are solutions to all of these issues. 

Over the last few weeks, I've been posting about a wide variety of best practices to improve contact rates in phonathon. This post will serve to consolidate this information and recap the recommendations. 

It is not possible to raise money from someone that you can't get in touch with, so contact rate is crucial to a healthy phonathon. When your contact rate improves, you will raise more money even if call quality doens't improve at all. It is not optional. You must have a plan to get your data clean and valid and keep it that way. 

First Steps to Improve Phonathon Contact Rates: This post outlines the importance of contact rates and details the basic research processes that every phonathon should be doing prior to loading data for the year. 

Next Steps to Improve Your Phonathon Contact Rate (Wireless ID and Wireless Append): This post lays out the trends with respect to households transitioning to wireless only. Your database must manage phone types properly to accommodate this shift. There are also new data research tools that you need to make use of to acquire cell phone numbers.

Continuing to Improve Phonathon Contact Rates (Most Best Practices): In this installment, I recommend that you manage your data so that you do not load known invalid phone numbers for calling again. Once you remove those invalids, you'll need to find more groups to call and I show you how to lobby to call new colleges, schools or units. 

Improving Contact Rates in Phonathon with Where-Are-You-Now Emails: Besides making good use of data research services, you should also go to your constituents and ask them to update their information. In this post, I give an overview of sending next day "where-are-you" emails and "where-are-you" email blasts. 

​Young Alumni, Contact Rates and the History of Cell Phones: This post shows why young alumni are a strong group for contact rate and gives a comprehensive argument for why you should not remove young alumni from phonathon.

I hope you find these tips helpful. If you implement these strategies, your contact rate will improve. Improved contact rate in your phonathon will mean more money for your institution. Please comment below and let me know your results.

This is the fourth in a five-part series about ways to improve phonathon contact rates. Contact rate is one of the most important metrics in phonathon. To read the other posts in this series, click here.

Where-Are-You-Now (WAYN) Next-day emails

Beyond properly employing all of the data research tools available, you can also improve your data integrity by systematically asking your alumni to update their information. One of the best practices for this is implementing a “Where Are You Now?” next day email to all prospects marked as wrong number, reassigned number, disconnected, or whereabouts unknown (for whom you have an email address on file). This email would basically explain that the institution was unable to reach them and direct them to a website where they could update their demographic information.

I marketed the update website as a “Reconnect” website and promoted it throughout the year not just in these emails but also on direct mail pieces and at the bottom of other emails. These next-day auto-responder emails to newly coded invalid numbers should be an on-going part of your program which supplements the data collection your phonathon callers do on the phone and your data research program.

Where-Are-You-Now (WAYN) Email blasts to lost alums

I recommend sending a bulk “Where Are You Now?” email blast to all prospects not loaded due to status as a “historic delete”. (A historic delete is a constituent that you did not load for phonathon calling because you know all their numbers were coded as invalid in previous years. See post about that here.)

The process for a WAYN blast is very similar to the WAYN next day emails. This should be done sometime in the mid-fall semester so that results can be incorporated into the database in the spring. Load a segment in the spring semester called “Fall Updates” which consists historic deletes for whom a new phone number was found during the fall semester. This makes sure that those who update don’t go an entire year without a solicitation and gives you a few more records to call in the spring.

​I​f you found this article helpful, sign up for my mailing list to keep in touch. You will immediately receive a free e-book, "15 Best Call Center Games" and you'll be entered to win a copy of my upcoming e-book "How to Staff Your Phonathon Super-Fast: The 7 Secrets to Fill the Seats". Click the button below to sign up.

A solid strategic plan is not an easy thing to write. Ideally, it should have a balance of big picture thinking and sufficient detail so that it can be implemented. A strategic plan cannot be pie-in-the-sky but it also cannot be a user’s manual full of which button to push.

I would advise that strategic planning begin with 3 steps:

1. Undertake a benchmarking study with peer institutions. This can be as formal or informal as you have time for. Design questions that address these issues:
   1. What are the elements of their fundraising program? What are their goals?
   2. How much do they raise with their budget?
   3. Are there program elements that many peer institutions have that you do not? Why or why not?
2. Assess the culture of philanthropy at your institution. Consider these questions:
   1. Do the closest stakeholders understand the need for giving (employees, board members, etc.)? Do they actually give?
   2. Are there elements of fun around the enterprise of fundraising?
   3. Do you have an eager pool of volunteers to assist you in your endeavors?
   4. How’s staff morale?
3. Clearly articulate what your goals are for the upcoming year. Be concise and specific.
   1. Dollars or donors? Both? Alumni participation?
   2. Special campaigns? Buildings? Endowments? Operating expenses?
   3. Building or improving systems? Donor/alumni relations?

If your staff can take these three steps you are well on your way to a solid strategic plan. From here, you will need to take into account what you can afford to do next year, your budget. Your budget will drive what vehicles you can use to fundraise and how much you can do with each of those methods. Do you have major gift officers? How much can they travel? What’s a reasonable expectation of visits?

Do you have staff and budget to promote planned giving opportunities? What can you afford to do in terms of direct mail, phonathon, donor relations, etc.? Don’t forget about crucial areas like stewardship and fulfillment (pledge follow up). Also, pay special attention to data integrity and enrichment. You cannot afford to ignore those important areas.

Now, you have to combine your various vehicles for communication with the content: the case for support. What will you be focusing on this year? What are the needs of your institution? Scholarships? Program support? Operating expenses? What’s the impact that the donor will have in the world if they make a gift this year? Begin to weave these messages into thoughts about how to segment your data this year.

The final part of your strategic part is to have a calendar. You know enough now to lay out the steps. Don’t go into too much detail but have a month-by-month list of what major action steps need to happen to accomplish your goals. Review this calendar regularly at staff meetings.

It is inevitable that you won’t get to all your great ideas in one year. I’ve found it helpful to add a section at the end of my plan called “And Beyond” where I can stash my great ideas for future years. It keeps me inspired and helps me not to forget. Encourage other staff to join you in adding to that list throughout the year.

Most importantly, the strategic plan cannot be a lifeless document. If you aren’t referencing it at least once a month (preferably more), it isn't working for you. Start over. Make it a living document that guides you to your goals.

Your phonathon contact rate is a metric that measures your data integrity. It answers the question: How often does a completed call result in a solicitation of the correct individual?

Contact rate is defined as the percentage of your completed calls that are actual contacts. The formula is number of contacts divided by number of completes. As previously stated, all contacts (pledges, refusals, etc.) are completes but there are also other non-contact completes including deceased, wrong numbers, do not calls, disconnected, etc. 

If your contact rate is 36%, this means that out of 100 completed calls, you are only asking 36 people for a gift. The other 64 calls are marked as wrong numbers, do not calls, etc. It is difficult to raise money in this data environment. A strong contact rate would be in the 60-70% range. The more times that you talk to the correct person, the more chances you have to raise money.

When contact rate improves, it becomes easier for the callers to raise money because they are making more solicitations per hour of work. When contact rate improves (even when call technique and caller performance does not improve), raising money becomes magically easier.

So, if you have a contact rate problem, what are some inexpensive ways that you can begin to improve this metric?

My first recommendation is always, begin with basic research.

Basic level research is a two-step process:​

1. National Change of Address (NCOA) research through the post office and,
   
2. A general phone append process.
   

Essentially, this process looks for people who have recently moved and then searches for whether there is a phone number at the new address. These two services are very inexpensive to undertake but are the foundation of a strong research program for phonathon fundraising.

You should check with your advancement services staff to see if NCOA is being done regularly. Oftentimes this is standard procedure for advancement services to run an NCOA but a regular phone append process is less common. If your shop doesn’t already do this, begin lobbying for this to take place. I would recommend NCOA be done quarterly and a phone append annually or once per semester.

Another thing to keep in mind as you inquire about this with advancement service staff is timing. Ideally, you would like NCOA and a phone append run in the summer as close as possible to the time that you begin you phone program for the new fiscal year. (Just make sure the results are incorporated into the database before the calling data is pulled and loaded.)

Your effort will be rewarded. Any time spent on data integrity and research is like giving your callers a magical head-start on your fundraising goals.