If your annual cocktail fundraiser feels stale, cancel the servers bearing trays of bacon-wrapped mini-hot dogs. Instead, hang food on the wall.
You read that right. Richard Aaron, president of BizBash, which reports on event marketing and planning, says companies and nonprofits are hanging everything from cheese to salami cubes on wall pegs at their parties.
Jon Layne, a Los Angeles event planner, created a doughnut wall for a Zimmer Children’s Museum benefit, even working with a bakery to create icing that matched his backdrop colors.
We're sorry. Something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page.
You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one,
or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 571-540-8070 or cophelp@philanthropy.com
Make Food the Star of Your Event
If your annual cocktail fundraiser feels stale, cancel the servers bearing trays of bacon-wrapped mini-hot dogs. Instead, hang food on the wall.
You read that right. Richard Aaron, president of BizBash, which reports on event marketing and planning, says companies and nonprofits are hanging everything from cheese to salami cubes on wall pegs at their parties.
Jon Layne, a Los Angeles event planner, created a doughnut wall for a Zimmer Children’s Museum benefit, even working with a bakery to create icing that matched his backdrop colors.
Mr. Aaron says such “food design” brings energy to events, and chefs and caterers are often eager to try something new.
The planned-giving messages that Hackensack Meridian Health slips into in its annual-giving mailings are so subtle that a donor might not even notice them. One letter has just a tiny box that donors check if they want more information about including the hospital system in their wills or estate plans.
But the small notices appear to be working. Since the organization added them to its direct mail three years ago, the number of people asking about naming the health system in their wills or trusts has jumped by about a third; requests for information about charitable-gift annuities have gone up 12 percent.
Hackensack Meridian fundraisers call it “plannual giving” — promotions for bequests or other planned gifts dropped into annual-giving appeals.
ADVERTISEMENT
The mailings are sent to all donors who give less than $10,000, not just older ones who may be planning their estates. “We know our loyal annual donors are the most apt to make a planned gift at some point in their future, so offering that messaging in our regular annual-giving marketing” makes sense, says Robert Wahlers, vice president for development for the hospital system’s six foundations.
According to Mr. Wahlers, there’s no reason to wait until donors are up in years to start promoting planned gifts: “At that point, they may have already made up their mind about their favorite organization, so the chance of getting into their will” is diminished.
Follow-up material includes brochures that tout things like the health system’s Meridian Professional Advisors Network — a group of volunteer financial advisers, tax lawyers, and accountants ready to help donors who inquire about estate plans.
The hope is that a sizable number of donors “will slowly build their knowledge” and become more sophisticated about planned gifts, Mr. Wahlers, says. “We are really thinking about a marathon and not a sprint.”
— Timothy Sandoval
ADVERTISEMENT
Fundraisers from a top university and arts, health-care, and social-service organizations offer tips for landing endowment gifts.
The Phone-athon of the Future?
Students Working a Davidson College phone-athon might call, at most, 25 alumni an hour. But one student this spring reached better than 200 an hour.
This was not a stunt. Rather, the college was trying out what you might call a “textathon.” Here’s how it worked:
Channeling Bernie: For its annual giving day, #AllinforDavidson, the college signed up Relay, a new company run by veterans of Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid. Relay is selling to the charity world a key weapon from the Sanders campaign — the personalized-texting system it used to mobilize armies of young voters.
One-to-one texting: Using Relay software, Davidson uploaded alumni phone numbers and data to laptops. With a few clicks, students and staff could send a prewritten message to alumni, one at a time, sometimes tweaking the text to personalize it.
ADVERTISEMENT
Templated speed: If an individual responded, textathon workers would click and send one of four templated replies, or write their own. Alumni who wanted to donate got a link; those who declined received a polite thank you.
Payoff: The college sent 2,300 Relay texts to alumni who had donated last year but not this year. Though only about 50 donated, nearly a third responded, with some starting a text conversation in which they provided new contact information. Davidson’s Lisa Howe Combs says this response is noteworthy given the declining rates at which Americans open email or answer phone-athon calls. A bonus: Because messages are archived, she can review each text conversation and look for patterns.
The college likes the new weapon and will deploy it again, albeit strategically. “We don’t want to use it for everything,” Ms. Combs says. “We want to keep our powder dry to ensure effective response rates.”
Development chiefs routinely track the performance of individual fundraisers through data. But what about everybody else in their offices?
Not long ago, City of Hope, a cancer-care and -research center in the Los Angeles area, introduced performance metrics for all 140 development employees. With her team leaders, chief philanthropy officer Kristin Bertell sets the office’s overall goals, which this year include raising $142 million. Those goals “cascade down,” she says, and each department sets four to six targets that indicate how every staffer will contribute to the broader effort.
Prospect researchers, for example, know exactly how quickly they must turn around profiles of prospective donors; this year, they are being evaluated based on whether they meet 48- or 72-hour deadlines, depending on the size of the likely solicitation. Stewardship officers are aiming to renew 85 percent of past or lapsed donors.
Elaine Lee
GLAZED OR SPRINKLES? A doughnut wall brings energy and fun to a benefit at the Zimmer Children’s Museum.
The metrics-for-all system stems in part from surveys of department staff members, who indicated that expectations for individual employees were unclear. Supervisors now briefly check in with employees about their performance every six weeks.
ADVERTISEMENT
These regular talks have eased the tension and mystery that often accompany annual performance reviews, Ms. Bertell says. “We can’t be afraid to have clarity on this.”
The Red Cross takes fundraising planning to the extreme. Just ask Barb Coury, who led the organization’s fundraising in Indiana for five years. Ms. Coury had her major-gifts fundraisers create calendars that spelled out — to the date — when they would ask supporters for donations and when they might close each gift. Such painstaking planning is expected of Red Cross fundraisers across the nation, but Ms. Coury says Indiana hadn’t embraced the idea before she started there.
“It sounds kind of daunting,” she says, but the work appeared to pay off: Fundraising for Indiana rose 45 percent in 2015 and 18 percent in 2016. The calendars keep fundraisers on track and help them spot problems early, says Ms. Coury, who recently left her Indiana post for a role with the national Red Cross. Fundraisers try to schedule donor meetings three months out. If a visit falls through, they can often adjust well in advance. “It really avoids surprises,” she says.
ADVERTISEMENT
Some key details:
Fundraisers start building their calendars about a month and a half before the start of the new fiscal year, using donor history as a guide for when loyal backers might give.
They primarily schedule solicitations for new prospective donors toward the start of the fiscal year so they can adjust if the person declines to give.
Board members help build and execute the plan. For instance, a board member may make introductions to new donors or supporters who have lapsed.
— Timothy Sandoval
“How to Attract Midlevel Donors” features a stewardship plan from the American Farmland Trust and a six-step checklist for building a new program.
