A New World: Fundraisers Navigate Changed Interactions With Donors

Angie Sledge remembers the first time she asked for a big gift on a video call.

During the first pandemic summer, the Knoxville Habitat for Humanity, an affordable-housing nonprofit in Tennessee, was starting an ambitious campaign to raise $4.5 million over the next two years. Concerns about the virus largely kept fundraisers from meeting in-person with donors, so they went virtual.

“We were going to take a telephone call, and I said, ‘Would you like to do this by Zoom?’” Sledge, the organization’s chief development officer, recalls. “And dagnabbit, the fellow didn’t turn on his camera. I was talking to a black screen.”

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Luckily, Sledge already had a relationship with the donor; he had previously made gifts as large as $12,000. Even so, it was nerve-racking to make her pitch without any sense of how it was being received. To Sledge’s surprise, the donor responded with a $50,000 gift — his largest yet.

Those early victories were the start of two years of uncertainty and improvisation. The result: Fundraisers say they’re working in a new world. The nuts and bolts of how fundraising happens is different. Conversations with donors have gotten deeper and more meaningful. Donors have had a lot of time to think, and they know what they want to support.

Simple questions about the health and well-being of a donor’s family that used to elicit one-word answers now spark emotional responses. “It often takes as much as 45 minutes to get to the actual point of the conversation,” says Shiloh Todorov, development director at Move to Prosper, an affordable-housing nonprofit in Columbus, Ohio.

Todorov sees these warmer, more meaningful conversations as a response to the “sniping” donors may encounter on social media or at their local school-board meetings. Opportunities for uncontentious conversations are few and far between right now. Todorov thinks donors will be open to more expansive discussions for the “medium term.”

Like Todorov, fundraisers across the country are taking stock of how their interactions with donors have shifted — and what that means going forward.

“For those fundraisers who already had a solid portfolio and a number of donors that they’ve known for years, the transition in the relationship should not have been radically different,” says consultant Sunil Oommen, who heads up his own fundraising firm. “Fundraisers who are tasked with prospecting for brand new donors that they’ve never met before — that’s where the rub is.”

Late-Night Texts

Like many fundraisers, Reshunda Mahone is used to being on the road. Before Covid, she spent about half of every month away on barnstorming visits to donors. In conference rooms, offices, and restaurants across the country, she forged ties with supporters.

Now the assistant dean for advancement and alumni engagement at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University, Mahone is focused on winning pledges for the university’s $4 billion capital campaign — mostly through virtual meetings. Right now, in-person visits account for roughly 10 percent of her meetings.

MADDIE MCGARVEY FOR THE CHRONICLE

It hasn’t been an easy switch. Mahone says it’s harder to get donors to take a video call. Before the pandemic, she says, donors felt a sense of urgency to respond when she told them she was planning a trip to visit them. She spends more time now trying to craft subject lines that prompt donors to open her emails. And even if donors do accept a remote meeting, there’s always the possibility they’ll cancel it. It’s easier to cancel a Zoom meeting than an in-person one.

Cutting out travel time seems like a win — and Mahone can now fit more meetings into a day. But there’s been a downside: She lost the time in transit when she’d reflect on what she learned about donors in their meeting.

Now she feels like she has to suggest a follow-up meeting five minutes after a video call has ended. She wonders if she’s putting too much pressure on herself or if she’s just mirroring what her fellow fundraisers are doing. Maybe business just moves faster now than it did before the pandemic. Whatever the cause, that time crunch eats at her.

The rise of video calls isn’t the only shift in how fundraisers and donors communicate. Before the pandemic, Nichole Dunn, chief executive officer at Flying Horse Farms, a camp for kids with serious illnesses, received occasional texts from donors on her personal cellphone. But, she says, it really picked up during the latter half of 2021.

Major donors and longtime supporters are sending her texts saying, “Watch for my gift in the next couple of weeks.” Sometimes they’ll text her questions about fundraising campaign deadlines or to schedule meetings with her.

Maddie McGarvey

“It really speaks to relationship development and rapport,” Dunn says. But it’s also an example of the tightrope many fundraisers are walking right now. During the past two years, fundraisers have strived to be more accessible to donors even as they needed more time off the clock to care for their families and themselves. It’s gotten Dunn thinking about how to embrace a communications medium that’s convenient for big donors — but has the potential to interrupt her personal time away from work.

Sometimes donors text after 7 p.m. or on weekend mornings. And sometimes they may keep the conversation going past the quick transaction of setting a date for a meeting or discussing a gift timeline.

In these rare instances, Dunn says, she tries to steer the relationship back into a more traditional realm. “Thank you so much for thinking of camp right now. I will get back to you tomorrow morning,” she might text back to a late-night question from a donor. When a text conversation goes on past the point where Dunn is comfortable, she may instead respond to the donor’s questions by email the next morning. So far, she says, donors have responded well when she sets such boundaries.

Accelerated Timelines

It’s not just the mechanics of fundraising that have changed. Conversations are richer and more intimate. But being on the receiving end of so much personal information can wear on fundraisers.

“We’re the first to hear from prospects what they’re going through,” says Mahone, of Emory University. She says fundraising leaders like her are now pushing themselves not only to bring in the dollars their organizations need but also to provide emotional support to their frontline fundraisers and the donors they meet with.

Fundraisers have always approached donor relationships with care and empathy, Mahone says. “But because of the pandemic, I think it’s taken it to a whole new level.”

There’s something else fundraisers are noticing: Many donors are more decisive now than they were before the pandemic. They know what they want to support, and they don’t need a long string of meetings to make a commitment.

“We’re all taught that the major-gift cycle is 18 months — that you need to wait, that you need to build up,” says Kathryn Van Sickle, director of major gifts at the Chapin School, an independent school in New York City. “That’s no longer the case because people have taken a lot of time to sit down, to revisit their values, to think about their legacies.”

Van Sickle says the time to reflect has made donors more clear-eyed on their giving priorities. “We need to be ready to move.”

Maddie Hansen, senior associate director of development at Penn Medicine, has seen the length of gift conversations decrease noticeably in some cases.

Hansen raises money from current and former patients of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. She says Zoom allows for “more focused” interactions than traditional approaches like inviting a donor to a lunch or a lecture. Because of that, she says, there’s no ambiguity about why they’re having a conversation. “It’s more like: Purely, we are meeting for an agreed reason to talk about your involvement and potential interest in giving back.”

While some potential donors may have attended an event or a lunch out of curiosity or a desire to rub elbows, she says, donors generally only accept an invitation for a video call if they intend to give. In some cases, this has sped up contributions. At the close of 2020, Hansen brought in a seven-figure gift from a couple she had only met virtually.

One advantage of video calls is that they make it easier to bring potential donors together with the faculty or researchers who would benefit from the gift. She points to a virtual lab tour her colleagues organized that enabled a faculty member to show his research to major donors. “You’re able to do things over Zoom that can really help cultivate a donor, even for a larger gift.”

Some committed donors don’t need a meeting of any kind before they make an additional gift, says Dunn of Flying Horse Farms.

In late October, Dunn contacted a longtime supporter about a fundraising campaign for the camp’s endowment. She suggested several ways they could meet — in-person, outdoors, or by phone or video call. The donor emailed back that she’d prefer to meet in-person in the spring, once Covid-19 case counts were lower, and that she’d double her annual gift with a contribution to the endowment.

Literacy or Meals

As donors reflected on their values over the course of the pandemic, they’ve become really specific about what part of the mission they want to support, says Patrick Gamble, senior director of development at SproutFive, a network of early-childhood education centers in the Columbus, Ohio, area.

Alyssa Schukar, The Greater Chicago Food Depository

“At the early start of the pandemic, everybody just kind of wanted to help anybody who needed it,” he says. For example, donors gave staff and clients essential items like diapers, over-the-counter medicines, face masks, and hand sanitizer. Those donations helped the nonprofit keep operating when many other organizations shut down. But as the pandemic stretched from weeks into months and years, donors widened their focus to include not just emergency needs but also long-term impact. Gamble says more donors are asking themselves: “What is very, very important to me?”

Gamble has sliced the nonprofit’s donor pool into ever more specific segments so fundraisers can approach donors with gift requests that fit their interests. SproutFive fundraisers have always sought out donors who care about education, but now they’re doing more leg work to determine which donors are passionate about funding literacy programs or nutritious meals for young learners, their families, and their teachers.

“People are like, ‘Alright, I only really care about this,’” Gamble says. “‘Don’t talk to me about the playground.’”

‘It’s a Great First Step’

Video calls loom large in the debate about the legacy of pandemic fundraising. It’s a contentious issue. Some fundraisers say donors have had their fill of Zoom, while others say that video calls will be an important part of fundraisers’ repertoires for years to come.

“People are just tired of devices,” Gamble says. “They’ve been harder to reach by email. They’ve been harder to reach by phone. They’ve been harder to reach by Zoom.”

Both donors and fundraisers have come out of the pandemic drained. The business world’s shift to virtual work has only added to the strain, says Erika Gable, associate vice president for development at the Columbus College of Art and Design.

“People seem really stressed out with their jobs right now and tend to take virtual meetings because of time crunch versus safety,” she says. “I’m having donors initially say, ‘Yes, let’s get together in person. Yes, come to my house. Yes, let’s do lunch.’ And then a couple of days before our meeting say, ‘Hey, can we do it virtually? I have back-to-back meetings all day.’”

Gable has started offering to drive to the offices of donors who work nearby so they can keep their in-person appointment without the donor leaving the office.

Video calls aren’t the right tool for every donor interaction, but they work well for some tasks, says Phil Hills, chief executive of the fundraising consulting firm Marts & Lundy.

“The ask is still really hard not to do in person,” he says. “The larger the gift is, the harder it is.”

Hills thinks fundraisers will have more success asking for contributions of $1,000 or more in-person. But he suggests they could consider making annual giving appeals for less than $1,000 by Zoom. Oftentimes they’re done by phone, and Hills thinks that to many donors, a Zoom call with a fundraiser would feel like an upgrade.

Abigail Smitka, regional director of major gifts at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, says video calls could be useful for introductory meetings. During a previous fundraising job in Boston, she had to make frequent trips to California to connect with potential donors. “I went all the way there and maybe they ended up in my portfolio, maybe they didn’t,” she says.

Video calls can save organizations the time and expense of travel, Smitka says, and also provide a platform for fundraisers to feel out how interested a potential donor really is in their mission. “It’s a great first step,” she says.

She also thinks video calls are an efficient way to follow up after an in-person meeting. “Instead of saying, ‘I’ll be back next month,’ it’s: ‘Here’s the link; let’s chat on Thursday.’”

Jill Zimmerman, chief philanthropy officer at the Greater Chicago Food Depository, says donors to the Chicago-area food bank have gotten used to more frequent emails, video messages, and video calls from fundraisers — and those interactions have strengthened their connection to the charity.

“Our fundraising has changed. It’s different, and I don’t believe that it’s ever going to go back to pre-pandemic,” Zimmerman says. “We now have a whole new set of tools in our toolbox that we’ll use.”

Fundraisers are feeling their way forward in this changed world, searching for the right combination of new and familiar strategies. It’s no easy task. But they say it helps to give donors options and let them lead.

Drew Lindsay contributed to this article.