In some ways, sitting down across a table and asking for a major gift from a 30-year-old is nearly identical to sitting down with someone on the verge of retirement, says Felicity Meu, a consultant at the Stanford Effective Philanthropy Lab. To understand a donor’s motives and see if that person is a good prospect, a fundraiser has to engage in what Ms. Meu calls a “deep empathy conversation” to let the donor understand you have a thorough sense of how she wants her gift to make a difference.
But in her work at the lab, and previously as director of next-generation giving at Stanford University’s Office of Development, Ms. Meu has found that younger donors have certain preferences. They often discover nonprofits online and give to those doing something new, rather than gravitating toward established institutions with a long history. They also often have different views on how to measure a nonprofit’s impact and on the role of volunteering.
For some young donors, volunteering means providing a specific kind of business experience to a nonprofit; and impact, for some, means being able to see tangible benefits in the world around them, rather than a set of data.
Ms. Meu talked with The Chronicle about how to engage young, wealthy donors. Her comments have been edited for brevity and clarity.
How is securing a large donation from a millennial donor different from, say, a baby boomer?
A meaningful major-gift conversation in many ways is going to be done how it’s always been done. You’re going to have many meetings. You’re going to sit down and figure out, through deep interviews, what’s important to this person, what their desired legacy is, what their capacity is, and what their hope is for the impact of their gift. However, the way someone gets to the other side of that table is very much changing, and technology plays a large role in that.
The way people initially engage with an organization differs today. Many major-gift donors are taking their first step online. Whether it’s a crowdsourcing platform or a giving day, that medium is still attractive to that set of donors. Very rarely is a donor’s first gift $100,000 — that’s always been true. But now many gifts are being made online in ways that might not raise the same signals to fundraising staff as they have in the past.
So how do nonprofits capitalize on younger donors’ willingness to engage online?
In any good online campaign, like a giving day where you’re getting thousands of gifts, hopefully before you’re launched, you’ve got a systematic plan for stewarding all of those individuals. You have a plan for people who are new. And you have a plan for people who have upgraded and for people who are making their first online gift. Have a plan for how you’re going to work with those people going forward.
Thank them on the channel through which they’ve shown their support. If they gave for the first time because they followed a link on Facebook, that tells you something about that donor.
If you think a young donor has the capacity to make a major gift, how can you encourage that?
It is fair to say most of the people I’ve talked to who are excited about giving a major gift to an organization have also spent some time with that organization. Listen really carefully when they talk to you about volunteering. Are they looking to volunteer their time, or are they looking to vet your organization? What you serve them up as a volunteer opportunity might differ based on that.
Sometimes they’re just saying volunteering but what they mean is high-level access to thought leaders in the organization. So maybe you call it volunteering, but it’s really a lunch-and-learn where individuals have access to leaders to hear what they’re thinking, understand their vision, and build rapport with the people executing the plan of the nonprofit.
How is this different from how other generations view volunteering?
There have been a lot of volunteers in previous generations who were willing to do whatever the organization needed. If the organization said, “We need 25 class-reunion volunteers,” then everyone said, “OK, great, I will be a class-reunion volunteer.”
This generation wants to do something a little more tailored to their area of expertise. Many times what they want from that experience is to leverage their knowledge to help the organization in a pinpoint-specific way. If they are a marketing-test genius — that’s how they’ve made their money — they’d like to be able to help the organization by sharing that expertise, because they feel they can bring more value to their volunteering this way.
However, building that kind of volunteer structure can be really challenging for nonprofits.
Do young, wealthy donors have different goals for what they want their gift to accomplish?
If you’re fortunate to be working one-on-one with a high-net-worth individual, you have the opportunity to unpack that a bit. Ask a lot of additional questions about what they mean by impact. It’s a word that gets used a lot among millennial donors, but for different people, it can mean very, very different things.
For some people, it truly does mean the most amount of good for their dollars — that is, reaching the highest number of people. For others, it’s a code for transparency, which is another thing that’s important to this generation of donors. Sometimes impact means something they are able to see: Can they walk around the streets of San Francisco and see the fruits of this labor or these dollars?
So while it’s become a buzzword, for different donors it means very different things.
How are young donors of means learning about philanthropy?
There’s a desire for a trusted third party when it comes to their philanthropy. Who can they talk to to get good advice, especially for high-net-worth individuals who made their wealth early. Their network of people who can give them good advice is small. Most of their peers haven’t experienced what they have. If they didn’t come from wealth, they can’t turn to their parents. Oftentimes they feel wealth managers and tax advisers either don’t have the knowledge of philanthropy or have interests that aren’t necessarily in line with their philanthropy. This is a hole in the landscape: how we bring in trusted third-party advisers for this group.
How can nonprofits help find philanthropic advisers for young major donors?
One of the ways we’ve tried to tackle that was lining them up with mentors who have gone through this journey in the past, who can advise them on things like “When I was your age, I wish I had ...” or “You don’t have a tax adviser yet; here’s who I use,” all the way up to the deeply philosophical questions like “This is the impact I’d like to make, and this is the legacy I’d like to leave.” All of these things are nuanced, complicated, and new to these donors.
Does this always work?
First, your millennial donor has to raise his or her hand and say they want help — and that doesn’t always happen. Also you have to have a cadre of seasoned philanthropists willing to take the time to have the conversation. There has to be good chemistry. You can’t just get any up-and-coming philanthropist and put them with a seasoned philanthropist and expect it to be a match made in heaven. And you have to be an organization that has the bandwidth and desire to do this with the understanding that some of those philanthropic dollars may not come to you. When a young donor makes a strategic philanthropic plan, you may not be at the top of their list, even if you made the introduction to their philanthropy mentor.
In doing this, do you risk intruding into the donor’s personal business?
In my experience, no. They’re craving those meaningful conversations. But you have to use good judgment, perhaps the number-one skill of a successful fundraiser. Listen and ask good follow-up questions. There’s a real hunger for thoughtful, high-level conversations around current and future philanthropy.
