George Whelan says too many charities that are trying to make up for drops in government and foundation support are missing a potential gold mine.
“We focus on major giving and lower-dollar donors,” he says, “but there’s not enough focus on the folks in the middle.”
Mr. Whelan presides over the direct-mail and telemarketing operation at WNET/Thirteen, a public-television station in New York that has more donors than any other in the country. He focuses on mid-level supporters, the 33,000 donors who give from $150 to $1,299 a year, the top bracket of the station’s 300,000 so-called basic members but just below the amount the station considers major gifts.
A mid-level appeal focuses more than a basic-membership appeal does on the donor’s specific areas of interest. It tries to lure supporters not only by offering the free gifts common to public-broadcasting pledge drives, but also by making donors feel invested in the organization’s mission, says Mr. Whelan (who is not related to the author of this article). Mid-level appeals, say fund raisers, are less frequent but more substantive than appeals to donors who give less.
Such efforts can bring handsome fiscal returns for charities: Mid-level gift appeals cost WNET only marginally more per donor than the station’s appeals to smaller contributors, Mr. Whelan says, yet the station has raised a total of at least $5-million from mid-level donors annually, about a third as much as the station raises from its smaller donors. Total gifts in the mid-level program have grown by more than 26 percent over the course of the four years that Mr. Whelan has been in charge of the program; total gifts among basic members have remained flat over the same period. Best of all, more than 700 mid-level donors have become major donors to the station by giving at least $1,300 in a year.
Marketing the Mission
Mid-level giving can be thought of as an attempt to identify the most devoted supporters among a charity’s membership and tap them for more help.
“There are lots of grass-roots orgs that have larger membership bases and some are realizing that they are peaking out in terms of their numbers,” said Scott Schultz, president of a Philadelphia direct-mail business who, as a consultant, helped develop mid-level solicitations for the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, and for two Los Angeles charities: the American Film Institute and St. Vincents Meals on Wheels.
Mr. Schultz says that mid-level programs like WNET’s work best when they put the focus on bringing supporters closer to an organization’s purpose rather than on plying them with perks. Mr. Whelan’s solicitations “use things like invitations to premieres -- no offense, but it’s not a lot of mugs and umbrellas,” Mr. Schultz says. “His program is the next step beyond that, connecting people to the mission.”
Mid-level and major donors are less likely than lower-level supporters to be motivated by trinkets, says Wesley Hall, director of annual giving for the American Film Institute. “At the upper levels, there’s more of an emphasis on contributing to the mission of the organization, and belonging, and being part of a group,” he says. “So your appeal is based more on what the institution does, and on its contribution to society.”
Since joining the institute two years ago, Mr. Hall says, he has revamped its decades-old mid-level giving program, expanding its reach beyond film-industry professionals to cinephiles, and increasing the minimum donation from $1,500 to $2,500. (The organization considers donations of $50,000 and more to be major gifts.) Its mid-level “Premiere Circle” program lures donors by creating opportunities for supporters to connect to the group’s film-preservation mission and to each other. It invites Premiere Circle members to movie premieres and exclusive dinners, such as one held last November that featured a chat by Gary Ross, director of the film Seabiscuit. Such events, Mr. Hall says, also give the organization’s staff members and leadership a chance to meet some of their most devoted supporters.
The effort, he notes, is still in its infancy, with only about 100 Premiere Circle members thus far, but it’s part of the explosive growth in the group’s overall base of support: About 7,000 of the institute’s 9,000 members have joined in the last year, largely because of appeals tied to the opening last spring of the group’s new theater in Silver Spring, Md.
St. Vincents Meals on Wheels, which operates on a $6.5-million annual budget fueled by 47,000 supporters, has focused on mid-level donors for the past five years, through a program it calls the Breakfast Club -- participants are asked to give at least $365 per year, to buy breakfast for a St. Vincents client. Appeals emphasize the nutritional importance of breakfast, and the fact that St. Vincents’ breakfast clients are among its neediest, says Daryl T. Twerdahl, director of the charity’s annual fund. “We’ve found that’s extremely successful, because people can easily grasp giving a dollar a day,” she says.
Most of her charity’s supporters, she says, give tiny amounts, but Breakfast Club members are responsible for 5.2 percent of the group’s overall revenue from donors. About 40 percent of Breakfast Club members remain in the giving program from year to year -- more, she says, than the percent that is retained by the charity’s lower-level giving programs.
When donors remain in the Breakfast Club for three years running, she says, the charity begins considering them as prospects to increase their giving. The group has just started a program for luring major gifts, which it defines as $1,000 and up. Ms. Twerdahl says that several Breakfast Club members -- slightly more than 12 percent -- have upgraded their giving to major-gift levels.
The group has found that emphasizing its mission is the strongest way to appeal to all its donors, not just mid-level supporters. “Meals on Wheels is kind of different from other organizations, like public television,” Ms. Twerdahl says. “People are saying, ‘Gosh, somebody’s going to go hungry.’ It’s a little different than, ‘Oh, the programming is not going to be what I thought it would be.’ Our donors across the board are quite connected.”
Making the Pitch
Most of WNET’s mid-level donors used to give smaller amounts, says Mr. Whelan. Either they were never coaxed to give more, he says, or they simply gave according to the prize they wanted during the annual pledge drive. His goal, he says, is to find those supporters who can give more than $150 a year by appealing to their charitable motives, rather than to their craving for the latest Ken Burns documentary on DVD.
Mr. Whelan locates prospects by combing the station’s electronic donor files and identifying those donors who appear to be on the cusp of making a gift of $150 or more. “I love to stare at the numbers,” he says.
He finds that the best prospects tend to be donors who gave in response to direct-mail solicitations and who have increased the size of their gift to the station at least once. He avoids people who make their pledges in response to the station’s on-air drive, he says, since only a quarter of those donors make a gift the following year.
Once the prospects are selected, he sends them mailings that are more personalized than the standard direct-mail solicitations. Many of the appeals to the mid-level prospects are signed by William Baker, the station’s president, while appeals sent to smaller-donation prospects are signed by the station’s director of membership.
The station also sends fewer mailings to these prospects -- roughly five additional-gift appeals per year for mid-level prospects versus eight for smaller donors -- assuming that they will respond to quality rather than quantity.
Mr. Whelan also tries to determine, through feedback gleaned from letters or phone calls, which television programs -- such as children’s shows or documentaries -- each donor prefers. Their preferences are marked in WNET’s database and shape the content of each solicitation. For example, he says, donors who have been identified as history buffs will be told about forthcoming documentaries.
The station’s mid-level donor phone solicitations are handled by a call-center company, Direct Advantage, in Pittsburgh, which was chosen for its small size. Its callers, Mr. Whelan says, are more conversational and less likely to subject donor prospects to a hard sell, easing prospects into a discussion of financial support by talking about forthcoming programming that matches their interests. These chatty callers are also pricier: WNET pays $5.75 for each contact, as much as 10 percent more than it would for a bigger call center, Mr. Whelan estimates.
He also picks up the phone himself, calling donors who give more than $1,000 and thanking them. A $500 donor gets a call from a lower-ranking WNET fund raiser. Mid-level donors also receive a video in the mail with a preview of the season’s new shows and an invitation to a party where the same preview is screened for an audience of WNET’s supporters. Those who give at least $500 also get a one-time opportunity to borrow from WNET’s video library. (By contrast, the stations’ largest donors are allowed to borrow as many items as they want.)
Soon WLIW, a Long Island public-television station whose fund-raising office recently merged with WNET’s, plans to start a similar effort to lavish attention on mid-level donors.
Forging a Bond
The net result of all the attention, Mr. Whelan says, is that mid-level donors feel much more closely tied to the station than do general members.
Mr. Whelan, who used to run Pace University’s annual fund and started its telephone fund-raising program, arrived at the station in 2000 and built aggressively on an effort to attract mid-level donors that had been loosely inspired by a similar effort at WGBH, a public-television station in Boston.
Mary Toropov, director of WGBH’s “Leadership Circle” for donors giving $300 or more annually, says the station has been focusing on mid-level donors for the past two decades; it expects to raise $2.6-million of its projected goal of $17.5-million in membership donations this year from mid-level supporters. Yet unlike Mr. Whelan, she does not emphasize the potential to find major-gift donors among the station’s small donors -- and she sees problems with that approach.
“They’re not all major-gift prospects,” Ms. Toropov says. “We find them to be very loyal members that are making a stretch gift to give at this level.” Unlike WGBH’s most generous supporters, she says, its mid-level donors do not try to support every cultural institution in town. Rather, she says, they are distinguished by their particular interest in public television: “They know the stuff way better than we do.”
The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden runs a mid-level program like WGBH’s, which focuses on the 1,500 of the zoo’s 53,000 donors who give from $1,000 to $5,000 per year. Such donors are responsible for $2-million of the $7-million the zoo collects annually from all its members, says Gregg Hudson, the organization’s president.
The zoo offers mid-level donors not just free admission, but also behind-the-scenes tours with zookeepers that provide a sense of how the zoo works, and what is required to keep it operating. Members who give at least $1,000 annually, for instance, are invited to a picnic on a farm where they can observe a cheetah running 65 miles an hour and learn about the organization’s conservation programs in the animal’s native Namibia. Through these events, Mr. Hudson says, “a lot of the donors will find out about these programs and will give directly to them.”
Career Opportunities
Because of the importance of mid-level donors to the zoo’s bottom line, Mr. Hudson says he is thinking of hiring someone to oversee the program full time. “It’s important,” he says, “to move a donor up.”
Mid-level giving could point to opportunities for fund-raising professionals, Mr. Schultz says, because it can help big grass-roots organizations whose memberships have stopped growing. He says, “There are going to be jobs for people in this space: people who understand both sides, membership and donor acquisitions on one hand and major-gifts fund raising on the other.”
Mr. Hall echoes the notion that major-gifts and membership experience are key to successfully luring mid-level gifts, adding that fund raisers who have backgrounds in special-events planning, public relations, and marketing would find those skills useful in courting mid-level donors.
“I would not hire a grants writer in that position. I think that’s a whole other animal,” he says. Mid-level supporters, Mr. Hall says, “like sexy benefits. They like to feel important. Not only is their support coming from a desire to give to the cause or the mission, it’s also wanting to be part of the institution. You want to have events, you want to market it. It needs to be attractive.”