Fundraising Update

Welcome to Fundraising Update. This week, experts explain how to build a smart outreach plan to engage donors throughout the year. Plus, can generosity go viral?

I’m Emily Haynes, senior reporter at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. If you have ideas, comments, or questions about this newsletter, please write me.

Outreach Plan Can Keep Donors Close All Year

Most fundraisers understand that staying in touch with donors all year long is crucial to keep supporters connected to the mission, ensure that no one is overlooked, and lay the groundwork for strong year-end giving. But it can be hard to know how — and find time — to build a 12-month outreach calendar, especially in a year that promises to be quite complicated.

My colleague Lisa Schohl spoke with experts who outlined key steps to take and things to consider when crafting a donor-engagement strategy for 2024. Here’s what they suggest to get the best results.

Dana Smith for The Chronicle

Define your goals and tie them to your nonprofit’s strategic priorities. Identify your top three priorities for donor engagement so you can build tactics and messages that feed into them, says Chrissey Nguyen Klockner, chief of staff at Carlos Rosario International Public Charter School in Washington, D.C. For example, these might include increasing awareness and understanding of your mission, deepening key donor relationships and expanding your pool of support, or raising a specific sum.

Your donor-engagement goals should be aligned with your nonprofit’s strategic priorities, she adds, to ensure that donors get consistent messages throughout the year.

Build the foundation. Identify the campaigns or moments when you already know you’ll be reaching out to donors this year, suggests Lori Woehrle, editorial director of Leapfrog Group, a firm that helps nonprofits with fundraising and marketing, but make it flexible so you can adapt if the landscape shifts. These moments could be on GivingTuesday, through a monthly newsletter, or with a quarterly magazine. You might think of these touchpoints as the “building blocks” of your plan.

Also consider the cadence of your communications. It’s OK to get in touch with donors often, such as monthly, as long as you’re not always asking for money, she says.

Once you have a big-picture view of your calendar, look for gaps between campaigns or months, where you can plug in creative engagement and stewardship activities, suggests Jen Newmeyer, director of digital fundraising strategy at PBS. Involve other departments, she adds, so you can complement each other’s efforts and avoid competing or oversaturating donors.

Plan consistent messages and stick to your theme(s). Unless something extremely dramatic happens, you shouldn’t need to change your message very much in a year, Woehrle says. You might think of it as having a platform for your overall message, which should be tied to your work and objectives. “It’s really about the goals of the organization,” she says. “What they’re trying to do, how they’re doing it, and why it’s important and urgent — while being sensitive to the world around us.”

Don’t be afraid of sounding repetitive. People need to hear something seven times before they remember it, Woehrle says, and your nonprofit isn’t the only one they’re hearing from. So, it’s critical to develop consistent messages and build on each one over 12 months to advance your goals.

Plan to share plenty of good news and updates on your impact, Nguyen Klockner says. Positive messages can be especially powerful at a time when many donors may be feeling bombarded with bad news, she adds. Reminding them that your organization continues to deliver results can help keep your nonprofit on donors’ minds and inspire giving.

Read Lisa’s full article for even more tips, including how to ask donors what they want.

Need to Know

— Chris Anderson, head of TED, on the premise of his new book, Infectious Generosity.

What if the internet could be a hub for generosity instead of a hotbed for division?

Making goodness go viral wouldn’t be easy — but it’s possible, says Chris Anderson, head of TED and author of the new book Infectious Generosity, which insists that nonprofit leaders, philanthropists, and everyday people have a role to play in reclaiming optimism online and electrifying what it means to give.

It’s been nearly two decades since TED transformed from a little-known gathering in Monterey, Calif., to a global brand, boasting thousands of independently-run TEDx events, a billion-dollar philanthropic venture called the Audacious Project, a meme, and over two dozen podcasts. And It all started with a viral video.

Anderson spoke with my colleague Sara Herschander about Anderson’s new book and its call for other nonprofits, philanthropists, and volunteers to open themselves up to collaboration and be more daring in what they’re willing to give. Here’s a snippet of their conversation, and you can read their full discussion here.

There’s a line in your book: “Threats, outrage, and disgust are compelling. Earnest goodness, alas, is boring.” Do you think generosity can regularly go viral on today’s internet, or do the algorithms need to change first?

I think we have to do both. The algorithms absolutely should change, and we should all put pressure on the social media platforms to do that.

There actually are serious efforts going on inside most of those companies to try to be more for the public good, but while that’s happening, there’s a lot that we can do ourselves.

The book is trying to crack the code of what could make kindness go viral. We’re often so boring in how we put stuff out there. Take a few risks, be playful, and dial up courage. In general, being more audacious is a big part of the recipe.

In recent years, so many everyday donors have stopped giving. What might a new giving model look like for them?

The hope with the Audacious Project is that millions of people will ultimately participate. What does that look like? We’re honestly still thinking hard about that ourselves.

Part of it is trying to make clear what a $10 or $100 donation can contribute — not just what millions of dollars can achieve.

One of the projects is a massive deworming program for children in Africa. Each procedure cost less than $1. If you can tell that story powerfully and make it easy for anyone to chip in $10, a lot of people would do that.

There’s a second more radical piece that I’m excited about: Communities could do a version of this themselves.

Instead of one person writing a check to an organization, a group of friends could work together to identify people who really have something special to offer — from a soup kitchen to a theater to a park — and encourage them to make a credible plan that a donor would take seriously.

Then, bring in some of the wealthier people in town and give them a chance to genuinely make a difference locally.

If you can bring together the people who will actually do the work and the people who will fund the work, it opens the door to a whole new set of possibilities of how change can happen at a local level. It could be really, really beautiful.

For more of Anderson’s thoughts on philanthropy, read his and Sara’s full Q&A.

Plus…

• Last week, the Chronicle ran an opinion piece by nonprofit executive Dan Goldberg about his organization’s decision to turn away from trust-based philanthropy after a trial period. Trust-based philanthropy practices encourage grant makers to award funding with fewer spending restrictions and reporting requirements. Proponents of the practice say it levels the philanthropic playing field, allowing grant recipients to spend the funds on the greatest need and skip the time-consuming process of reporting on the grant’s impact. The opinion piece caused quite a stir, and readers wrote into the Chronicle with their responses. Here are a few excerpts from those letters. You can read the full responses here.

  By encouraging partnerships between the grant maker and the nonprofit, trust-based philanthropy allows for a more expansive understanding of measures of success. Donors and nonprofits can learn together about the best way to achieve impact, which in turn encourages everyone to be more strategic in achieving long-term success.

  — Pia Infante, senior Fellow, and Shaady Salehi, executive director, Trust-Based Philanthropy Project

  Like other trust-based grant makers, the Honnold Foundation takes impact measurement seriously. Rather than blindly following our grantees, we invest in what we call authentic trust, which balances transparency with accountability. We believe both donors and grantees bear the responsibility of measuring impact. This provides regular opportunities for grantee organizations to share their results and offer confidential feedback about our performance as a grant maker.

  — Emily Teitsworth, executive director, The Honnold Foundation
  

Gift of the Week

Craig Newmark gave $10 million to the City University of New York Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism through his Craig Newmark Philanthropies to endow financial aid. The gift will pay full tuition for half the class starting in August 2025, and school officials plan to to raise an additional $30 million from other donors by the end of 2026 to provide free tuition in perpetuity to its entire student body.

Newmark founded the classified-advertising website Craigslist. He has devoted huge sums to charity in recent years, appearing on the Chronicle’s annual Philanthropy 50 list of the biggest donors four times since 2018. He has focused much of his giving on election integrity, journalism ethics, security, and cybersecurity, as well as helping veterans and their families. He donated $20 million in 2018 to establish the journalism school.

For other notable gifts this week, read my colleague Maria Di Mento’s Gifts Roundup column. To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly and has data going back to 2000.

Opinion

A Warning From the Gates Foundation: The Wealthy Must Give More In an exclusive guest essay, CEO Mark Suzman calls on megadonors to change and deepen their giving to preserve hard-fought gains in health and prosperity.

Fewer People Want to Lead Nonprofits. What’s the Answer? A new study finds that aspiring leaders, especially those of color, aren’t being pulled into leadership through support and positive role models but are more often pushed into top positions to escape difficult work circumstances.

What We’re Reading

Times Change; Generosity Persists. Last summer, two days of heavy rain flooded much of central Vermont. It was the worst flood the state had seen since 1927. The state’s capital, Montpelier, was hit especially hard, and its library suffered $1 million in damages to its furnishings and collections. Floodwaters seeped into the library’s basement, where staff were storing books to sell at an upcoming fundraising event. The books were damaged beyond repair and the event was canceled.

A neighboring nonprofit came to the library’s aid. The Waterbury Public Library made it through the floods relatively unscathed, so its supporting nonprofit decided to donate the proceeds of all its fundraising book sales from August to December — $1,087.87 — to Montpelier’s Kellogg-Hubbard Library. The nonprofit made its final contribution two weeks ago. The donation is a small contribution toward the funds Montpelier’s library needs to fully recover. But expert research by Waterbury’s library commissioner discovered that the gesture is a neat echo to one made after the 1927 flood.

Tasked in 1929 with distributing aid from the Massachusetts Library Club to Vermont libraries still trying to recover from the flood, the Kellogg-Hubbard librarian mailed a $100 check to the Waterbury Public Library. “I hope you will use it for something you want very much — but which you aren’t sure will be easy to obtain,” she wrote to its librarian. “It doesn’t have to be spent for books — anything in the interest of the library.” That was 95 years ago, and it’s nice to see librarians and their supporters continuing to rally around each other in difficult times. (VT Digger)