Episode 284: The Donor Waltz Three Conversation Sequencing that Builds Momentum
As Mr. Rogers once said, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood right here on this edition of Around with Randall. You might think of this a little bit differently today because we're going to learn how to dance. When I was a young boy. I had to go to cotillion by, I think, more force and threat than by desire.
But nevertheless, I went. For those who don't know. Catalina is where you go learn to dance. And I learned to dance the waltz. One and two and three and one and two and three. And today we're going to take that waltz and create a donor waltz and talk about the sequential three meetings, the conversations that need to happen to get to more gift opportunities.
And when we're done, maybe you'll hear your own waltz in the work that you do. This is going to be used. Can be used. Should be used in different contexts, i.e. a new potential donor. Or maybe it's a donor who you're trying to elevate, or it's after the completion of a pledge, maybe a campaign gift, and then the elevation to the next gift.
Maybe it's to move into plan giving. The intent here is to give you tactical, as we tend to do at the end, tactical steps and rationale behind them as to how to get to. As we talk about all too often more transformational relationships. And what I realized is I've done a very poor job in giving some of those tactical steps, while I also talk about the idea of or the importance of building transformational relationships.
Trust with people. And it's easy to talk about if you don't share how to do it, where the real rubber meets the road, where education or professional development. However you look at what we're talking about here, and each and every week on a round with Randall is how to actually do it. And so we'll start today with the big picture.
What's going on? Why is this important. Number two. Why it matters. And then number three we're going to have tactical solutions to think about these three consecutive meeting conversation steps, emotional states of the donor to get them toward that ultimate conversation about how they might invest in you. So we'll start at the top, as we always tend to do, we tend in our industry to think about these kind of three meetings, three kind of steps in the process, as separate as not linked, as not interdependent.
And that's the first part of this is we can't view this as isolated moments in a series of progression steps. And here's why the donor doesn't view it this way. The donor wants to be taken on a journey, and I'll use me as an example throughout. As I've been approached, my wife and I and I've been approached about some philanthropy, and I don't feel like there's any sequential steps that we are being kind of moved all over the place in a non connected way.
The role of the conversations can be kind of classified in some three bigger buckets. The first is permission and discovery. The second is meeting and alignment. And the third is movement and moving toward commitment. And this serves, if done correctly, the emotional journey which I will have more to talk about here, probably sometime in the next six months to a year around what exactly the donor goes through emotionally.
The challenge is, is, is that most fundraisers may often repeat the same generic conversation multiple times. And that frustrates the donor. They're looking to try to go somewhere and it becomes contact with no progression or narrative or connection. What we find is, is that when we sequence this correctly, we're taking the donor where they want to go. And I always talk about being a Sherpa in the gift getting business.
What we are philanthropy fundraisers that we are guiding them where they want to go. We're not telling them where they should go. We're helping them get there. And without this sequencing, donor engagement becomes repetitive, awkward, premature. It becomes up and down and non-conductive. And it's tough to get to the next meeting. Tough to have the next conversation. If we sequences correctly, we'll get more conversion from picking up the phone and saying, hey, I'd like to have the next meeting.
Loose terminology. They're willing to do that because they understand where we're headed. And so this brings us to why this matters, where this connection is. The first thing is, is that challenge number one, or the kind of the why it matters, number one, is that we sometimes confuse activity with progress. All too often that multiple meetings in our world may not mean relationship development.
And I use this when I do a lot of my teaching. And talking about John Wooden, the legendary coach at UCLA, his pyramid of success, which he used as the basis for his, as he called it, teaching. Yes, there was basketball, but he taught them life. You asked Bill Walton, or formerly the Law Center, now creme de bar, or any of those great players winning ten championships in 11 years.
They would tell you they learn more about life from John Wooden than they did basketball, and the pyramid of success. In that pyramid of success, a bunch of phrases, sayings and beliefs was don't confuse activity with accomplishment. And that's what we're talking here in that first, why it matters. All too often our metrics support the idea of lots of activity, but misses the boat when it comes to the answers or the thought process of donor relationship building.
There should be a purpose to it, and this can be seen in various podcasts that I've done where I talk about this and how to elevate those conversations. And we'll get into that three step process and tactical outcomes here in a minute. The second challenge is, is that poor sequencing actually damages the donor's confidence. You know what you're doing.
And I'm experiencing that right now. I had a desire I still kind of do to want to do something. I had a little bit of enthusiasm, some excitement and the sequencing of this three step process that we'll get to. And we've kind of mentioned permission discovery. Then meaning an alignment then towards commitment has been just thrown all over the map.
It's like a Pollock a lot of paint. I don't see the pattern now. I'm also a neophyte and somewhat of a an idiot when it comes to art, so don't let me judge the Jackson Pollock considering one just sold for some $180 billion. But the point is, is that if they don't see the donor, the prospect don't see the connection, that what happens is sequencing hurts the confidence.
Like, are we going to get where I want to go? Do I actually get to do what I want to do? Is this more about you and what you need rather than what I'm trying to accomplish? And that if you don't do it in this way, what we get is momentum dying. And I'm experiencing that now. It's frustrating because there's something I'd like to do, but I'm having a struggle to do it.
The third reason it matters, or maybe it challenge is, is that donors are evaluating organizations constantly, that particularly those at the highest end, who have some level of either sophistication. Certainly I don't have that, but experience in philanthropy, and I have it from multiple sides, more of the getting than the giving. But my wife and I, we try we're committed to trying to make our community a better place is, is that they're evaluating you, evaluating your organization.
Are you able to help them do what they want to do? Is this organization does this person understand me what I want? I they actually listening to what I'm trying to do, is there a thoughtful process, a respectful process when I ask those three questions in this evaluation process, in my example, the answer is I don't know in all three.
So my circumstance that's causing this momentum to slow down, my interest to diminish a little bit. My passion for what I want to try to do, to be redirected to something else, something else I can get my joy from, and making a difference. If you don't think that your donors are evaluating you at every step of the process about what they're trying to do, not just what you're trying to get at, what ends up happening is, is that there's a loss of trust.
The fourth kind of challenger. Why it matters is, is that, as mentioned earlier, our internal rewards are so misaligned with what we're trying to accomplish. What am I talking about? Metrics. I believe in metrics. I think we should have metrics. I think we should have better metrics. The problem is, is, is that the number of contacts gets tracked all too often.
I've a client that has a process. I love the intent. I don't like the outcome of, well, we want to touch every when every gift officer to touch their people in their portfolio all over so often. And I'm asking the question now, I think that's great, but how are you measuring what's actually being accomplished in that context? Is it just, hey, I sent an email and they responded and we got a check mark in the box, or we actually doing what we talked about in that three steps, that waltz, that dance.
Permission to discovery.
Meaning and alignment. Movement towards commitment a one and a two and a three. If all you're doing is check marks of contact, what you're going to end up with is a lot of transactional conversations, probably transactional gifts, relationships and their movement often do not align with just are we talking with people? I got to get a proposal in front of them because that's what my metrics are.
I got to have two per month or 15 per year or whatever the number is. I'm not saying we shouldn't measure those things. What I'm saying is I don't think we're measuring them correctly. Are we moving people along? Donors experiences and the relationship building process philanthropically are progressions emotionally, before the fundraiser ever recognizes the operational process of this?
How frustrating is it for a donor? And again, I speak about myself. Who wants to do something that's really aligned with what the organization is looking to do? It fits into a bigger picture and just being pushed off. And I'm like, this isn't about you, this is about me. And they've missed the permission and discovery, really, the discovery piece.
And they certainly have missed the alignment, which means we are nowhere close to a commitment. And this is what we see all the time in these transactional relationships. Which brings us to the last part of the podcast, my 21st Century Classroom Tactical Solutions to fix this. How do you overcome these things? How do you put language to the one and the two and the three that creates that dance?
The waltz that allows the donor to feel like they're leading themselves with your assistance towards a meaningful, transformational type gift? Again, transformational isn't about zeros. It's about emotional connection. So the first solution, the first tactical recommendation is assign a specific objective to each of the three steps, the three conversations. And I'm going to tell you what they are at least what I think they should be.
The first conversations about learning, listening, and establishing a baseline trust. You're gaining permission to enter into the engagement, learning about what they're trying, their connection, their values, listening to what those are. And I talk about this in my formal educational training that I do with HP and with clients and with standalone, is that we have two years and one mouth.
We should use them proportionally. And the third is by doing so we establish trust. So that first conversation is about that discovery. The second conversation then is about deepening the values of that conversation or the relationship. It's connecting the donor's interest to organizational priorities. Notice I did not say connecting organizational priorities to the donor's interest. We start from the premise of the donors trying to accomplish something.
What is it and what are we doing to do that? How do we make that meaningful to them?
The third conversation moves us into introduction of a directional movement. The one and the two and the three. The three in this case is exploring that involvement, investment, advocacy. And most important, as I always talk about in the trainings, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, the next step, the next step, the next action, what are we doing?
The takeaway from kind of the first tactical solution is, is never enter a donor interaction without knowing what the conversation was supposed to do and meant to do, and did it accomplish it, what was the goal in that conversation? Question one learn and listen. Established trust to deepen value. Connection. Who we are well, who they are, what the connections are, and connect that to their interest and what they're trying to do and what priorities we have that might meet them where they are.
And three introduce directional movement as to what's going to happen next. What are we trying to do? What could be some actions that come out of it? Solution two or tactical recommendation number two is change your questions across the sequencing. In that first interaction that we talked about, learn, listen and establish trust. This is about story based discovery focus.
And you start asking questions why do you care about this work? What experiences help shape this?
What values in you are exemplified and by what we do?
The second series of questions in that moment about deepening the values is about meaning based values. Focus, questioning what kind of impact matters to you most? How do you define meaningful philanthropy? Meaningful engagement? Meaningful giving? What you're trying to do is get inside and connect their emotional desires with what we do every day, but we're not telling them what we do.
We're asking them what they're trying to accomplish. The third is quite a series of questions is about orientated to the future. Would it be helpful to explore your interests where they might intersect with what we do? It sounds like you like doing x, we do x.
The takeaway here for kind of the second tactical solution is that repeated discovery questions creates stagnation. If you keep asking about them, their experience, you do that once. But in healthcare we talk about oh, go find out the patient experience. My own years of doing this tells me that the patient or family is going to tell you their experience.
What they want to do is talk to you about why it connects with them. And you might think they're the same and they're not. There are two different series of questions. So if you keep repeating this, if you're not building into that values, into that, what they're trying to accomplish and eventually that connection, the three steps, the waltz, the one and the two and the three, what you end up with is that stagnation, the one I'm moving forward.
The third is build an emotional bridge between the conversations we think about moves management from an operational perspective. We go from maybe, say, discovery then into qualification. Some people discover it's front discovery, qualification, cultivation, solicitation, stewardship. I would add closing in there with solicitation because that's a separate to me. Step. But you get the idea is, is that we view them independently a donor's journey.
It's emotional. You can bridge gaps by bringing back things that were talked about last time. Last time you mentioned your mother's experience with cancer and the care received. I've been thinking a lot about that for this reason. Donors want evidence that they were heard, and I'll bring myself back into the situation I'm dealing with a nonprofit where I I've told them exactly what I'm trying to do.
It aligns with what they're looking to accomplish. And the what happened is, is that I don't think they heard me. I think they heard what they wanted to hear, but I'm not sure they heard me. And it's my money. Sequencing. This is about bringing memories into action, bringing connection to the fact that I was heard in my example or with your donors, and that they're heard, and you bring that up through this idea of emotional bridging.
Bring something up from what's happened in the past that connects them to the values that they had in that moment. For tactical solution, number four is define the trigger that earns the next conversation. Next step, next step, next step, next step. Before the meeting, before the conversation, you need to probably determine what might be possible that would allow us to move forward.
In that conversation we talked about earlier the three steps around permission and discovery, then into meaning and alignment, then finally into movement and into commitment. What are some things that might be part of the discussion? This is Prep got to think about it. That might allow us to think that we're going to move forward their signals. So they might be things like interest or curiosity or personal disclosure or engagement behavior.
They start showing up to stop stuff. They start talking about how they're connected to things that they do that align with whatever it is your nonprofit does. They're asking lots of questions. They're looking for answers. Those all position the donor as thinking about, well, I'm trying to go somewhere. My example I was asking about some what I'll call naming, but not with my name.
And it just didn't get very far.
Okay, but I told you why I wanted to do this. This is the music stopping in the middle of this first or second step. Disjointed. Unconnected. I'm not listening to every donor takes a different journey and not everybody moves at the same pace, which speaks to what we talked about in terms of actions. It's just not contact. It's about movement.
Some people need more time to move. Some people need a lot less time to move. They've thought about it. The point is, is that there are triggers in discussions that you need to be aware of to think about, to kind of plan for that would allow you to know we're going to move forward in a meaningful way. Number five is, is that we want to measure progress, not contacts.
So how about measuring things in our metrics around specifics? What insight did you gain? What interest was clarified to a much more detailed level, but what they're looking to do. Did you identify the emotional connection that the person has to the purpose of what they're trying to do and how we fit that hopefully goal of fulfilling what they want to do?
Did we get permission to take the next step, whatever that is? All of these things are thought about, I think, by good gift officers, but we don't measure them. This goes to a moves management philosophy that I've moved to with several clients and did a podcast on. You can search it on about changing your moves, management meetings, but you can't move forward with a person until you can articulate the answers to one or 2 or 3 of these in a move management meeting, instead of saying, well, I'm having a conversation with Randall, can you answer the question, what insight did I gain about where Randall wants to go?
What are the interests that he actually has? Why is he choosing to do this? What is the emotional reason that it's connected to what we're trying to accomplish as an organization? Think about a moves management meeting where you can't make the next call, the one and the two and the three until you can answer these kind of questions and we start measuring that.
Well, think about the difference in the relationships we'd have with our donors. The last is, is that you need to avoid some basic sequencing mistakes. All too often we ask for too little too early. This is why I don't like board members asking for gifts, per se, because they're going to ask too quickly and for something that that they don't understand at a and at a giving level that is more based upon what they're comfortable talking about, rather than maximizing what the other person wants to do.
The second is, is staying in discovery too long because either they aren't interested in doing something and or we don't know what questions to ask, and we don't use those senses proportionally. Two years, one month? Use them that way. The third is, is that we don't clarify a next step. And so if you avoid these things, if we think about it from the perspective of really creating a specific objective for each of the three conversations, learn lesson.
Establish trust. Number one. Number two deepen values. Number three introduction to directional movement. We're going to go here because that's where you've told me you want to go. Number two changing the questions so that you get into the emotional state. Number three building bridges between the meetings make them connected part of a journey. Number four, defining those triggers of when I might know as a gift officer, a board member relationship builder.
We're ready to move to the next step, which can be based upon the things we've talked about previous. Number five is measuring the right things. And number six avoiding those huge mistakes. If we did these things differently in this dance, this waltz, the one and the two and the three, what we find are our donors and prospects who are much more receptive to us calling, reaching out, talking to us that we would increase the depth of our conversations, that we would sequence this correctly.
Trust to clarity, to movement forward. That the first conversation maybe this is a highlight opens the door, the second creates meaning, the third creates a movement. Look at your donor pipeline. Look at the people in your portfolio. Look at the people. Are you doing these things? Can you identify these things? Because my guess is if you do this correctly, you're going to have more on some than others and less on some than you do on some in the middle.
The point is, is you have to ask yourself. Am I doing this? And can I do this with people that I'm working with to get them to think about philanthropy in a different way? Because I'm the Sherpa guiding them where they've already self chosen to go. I'm not going to put up roadblocks. I'm going to clear away the hurdles because I know what they want.
What I can tell you is this. And I steal from my parents. My parents were wonderful dancers together, and when I eulogized my father, I talked about this, that they knew enough about each other, where the other one was going to step, where the other one would go before the step was ever taken in the dance. And that's how they were in life.
And in some ways, I truly believe that the best giving, the best philanthropy, the best donor journeys are much the same, that we begin to figure out where they want to go and we help them do it. So we're in sequence in that dance. A great dance is when both partners are in sequence, are in uniformity, are together.
And that should be the goal that we have in this three step process in deepening these relationships. Don't forget. Check out the blogs how it philanthropy two per week in our feet. I'm really, always really, really surprised how many people reading them. I don't overdo it, 90-second reads. Things I see, read, think about, don't sleep as much anymore so I get a chance to kind of think that might be interesting to maybe write a little bit about.
And if you'd like to, you can reach out to me at podcast at Allison. Com. I'm honored when people do this. Recently I found out that in a couple of rankings I don't know quite what the parameters are or the criteria, but how that through how it philanthropy and my podcast Around with Randall were ranked internationally as a top podcast.
I use this as a platform not for business purposes, but to teach. That's where my heart lies. How do we make this better? This brings me and us to my favorite saying some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened. If you're investing in yourself to do a little professional development, if this is part of that toolkit that you're using to be better at what you do, then.
First of all, I'm honored. Humbled. But number two, you're somebody making things happen. You want to get better. You want your organization to be better, and you're doing it not for self glory. Most likely, I have to believe, but for the betterment of your community, for the people and places that are wondering what happened. At 55 years old, there's many.
I'm much closer to retirement than I am in the beginning. Far, far closer. What I've come to appreciate is, is that I can't imagine having spent 30 years doing this, a more rewarding 30 years, a lot of options in terms of what I did from coming a professional golfer teaching, not playing to a lawyer to business to teaching in terms of being a professor.
Lots of different things. I wouldn't trade what I've done for 30 years. I hope you feel the same. I hope if you're young enough, you're looking at someone and saying, well, if it was good enough for him, maybe I can do this. Yes you can. People and places and things in your community need philanthropy. It fills the gap between free enterprise, which does things for profit, and government, which isn't that efficient.
It's the whole between the two that nonprofit work philanthropy is all about. It changes the world, but it changes it often, one person at a time. That's a great career value. I'll look forward to seeing you the next time, right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall.
And don't forget. Make it a great day.