Episode 295: The Need for Internal Collaboration with Donor Strategy
No matter what day you join this episode of Around with Randall, let me tell you how appreciative I am for your time and hopefully your attention as we look at another one of our philanthropic challenges in the nonprofit world and try to find some solutions. And today, I want to talk about isolation. And in a very narrow confines, gift officers.
And this is true of major gift plan, gift leadership, annual giving. I'd say even annual giving officers tend to work in isolation when it comes to the idea of moves management in terms of strategy when it comes to donors. And I want to talk today about why this is such a challenge and what we can do about it to make this a more harmonious process that really provides more options for the gift officer than they may see themselves all too often in the work, as I do with my clients, I'm having more and more discussions with particularly longer standing clients, some of which I've been blessed enough to have for as much as almost ten
years is about strategy.
The value that I sometimes bring as it evolves past the initial work that was being engaged, or scope of work to do, is really about the gray hair. In looking at donor strategy in particular, I think about recently a situation where we had a donor who literally kind of went off the radar after some big multi-million dollar gift opportunity that they kind of disappeared.
And the strategy was, how do we engage them? Again, another client, we were dealing with the conversation around plan giving. And how do I set this up more meaningfully or this different third client dealing with an enormous kind of initial stages, qualification, early cultivation of an enormous gift opportunity. And how would I do that more effectively? I'm glad to do that.
But I don't work with everybody. And so the question becomes, how can you do that for yourself? All too often we tend to as gift officers. Maybe you're in prospect management listening to this and you hear this, your chief philanthropy officer, you hear this, maybe you're a board member and you're like, I never thought about this, but maybe I should be asking about it.
We tend to hear things like, well, I'm stuck. I'm not quite sure what the donor is actually saying or telling me. I don't know what the next move should be. I'm moving too slowly. I'm moving to quickly. I'm not quite sure. And as a result, we end up with a sense of lower confidence level. And much of the time, the things that we are talking about, the challenge of that hesitation or that they've disappeared or I'm not quite sure what to do, really has little to do with us, as it does more with the donor and what they're going through.
And sometimes that's hard to see. This is where good moves, management meetings, or a colleague can help reframe this in a larger perspective at the end of the day, and we're going to get to the tactical. In this case, we'll have four tactical things that you can do to make this more effective. There may be big shops, and some of this will talk about how you can change your moves.
Management meetings. And we talked about this in episode 204 around passion and really forcing the conversation, which we will reiterate to a lesser degree here in a moment around not allowing people to move forward without some type of passion statement, meaning you can't ask them for money until you know what their passion is. We'll frame that a little bit, but more in depth.
In going further, the importance of this sense of collaboration that when we think about, we work. If we do this correctly with board members, with team members, with people in our community that can be formal or informal advisors in this process that can better help us look at this. There are lots of examples where we see this happen.
We kind of talked about the questions that gift officers might have. Scenarios which are pretty typical revolve around things like they've been engaged with for two years in a cultivation process, but they have made a gift. We're not quite sure why. Maybe they've stopped responding, which we talked about here a momentarily just a few minutes ago, where we addressed this very specific subject and how we could move them forward.
And the answer ended up being after multiple different avenues, you're just going to have to call them and say, where you at? It turned out pretty good answer. The donor might have significant capacity, but keeps making modest gifts. We're not quite sure maybe why they haven't maximized. Maybe you heard them say I need to have other people involved.
Mouse significant other financial advisors, someone in this process. Maybe they're really interested in the mission, in the organization, but you're not quite sure it's specifically what it is they're interested in. It could be as simple as something like they fund something very specific, but you'd like to enlarge their perspective as to what might be possible. We use tools in our business all the time.
Think about this list of tools that is very consistent. We have CRMs. We have reports, portfolio reports, reports. We use dashboards. We set up goals. If we have a really strong leader or you are the strong leader, we set a process to prioritize the people that are going to be the most valuable in a gift. Officers next year.
Why wouldn't we use a tool to take away the isolation? To give us broader perspective of the donor relationship, the best fundraising gift officers are the ones who say a couple of things. Number one, I need help starts with that. And then A and or B I need help. Let me tell you what's happening with my donor and or b I need help.
What do you think?
There is no one person. There are some very wonderful philanthropic leaders and fundraisers that I've met in my career, but there's none of them as this font, and I think they would all tell you at the highest levels that the ability to collaborate gives them perspective. So why is this becoming a problem? Well, number one, let's start at the very top.
There's more and more pressure on philanthropy to deliver. And almost every sector of the nonprofit world that the ability for philanthropy to deliver, to move the mission forward, the organizational daily life to function is just higher, that there are cost pressures and we're losing donors. The industry is becoming more sophisticated because it has to be because our nonprofits need the money.
Number two, I would argue and say this very, very consistently that our portfolio sizes are way too big in this process. When you have a portfolio size of 150 people, you don't have time to actually strategize. And then I would say, number three are metrics don't incentivize the right kind of discussions. We're always about the bottom line. And by the way, I'm okay with the bottom line, but it's not the metric I want to use every day of the year.
Because the bottom line is how much money do you raise? But that really doesn't help us with strategy. If we had smaller portfolios, we could think about kind of the kind of proactive, predictable, or predicting metrics like how many moves are you making that are meaningful? How many people have you elevated? How many people have you retained? How many conversations of plan giving have you just introduced into the conversation?
But we don't use those metrics. So we have portfolios that are too large. We have a lot of pressure and we have metrics that don't help us. And then what it begins to happen is that our prospect management meetings turn into reporting meetings about the metrics that I'm not sure really help us how. And they start talking about how many visits you made, how many asks you made, how much money has been brought in.
Again, I think we should measure those, but I don't think there should be the conversation pieces. What we should be talking about when we do this in a more consistent, more precise, more what I call elevated level, that actually helps gift officers and the donor get to where the donor can maximize our thing. Tell us about your donor.
You've learned what are you struggling with? What's their passion? What do you think is next for them? For you, who maybe has an idea that can help them? So these are kind of the tactical things that are the reason this is a problem. I'd be remiss if I didn't also say sometimes, particularly with long standing donors with long standing gift officers.
When we're looking at getting to that ultimate transformational guest, maybe they've made 4 or 5 gifts, start at five, then went to 25, then to 50, then to 250. We're thinking, man, maybe we need to be thinking about 5 million. You spent months or years in this relationship. You develop assumptions. And this brings us to the fact that you may be too close to them, that you think you know what the donor wants.
You make assumptions in that. And then because you think you know them, you don't believe other people can help you. But a second perspective can bring enormous visibility into the kind of the recesses of the relationship that you may not actually see. And if we want to elevate people multiple gifts in the process to their highest levels, we need a strategy to do so.
And we need to permission from the donor. And I think also from the gift officer to put some tension back into that relationship. Not a lot, but a little bit about look, we've got some things that are really interesting. I'd love to get your opinion on them, but they're at much higher levels. Could we do that?
The last is, is that and I alluded to this a minute ago, that if you are having some type of moves management meeting, which is fabulous, that I really believe they become more reporting sessions that it's all about. And I was guilty of this. I would meet with most of my team every Monday morning. I called him a standing meeting, and the reason they were standing is not because they happened to Monday morning.
Any 30 each week. It's because no one was allowed to sit because I wanted them out of my office. We're only going to meet for half an hour and I made this mistake. I look back and realize the difference I could have made in a much more meaningful way, had I not just done well. We've got the metrics.
It was produced by Jeanette. I had them every Monday morning. Here's where everybody did last week, including mine. I made them a reporting session, and what that led to was judgment. Not a lot of interaction, not a lot of openness to bringing opportunities to the table. Probably too much competition where I wanted it to be and should have been a better leader at saying, I want this to be interactive, I want this to be collaborative, and I want us all to be able to win.
And these moves, management meetings. And I would say the moves management reports are all to the antithesis of what we actually probably should be desiring, and that pivots directly to the tactical ways. You can help solve this for yourself, for your office, for your organization, for things that are really important. They're going to be framed around episode 204 again about this idea of passion.
It's not about the reporting mechanism of the moves management. It's about where the donors at. And then how do we figure out where they want to go. So the first thing, and this is actually even before the four tactical and before any type of conversation, and there's a number of podcasts you can look back at to get more information on this as to why some great academic studies out there saying our portfolio size is 120 550 are way too big.
They need to be between 42 and 60. Maybe some people float in and out. Maybe there's some long term stewardship that we got to hang on to for very important reasons. But at the end of the day, these enormous portfolios are killing us. So the first thing is in this process is, is that we have to think about kind of producing another dimension.
The first is a sense of vulnerability, which obviously was part of the book I wrote, vibrant vulnerability for CEOs, but in this case, it's directly related to gift officers being vulnerable enough to say, I don't know, it's a philosophy. Before you ever get to tactical one, you have to be a leader or you have to be. The gift officer says, I'm okay with not having all the answers.
So tactical number one, what we might call the bounce off rule, that every gift officer brings 1 or 2 people to the conversation. Not ten, not 20, not metrics. And it's not an update. If a gift officer knows that they're going to ask Bob or Cindy for a gift and it's ready to go. I don't need to hear that in the management meeting moves.
Management meeting should be based on that kind of philosophy or methodology of vulnerability should really be about how do we help you with someone you can't figure out? And it's a simple format because it can go quickly. Donor what I know about them short 2 or 3 sentences, only the important things. What they seem to care about, passion, where the relationship stands.
Really it's a trust indicator and what the problem is. And then spend a couple of minutes talking about the options. This is kind of the way I do this work. As I was mentioning near the top of the podcast with my clients, it's exactly what I do, and in about three minutes they can tell me, or two minutes can tell me enough about the person or the couple or the family or whatever the situation is, and we start going back and forth because I'm asking questions.
This idea of the bounce off rule is a limitation of the number of people. So I have one client. I do this very regularly with their only allowed to bring 2 or 3 people, and that's a half an hour, one on one with each gift. Officer. And but we're spending only 5 or 10 minutes on each one. They're not bringing 50 people.
That's the kind of kind of specific, narrowed, intentional work that we're looking to do. Which brings us to tactical number two, which really is found in episode 204. If you can't tell me their passion, if you can't tell me their objective, if you can't tell me what they're trying to accomplish, then this meeting isn't very valuable. This conversation is not very valuable.
And that should be the first question. If not heard the group or an individual we'll talk about. If you're not in a large shop and don't have people to bounce us off of, I've got some suggestions for you. If you can't get to that, then this isn't meaningful. And so that means you're probably going to be pushed back into you got to go back and ask some questions.
What's most important to them? What are they looking to accomplish? What do they give to that brings them joy? Maybe with you or someone else? What is it they say about their gifts that are appropriate, that are kind of aligned or that makes a difference? Those are the questions that get to the passion discussion. Three I said this earlier, but I make it tactical because I think it's that critical limit the number of donors to be discussed more is not better.
So we have two things to think about here. The first is what I said earlier portfolio sizes are too big. You can't manage 125 to 150 people. Now, if you're a leadership annual giving person, that's maybe a little more possible because that's a couple of calls a year. I mean, we're not maybe a cup of coffee. We're talking about a leadership annual gift that's not moves management driven, except for those 1 or 2 interactions.
For a major gift officer, you got 150 people. You can't manage it. It's physically impossible to do it well. And then what happens is you got a group of people that there's no contact with it at all. That's one of the studies. So the first thing is, if you're bringing that many people, it's because there's pressure behind you in the portfolio saying, I got to get to all these people and there's just not enough time.
So focus on the ones that are the most reasonable, the ones that are the highest priority. Which then gets into the second thing about what is it the number we bring to the meeting or the conversation itself. And as I said, it's one two. If you haven't a half an hour, maybe, maybe three. But it's the ability in this process to talk about a very limited group of people and to do what we said to tactic one, what about them?
What are the kind of what do they seem to care about? Passion. What's the relationship? Where's the trust meter kind of where are they at and what's the problem? The limitation of this is really important. All three of these things because we'll get to number four, which is about your own individual office size or number of people, is, is that the goal is to have a series of options.
And really if we do this correctly, we get to a specific next step for each person. My example earlier about a person who is given a multi-million dollar opportunity proposal and then kind of went dormant and it was odd months and not a huge community. So this is not a matter of like they were really busy with other things.
There was a disconnect and no one could figure out why and various things were recommended. We actually did multiple sessions of exactly what I'm talking about, and we came up with different solutions and none seemed to work. And they got to the point where I was like, look, I think what you're going to have to do is just do something direct.
Something is bothering them. They took the proposal, they were willing to think about the proposal. And then chasm of silence. Something's happened and you don't know what it is. At some point, you just have to be direct. And in this case, this goes back to a simple premise that I always believed in. Still do that no is better than I don't know.
Although we didn't think it was a no. The client didn't think it was a no. So it became a phone call and we came up with a very specific strategy. And in this circumstance, based on some strategy that we talked about, this exact scenario, we said maybe it could be business related. And what we found out was or what this really great fundraising leader found out was, is that there were some things they were concerned about, that once they were out on the table, the solution was very easy.
We didn't have strategized about that, but what we strategized was what's the next step? It has to be specific, not just what you should call them. What are you going to call them about? Where are you going to call them? What are you asking them for in that call? When you think about these three tactics, the key here is to be specific with an outcome about what should be done or what can be done.
Tactic number four is to right size your office space. Now I've talked a lot about moves, management meetings and things of that nature, and not every office has enough people to do this on a formal basis. But yet I think everybody should do it. If you're in an office of one, meaning you are the only fundraiser, you should still do this.
And you might ask, how do I do that? Well, here's tactic number four. And by the way, if you're in a larger office, you can do this also in an informal way with people just like this.
You could use your CEO or you could use a board member. Maybe there's somebody, a retired professional in the in the community that would love to have a cup of coffee every once in a while and be able to give you thoughts on this. Certainly you could have a consultant. There are lots of different places. If we build the right relationships to have the support that we need.
So it could be formalized moves, management meeting. It could be informal with these other people to say, look, could I'd love to get your perspective even without names, just anonymously. Hey, here's the situation. What would you recommend? Structure will be different depending on your organizational size. By the way. Maybe there's just two of you. Then the two of you meet and do this kind of informally.
Formally the structure is going to change, but the need for collaboration, for perspective, for an outside view is never a no others can help. What moves management should be about is not a meeting, but a better process for us to see the options to help our donors go where they want. It also produces accountability because that matters. And yes, metrics come from that and that matters.
And it will help you define your portfolio differently. And that matters. But the power is in the ability to say something or think something or believe in something. And that's the anti omnipotence principle. I don't know what to do next. And this creates an opportunity for someone else to help. And at the end of the day that's meaningful.
That something that people can get behind and allow you the opportunity to be more successful not in your metrics, but allowing people to make gifts for things they believe in. The definition of transformational, not a dollar figure, not a number of commas or zeros. For someone maximizes their giving to what they believe in, and collaboration can help you do that.
Don't forget to check out the blogs at Hallettphilanthropy.com. Two per week. I'm always very surprised how many people read them much of the time around philanthropy or nonprofit work or something of that nature, but also things about leadership. It's the value of life and RSS feed right to you and how and how it blogs. 90 second reads something very, very simple.
And if you'd like to reach out to me, it's podcast@Hallettphilanthropy.com. The world feels particularly with the election coming up like it's kind of moving under our feet at times. And that's for those of us that, at least I hope for me, are pretty stable. Think about the people whose world is moving under their feet.
A lot more people are wondering what happened, and think about what you do every day, being someone who makes something happen. My favorite old time Gaelic saying. Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wondered what happened. You're someone who makes things happen for the people and the places and the things in your community that are wondering what happened.
You are the gap, part of the gap between free enterprise which doesn't want to do things. Some things because they're not profitable, and government, which isn't all that efficient, that whole to help those things, those people who need it the most, that's valuable. It may not seem like that, particularly if you're more isolated, not using collaboration, because you get down into the weeds in your own world, put your head up, work with other people, listen, and realize that the difference you make affects an individual family, an organization, a need in the community in which you live.
And that is a worthwhile way to spend your day helping and changing lives. I 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.