September 7, 2017
When you look at fundraising for your Corps, Division, or Area Command, it’s easy to wonder why revenue fluctuates so greatly across years and seasons. The causes for these mysteries in your bottom line are oftentimes varied and out of anyone’s control. Things like disasters, layoffs, relocations, a lost week between Thanksgiving and Christmas — all of these affect your revenue. And many times, development staff or officers have to explain why things are way up or way down, even though marketing and development efforts haven’t changed.
One way to soften the blow is to look at your entire community as your donor base. Many of them already engage with you via volunteer work, financial gifts, or event participation, but you may not always know exactly who they are. That is a problem. You should know them, and they should know you. Collecting donor information is valuable!
When you have a major donor prospect that you want to cultivate for a gift, you may offer them a tour of a service location or show them a video highlighting your programs, and then ask for their support, right? Your volunteers and event donors are already seeing your programs firsthand and learning about you, so why not ask them to continue their support? They are very likely to give. If you aren’t asking for information for your mailing list, you are missing an opportunity to gain donors at zero cost! If you started doing a drawing at every event in order to collect names, how many could you gain in a year? Maybe 500? Perhaps 1,000? Acquisition doesn’t have to only happen at Christmas. YOU can acquire names on your own, year-round, by asking participants if you can contact them about services and opportunities for giving!
What happens when you focus your efforts on broadening your donor base? You have a more stable foundation of direct-response donors who will support you through the hard times.
Those fluctuations you experience, sometimes because a few corporate donors couldn’t support you, can be minimized by a broad direct-response program. Data has shown that individuals who give regular gifts to charities will not stop or eliminate giving immediately after an economic decline — it takes months or years. Many other individuals give more to social service agencies when they see the need increase locally!
Any interaction you have in your community should be used as an opportunity to teach about your services and share the mission of The Salvation Army. But it’s also a chance for you to learn who your supporters are (or could be). Don’t worry that putting someone on your list will mean they start getting every mail appeal. It won’t. Smart marketers, like TrueSense, use solid data to mail to people with strong giving histories the most, followed by those who are lapsed (or have zero giving history) with less frequency, using a strategy just for them.
I’ll finish with a story. When I was a Development Director in Tulsa, we added (almost by accident) a counter Red Kettle to our volunteer sign-in table at our Christmas warehouse. By the end of the Christmas season, we had collected more than $1,000 from that kettle. The volunteers who were there saw what we were doing, and they supported it with their dollars in addition to their time. Now, imagine if I had collected their information for the mailing list at the same time. How much would that group be giving today? That initial $1,000 in giving could very well have multiplied across the years!