Successful mid-level programs utilize a one-to-some approach.
While all donors should be appropriately thanked for their gift, mid-level donors require enhanced stewardship: a timely and personal thank-you with reporting on the impact of their gift.
NextAfter recently completed a study on The Mid-Level Donor Crisis. For their research, NextAfter made gifts between $1,000 and $5,000 to 37 different charities. Now as mid-level donors, they tracked the communication from those charities for the 90 days after the gift was made.
The results of the study were shocking:
This is not the way that mid-level donors should be stewarded! A well-designed, and ultimately successful, mid-level program must have a robust, personal, and timely way to thank donors for their time and generosity. Additionally, stewardship at this level should include recognizing donor milestones, such as: years of giving, giving thresholds, anniversaries of giving, or birthdays.
Stewardship goes beyond just thanking donors. Study after study shows the information donors most want to know is how their gift made an impact. Most mid-level donors have more than a casual interest in the impacts their generosity enables. Develop enhanced content newsletters and digital projects showing how donors have impacted the mission. Where a casual donor might not read 3-5 pages of content, a mid-level donor is likely to. Treat them like insiders. They want to know the triumphs, organizational challenges, funding priorities, and opportunities within the charity they’re supporting.
In a one-to-some relationship, it is important to understand donor intent: Why is it that your case for support pulls on her heartstrings? Every good mid-level program should include survey opportunities for the donors. These surveys should be asking pointed questions that you can act on and make your one-to-some relationships even stronger. An example survey question might be, “Which of these three areas of our mission is most important to you?” This donor feedback should be utilized for targeted impact and mission-specific stewardship and solicitations.
Fundraisers need to step back from the one-to-many approach to solicitations and stewardship. These committed, mid-level donors require less appeals and more communication about their gift’s impact and stewardship. Mid-level donor programs should have their own marketing and communication annual calendar. Telephone is the strongest channel for this group, particularly when supported by a multichannel strategy.
To hear phone conversations with real mid-level donors, click here!
This level of personalization is designed to mimic the one-to-one approach of major giving in a scalable way to a larger group of donors. Most organizations need one staff member for every 600-800 mid-level donors.
Another key part of the strategy for a mid-level program is implementing a design to move donors to portfolio. If this is well thought out, it can relieve the tension between gift officers and annual fund as to who owns a donor. A mid-level program is designed to move donors to a “tipping point” of giving.
The tipping point is different for every organization — so know yours. For most who consider major giving between $10,000 and $25,000 that tipping point tends to be between $3,000 to $5,000. When a donor reaches a tipping point and shows the capacity for a major gift, she should be moved to a portfolio. Each organization should create a mid-level donor scorecard that ranks participation, giving, and targeted responses. Review this scorecard with your major gift officers and your mid-level team to determine the best “score” that indicates that a donor is ready for portfolio. Get everyone on board! The mid-level team gets credited for “graduating” donors, and the major gifts team gets many more qualified donors.