Charting Your First 100 Days for the new Development Director

Josh Meyer: All right, well, welcome, everyone. We are just letting people fill in here. We are so excited to have Pamela Grow with us today, talking about charting your first 100 days for the new development director. We had a pretty phenomenal response here, with a lot of people signed up today, so we’re going to give them a couple of minutes to come on in. While we’re waiting, go ahead and open up that chat box and let us know where you’re dialing in from today. We’d love to hear where you’re coming in from. For those of you that just joined, we’re going to start the presentation in just a couple of minutes. Pamela, how are you doing this morning?

Pamela Grow: I am doing awesome, thank you, Josh. How about you?

Josh Meyer: I’m doing great. Look at this, the chat is blowing up. Wow, we have Philadelphia, over in your neck of the woods. Bucks County, Portland. Bucks is near you, right?

Pamela Grow: It is. I will have to put in a plug for the food truck.

Josh Meyer: We were talking before everyone hopped on here. You’re connected to a food truck in Philadelphia. Tell us a little more about it.

Pamela Grow: It’s a food truck that my daughter manages, Burrito Feliz. Last year they got best birria, best of Philly, and their tacos are absolutely epic.

Josh Meyer: We’ve got Yusuf Khan, who just dialed in from Philadelphia, so check out that food truck if you happen to come to Oktoberfest. Okay, we’ve got some promotion going on here. Portland, Oregon. Dana, the sound isn’t working. We will have our colleague Sarah reach out to you and troubleshoot. You may want to dial in, since sometimes that fixes it. If you go down to the control panel and click the little icon about dialing in, you can try that. Montana, fantastic. Long Beach. Omaha. All right, phenomenal. We are two minutes past the hour and we have a ton of content that Pamela has prepared, so I want to make sure that we have time to do that.

I’m going to kick us off here and walk us through some housekeeping, and then we will hand it over to Pamela. The presentation is being recorded, and we will be sending a link to view that recording later today, as well as the slides. If you are looking for those, we’ll get them to you later today or tomorrow at the latest. If you have a specific question for Pamela, please use the Q&A button in the Zoom control panel. That’s where we’re going to collect all of the questions, and Pamela will be taking questions at the end of the presentation. We’ll be keeping an eye on the chat, but if you really want to make sure your question is answered, put it in the Q&A section, not the chat.

For those of you I haven’t had the opportunity to meet, my name is Josh Meyer. I’m one of the VPs of Marketing over at Bloomerang. We are so thrilled that you have decided to join us this afternoon, or this morning if you’re on the West Coast. Just a little bit about Bloomerang: Bloomerang is a donor management and online fundraising tool. We would love to have the opportunity to connect with you and your team if there is an opportunity to help you and your fundraising staff get more out of your data and better manage the relationships you have with your constituents. I think Pamela may be talking a little about retention today as it relates to development directors. We focus a lot on how you can retain your donors using Bloomerang, but also just using best practices. There are a lot of fundraising best practices built into Bloomerang. So, enough about Bloomerang. It is now my pleasure to hand over the Zoom to Pamela Grow, the founder of Grow Consulting. I’m based just outside of Philadelphia. Pam, I’ll go ahead and hand it over to you and let you introduce yourself.

Pamela Grow: Awesome, perfect. Hey, thanks, everybody. Thanks for being here today. My gosh, it’s almost the end of August. A lot of folks are on vacation, or you’re super busy with your year-end fundraising, so I really appreciate that you took the time to be here today. Josh, is it okay if I take myself off camera? I find it a little distracting.

Josh Meyer: Sure, that works.

Pamela Grow: Whether you’re a brand-new development director or a new fundraising executive director, you’re going to emerge from today’s training with focus and a plan for what to do now for the most impact. If you stay with me till the end, although I think you can grab these from the handouts, you’ll get the handouts to really implement what you learned today.

I always like to say this because I know my own habit of being on Twitter, or maybe writing an appeal letter, or doing something else while a webinar is going on. So I’m going to ask if you could turn off all distractions. That would be absolutely awesome. I know it’s tough.

Are you a brand-new nonprofit development director, feeling excited but maybe a little scared about where to start? Josh introduced me already, but my name is Pamela Grow. I’ve been working in nonprofit fundraising since 2000. Prior to that, I spent seven years working for a grantmaking foundation here in Philadelphia, and I have trained about 10,000 nonprofits all over the world since 2010, including Easter Seals, the Salvation Army, and Embrace Race. I’ve also written a book called “Simple Development Systems: Successful Fundraising for the One-Person Shop.” I know the power of fundraising systems, and in particular individual giving, to really transform your nonprofit, and I believe strongly in you and your good work.

We talked about the Mexican food truck. That’s my daughter Samantha, represented in that corner down there. I have two daughters. Abigail is a lawyer in Philadelphia, and I live in the suburbs of the city. That is my grand-puppy down there on the left. I love classic movies, reading, museums, hiking, all kinds of stuff, and I really love baking. That is my Covid chocolate babka.

So how can you steer clear of the pitfalls of being the new kid on the block and avoid the all-too-common syndrome of fundraising turnover in small organizations? Today you’re going to discover how you can maximize the potential of your first 100 days on the job, create organizational change for the better, and instill in other members of your organization a sense of trusting you. It’s my hope that you’ll walk away from this training with a solid plan to get up to speed quickly.

This webinar is geared toward new fundraising professionals and new fundraising EDs. It’s also a good refresher for consultants to nonprofits who want to cut through the layers of complexity and develop a results-driven fundraising plan fast. If you have been in the sector for any length of time, you know that when you first start with a new organization, especially in those first few years in the sector, it takes about a year to really get your sea legs and understand what’s going on behind the scenes. That’s the purpose of this training: that you can hopefully get there a lot quicker. We’re going to talk step by step about what metrics you need to look at, how to put your best foot forward, how to build your new organization’s culture, and, most importantly, how to raise more money.

I’m going to ask Sarah now to launch the poll. We’ve got one poll for you in this webinar. I really like to engage, so I’ll probably be pausing the webinar a few times throughout to get your feedback. Are you a brand-new development director or associate, a new ED or CEO, a consultant, or other? Let me know.

Josh Meyer: All right, they’re filling it out here. Fantastic. I think we have 82% participation. We’ll wait here one or two more minutes, and then, Sarah, if you want to go share the results with everyone.

Pamela Grow: I always want to put the Jeopardy music in. Oh, that’s great. That’s interesting. Okay, we’ve got 64% who are brand-new development directors or associates, 9% are new EDs, and only 3% are consultants, and then other. Awesome, thanks, Sarah. Well, congratulations on your new job.

Before we get started, I want to address the elephant in the room. According to UnderDeveloped, 57% of development directors working at organizations with budgets under a million plan to leave their organizations within one year. Twenty-seven percent of small-shop fundraisers plan to leave the field of development altogether, compared to 11% of the development directors at larger organizations. We’ve talked about this a lot: burnout is affecting us all.

Does anyone have any guesses on the average length of tenure for a development director? Go ahead and type your thoughts in the chat box now. Can I see the chat box, or do I have to exit my presentation?

Josh Meyer: You should be able to hover over the top where you have the Zoom bar and just click chat. You shouldn’t have to exit the presentation, but I can read some of these out to you. It’s a lot of 18 months. You have some three, six years, five years, two years, two years, three years, three years, three years, 18 months. If I had to quickly average these, I would say you’re roughly between 18 months and three years.

Pamela Grow: I think it depends on size too. These are just some of the statistics that I uncovered when I was preparing this presentation. Twenty-four months, 18 months. We’ve heard 18 months for years now, well, maybe the last 10 years, but according to some of the latest research from Penelope Burke, it’s actually closer to 16 months. We all know how hard it is to really develop real relationships when you have that kind of turnover.

A quick warning: what I’m going to cover today is what my friend Mary Colon refers to as the unsexy side of fundraising. We’re going to be talking about what you really need to have moving forward and the best direction moving forward. We’re going to be talking about being proactive, because so often, I know it, this sector is very, very reactive. So how can you take control of your fundraising? How can you lead your fundraising team, if you have one, or even lead the rest of your team?

Let’s get started. These are the six steps of building a successful fundraising department, and we’re going to talk first about culture. There’s a reason for that, which we’ll get to later in this presentation.

Where does the money come from? First off, we just got a brand-new report from Giving USA. In 2021, Americans gave $484 billion to charity, a 4% increase over 2020. Where did that money come from? Sixty-seven percent came from individuals, and that was an increase. Foundation funding increased for the first time in a long time, to 19%. Legacy giving was 9%. And giving by corporations actually went down, I think it was 5%. So factoring in bequest gifts, giving by individuals accounts for 76% of all philanthropic giving in the United States. It’s really important to know that, and it’s an important part of your new job to make sure that everyone understands the facts behind sustainable fundraising. You really need to make it a point to educate your board, your staff, and your ED, and get everybody on the same page.

This is a book I’ve been recommending for a long time. Josh and I were talking before we got on about John Lepp’s new book, “Creative Deviations.” I think it’s a transformative book. Not to get off topic, but for the sector, there are certain books you return to over and over and over again, and “Creative Deviations” is going to be one for me. “Train Your Board” is something you need to have in your office, a really excellent book. It’s essentially a whole bunch of different exercises to educate your team on different aspects of fundraising.

In the handouts today, we have 17 easy ways to lead your organization’s culture shift. One of the most important things to do is to make a commitment to your organization’s culture, because it takes patience, consistency, and real commitment. I usually recommend that you pick about three to five of these, a handful that you think will work well with your organization, and make it a point to implement them regularly.

So what are some of the ways? This is always one of my favorites: if you have a staff meeting every week or every two weeks, integrate a short training into every staff and board meeting. Schedule regular thank-a-thons with both your board and staff. I like to get a feel for how my board and staff actually like to do them, because some people are more comfortable writing handwritten notes and some people are more comfortable on the phone. Shadow a member of your program staff. Maybe take half a day to shadow someone and find out exactly what they do.

What are some other ways? Go ahead and type in the chat box: what are some ways that you work regularly on your organization’s culture? Can you read those off, Josh?

Josh Meyer: Someone asked if you could explain thank-a-thons. What’s a thank-a-thon?

Pamela Grow: That’s when you have a board meeting and you set aside 20 minutes or half an hour to either write thank-you notes or call donors to thank them. Either way, you’re going to be really prepared. You’re going to have the list made out and the background on the donors. Give each board member anywhere from five to ten donors. You’ll get the hang of it as you do this more regularly. Have cards ready for them to write the handwritten thank-yous. Same with staff.

Josh Meyer: That’s great. Some of the other ideas here were share good donor feedback with the program staff.

Pamela Grow: Yes.

Josh Meyer: Take one of the staff members to coffee once a week. Ask site managers what their volunteer needs are. Report out to staff regularly. Involve staff in events. Maybe donor appreciation mixers. Meet the new staff as they onboard. There are a lot of good ideas here.

Pamela Grow: I knew there would be, because you have the best people, right? I love this quote from Brené Brown: “Daring leadership is ultimately about serving other people, not ourselves. That’s why we choose courage.”

Next up is discovery, and this can be painful, because you’re probably going to discover some stuff you don’t really want to discover. But these are the materials I recommend you start gathering. It might take you a while. You want your organization’s written case for support. This doesn’t need to be something fancy, professionally designed, that was done for a capital campaign, but you need to have a strong written case for support, something that forms the backing of your grant proposals and your appeals. Your organization’s gift acceptance policy is really important too. I remember I went directly from an organization serving women and children, where I was literally driving out to Walmart once a week to pick up diapers that Walmart donated for our mothers, to a really progressive educational organization. Right there in the gift acceptance policy was a list of businesses from which we did not accept gifts, and Walmart was on it.

You want your organization’s DEI policy and the makeup of your board, the past few years of annual reports, donor newsletters, and impact reports, and a breakdown of revenue by source over the past three years. Any grants applied for or received. What else? A fundraising plan, if available, as well as your organization’s strategic plan, if it’s fairly recent and not collecting dust on a shelf.

Think too: do you market planned giving to your donors, and how do you do it? This can be something as simple as a tagline that appears on everybody’s signature in the organization. Believe it or not, that’s one of the best ways to get started. Get samples of any direct mail, hard copy or electronic copies of email campaigns, and your organization’s thank-you letter and receipt. What database are you using? How are you measuring social media ROI: through engagement, through reach, through number of email subscribers? The same with events. And generally speaking, how do you evaluate the success of your fundraising program?

But most importantly, what is your budget? What is your budget for fundraising? Because if you don’t have a budget, it is a major, major red flag. I actually came across this earlier this week, believe it or not, in a Facebook group. I’ll give you a second to read that, because when I read it, I thought, she’s not alone, and that’s why the tenure tends to be 16 months.

Josh Meyer: We often say here, you’ve got to spend money to make money, right?

Pamela Grow: You have to spend money to make money. Yeah.

Josh Meyer: Oh yeah, you’ve got people in the chat here. Someone said, “This is my position right now,” and Molly echoes, “Yikes.”

Pamela Grow: Yeah, you need resources to succeed. Now, are there ways that you can, for a really, really small organization? I’ve had board members chip in to pay for printing, chip in to pay for stamps for thank-you notes. But yes, you need a real budget.

The next step in this process is what I call meet and greet. I strongly urge you to begin to meet one-on-one with your staff and with your board members. I think it’s really important to meet with each of your board members individually, and even with select volunteers. You really want to get to the heart of your organization. Some questions you might ask: How long have you worked here? What’s most meaningful to you about the work you do? Chances are it’s not just a paycheck. What do you think are our biggest strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities? And of course, the envisioning-the-future question: What if MacKenzie Scott, did anybody here get a grant from MacKenzie Scott? What if MacKenzie Scott gave you a grant of one million dollars tomorrow? How many people could you help? What would you do?

What are some of our organization’s best stories? What inspires you to come to work every day? What about our internal culture? Are our staff and board generally supportive of philanthropy? Do you have any ideas for future fundraising initiatives? Do you have any ideas to share on potential funders? Can you tell me about them? That’s especially important with your board members, because a lot of times they might have connections to foundation funders. Also, do your board members contribute financially? I know this is a question where there’s some controversy, but I do believe that all board members should contribute financially, at a level that’s meaningful to them. I’m not a big fan of give-or-get, where you have to give a thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars, but at a level that’s meaningful to them.

Next up, your data. Your data is really your GPS. You might feel uncomfortable digging into it. I know when I’m working with a brand-new client, it takes me a while to get the feel for their system and their donors, but you really need to dig in. How many active donors, those who have given in the past 12 months, do you have? How many lapsed donors? Really take a look at donor loyalty. This can be missing sometimes when we run reports and we’re more concerned with the size of the gift rather than the fact that Nana Brown has sent us a check every year for 20 years for $50. She’s prime for a big bequest.

How many active donors have a last gift of $250 to $499? How many have a last gift of $500 and more? How many monthly donors do you have, and how much revenue do you receive from them every month? What is your organization’s major gift threshold, and how many of those donors do you have? For a tiny little startup organization, maybe the biggest gift you’ve ever gotten has been $250 from an individual. For maybe a college or a university, it might be $10,000. What is your major gift threshold? How many requested gifts have you received in the past three years, and what’s the average size? When was your last data audit? And of course, most importantly, what is your donor retention rate?

When you really focus your fundraising efforts on donor retention, you will find that your fundraising costs go down over the years, which is really amazing. We have lots of students and clients whose retention rate is 60% and up, and your fundraising flows when you get to that level. You’re not constantly scrambling. And of course, online-only donors have much lower retention rates.

Next up we’re going to talk about your ask-thank-report systems. This is a poll where I just want you to type into the chat box: Is having a strong base of general operating support important to your nonprofit? Let’s see what we got here. I always aim for general operating support. When I managed grant programs, Philadelphia was kind of fortunate in that it’s pretty rich in foundation funding, and you could actually build a strong core of foundation grants for general operating support, but I know that’s not the case everywhere. A lot of foundations still don’t fund general operating support. What are you hearing, Josh?

Josh Meyer: Oh my goodness, I think it is a resounding yes. I saw “ten thousand percent, absolutely.” I’ve yet to see a no here. So I think, Pamela, the general consensus is a hands-down yes.

Pamela Grow: Yeah. I’ve worked with clients who actually got the bulk of their funding from government grants or fee-for-service, and they recognized the folly of not building a base of general operating support with individuals. Your organization’s individual fundraising program, raising money from individuals, should form the core of your fundraising efforts. While you can’t discount other forms of fundraising, for most nonprofits, general operating support is the very best kind of fundraising.

I’m going to walk you through a short story. If you’ve been to any of my presentations, I’ve been using this little story a lot. This is one donor story. Her name is Amy. She’s a 50-something lady, never married, and a professor at a small liberal arts college. She owns her own home, she loves her dog Max, she loves watching “The Great British Bake Off,” and her secret guilty pleasure is Hallmark Christmas movies. She likes to travel with her niece, her sister’s daughter, and she’s always been really close with her. She loves the theater, music, cooking and entertaining, hiking, and reading. She is also a donor. She believes strongly in giving back, and because of that, Amy is a regular donor to about a dozen to 20 organizations, mostly in the community. She is a monthly donor to about three organizations. She is a major donor: she has given large gifts to the college where she teaches, and she’s also given a large gift to a local theater and an animal shelter. They don’t know it yet, but the local shelter where she adopted Max will be the recipient of a $125,000 legacy gift when Amy passes away.

For the sake of the story, we’re going to say she went to your event, or she somehow became familiar with your organization, maybe a friend of hers turned her on to you, and she made a gift online. By the way, Amy makes most of her gifts online, except when she’s writing a bigger check. She got a receipt, and then utter silence. In the meantime, over the course of maybe about 10 months, she vacationed in Peru, helped plan her niece’s wedding, and took a French pastry-making class, which sounds like fun. She made a $10,000 gift to a local arts organization. Then, one super snowy day toward the end of December, your fundraising appeal landed in her mailbox. She’s like a lot of us: she sorts her mail over the recycling bin. She didn’t immediately recognize the name, and it went into the trash, because she leads a busy life and your organization was not at the top of her mind.

Amy is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, of wonderful donors who would love to support your mission. All you have to do is make it ridiculously easy to give and then nurture the relationship. You’ve heard of this model. I’m not the first one to talk about it. The Simple Development Systems fundraising model is your organization’s ask, thank, report, repeat donor communications model. I don’t call it your fundraising, but it’s the engine behind your fundraising. It’s keeping your wonderful mission at the top of mind. It’s essentially just ask, thank, report, and repeat, with a little bit of a twist: I like to put in donor feedback and engagement.

This is how simple it is. Your ask: this particular campaign consisted of a one- to two-page letter, five emails, and some Facebook posts. This is from Mandy Fisher at Intervale. This was actually at the height of lockdown. They do this Mother’s Day tree campaign every single year, and Mandy was really nervous about sending it out in the middle of Covid, but it had already been printed. She came up with a wonderful little accompanying note, and they did amazing.

Your thank-you: this is one thing I can guarantee you, that almost every single person on this webinar today can have a better thank-you. I always recommend the Sophie Thank You Letter Clinic. Just any thank-you? No, you really need to learn how to say thank you. Especially right now, your whole fundraising program should be centered around thank you. This is from a study by Jen Shang and Adrian Sargeant. They found that those who received the thank you gave an average of $45 more on the next ask than those who did not receive the thank-you. This is really cool research. I think you’ve had Jen Shang on, haven’t you? She’s so amazing. The good feeling of a thank you lasts for almost three months. And I love this quote from Ken Burnett: “The simple fact is that an appropriate thank-you letter is your best fundraising opportunity of all.” I can remember my very first job in fundraising. Once I had a plan, I sat down and worked that plan, and then the checks started to come in from proposals I’d written and from appeal letters. I remember the first foundation check that came in, and I thought, “Oh shoot, I have to write a thank-you letter.” What a terrible attitude, huh? You get to write a thank-you letter.

Your report: we are big on print donor newsletters, but how are you showing the impact your supporter’s gift makes possible? You can do it through a one-page impact update, maybe your donor newsletter with a personal note, a personal thank-you update call, an impact email or maybe a series of emails, or your annual report. Rinse and repeat. That’s all there is to it.

So what does that actually look like? This is a sample donor communications plan from one of our students. They do four multi-channel campaigns a year, three print donor newsletters that only go to donors, and one annual report just to say thank you. They also do four monthly giving campaigns a year, which are segmented and highly targeted, and a monthly e-newsletter. I wanted to share something real quick. This was an organization with Joy O’Keefe. She’s been with us for a long time and does amazing fundraising. She was with this organization that was all event-focused, and she started weaning them off events. I think it was just last year she started this monthly giving program. She mailed the invitation to 250 supporters, and they brought in 16 new monthly donors. That’s interesting, because most of their giving is done by check, but about 50% of these came in online. You can see that having a strong multichannel approach works for every single age group. Even very young donors respond to direct mail, and your best donors really respond.

So what’s up next? What now? You’ve got all that information together, and now you want to start thinking about your plan. It can be really distracting to be working in fundraising right now, because you are being marketed to by so many individuals and so many software companies. I have to tell you, I always recommend Bloomerang’s webinars, because they are the best in the industry. But TikTok can look exciting, Instagram can look exciting. What you really need to talk about first is your plan. I think you guys have had Barbara O’Reilly on too, haven’t you?

Josh Meyer: Yeah, I’m a big Barbara O’Reilly fan.

Pamela Grow: She is awesome. In 2020, Barbara O’Reilly and Adrian Sargeant ran a survey on the topic of fundraising planning. The results found that organizations having a written fundraising plan far outperform those without a plan. I know, it’s kind of like, duh. But one of the most critical factors, and this is why we start with culture, in whether the plan was actually implemented or not was the organization’s culture. I think you’ve had Clay Buck on too, right? I love Clay Buck. Clay and I were hanging out last week at the AFP Arizona conference. He’s such a peach. Your fundraising plan is your commitment to your organization, your community, and your donors on how you’ll fulfill your mission. I just love that statement. It’s so true.

When you’re creating your plan, I do have a template if you’d like one. You want to think about how you’re creating SMART goals. SMART goals are really simple: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Say it’s your plan to double your monthly donors in 2022. That’s pretty vague, right? Instead: double our monthly donors by November of 2023 by way of one direct mail campaign, three digital campaigns, and adding donate-monthly buttons to all email communications. Now that’s a SMART goal.

Maybe you feel alone in your work too. But what would it feel like to work in an organization where everyone understood that fundraising really is everyone’s responsibility? One of the most critical factors is the culture. You get that culture right and everything else will start to flow, so definitely grab that handout. Mandy is someone I met about seven or eight years ago. She had started with her organization. She actually moved to Vermont to start there, and if I’m not mistaken, she was the third in two years, something like that. She went in and really transformed the culture. She started with the culture. Mandy is still there, doing killer work for Intervale Center. She’s amazing.

You might be thinking, are you still with me? I told you this was the unsexy part of fundraising. But Pam, what about raising money? My organization wants results now. I’ve got some ideas for how you can raise some money in the midst of all this interviewing people and collecting data.

If you have a monthly giving program, growing it quickly with a dedicated monthly giving campaign is one of your absolute easiest wins. If you’re interested in growing your monthly giving program, definitely subscribe to Erica Waasdorp’s weekly newsletter. I also recommend that everyone have something similar to this, where you can empower your supporters to raise money on your behalf. This is a guide from Soi Dog. They’ve got all these different ways that people have raised money for Soi Dog. Encourage your supporters to start a Facebook fundraiser, because who doesn’t need a birthday present these days? Empower them to start a Facebook fundraiser on your behalf and show them how, step by step, screenshotting every single step. Add another campaign. If you’re doing one year-end campaign, or maybe two, add in a third or a fourth.

Consider surveying part of your donor base. This was my very first job. I landed in an organization that had had a development director, but after about two weeks of real digging, I found out that she literally hadn’t done anything for five years. They had come off a successful capital campaign, and I think she worked for the fellow who ran the capital campaign. At any rate, not a single foundation grant proposal had been written. They had membership and a lot of community organizations, but they hadn’t done anything with it. The fellow who had spearheaded the capital campaign had died, and none of those records were available to me. Their fundraising appeal, which they did yearly, had been on a five-year decline. It had been outsourced to I don’t know how many different mail houses, and any time they sent out an appeal, they were on the phone for days with complaints. Seriously, it was a mess. Our donor base was an older donor base, and they were literally dying.

What I did, and this was very fluky because I had no training in fundraising, since I had worked for a foundation for the past seven years and all I really knew how to do was write a grant proposal, was this. I think I got this idea out of a marketing book. I went into our database and found 20 loyal donors who had given every year for the past five years. Keep in mind they’d given every year without any kind of stewardship whatsoever, without ever hearing back. All they got was that ask in the mail once a year. I wrote this simple little letter of introduction, asked them why they had supported us, and sent it out along with a really short survey and a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Eighteen out of those 20 replied. Several sent in checks even though I hadn’t asked for money. Three became major donors, and less than two years later we received our first bequest gift, in the form of a check for $250,000.

This was Cindy’s experience when she tried that letter. She mailed out 86 letters and brought in over a thousand dollars. And Sarah, who works with an animal shelter in Vermont, just started getting responses to hers. But more important than the money was how that first survey really helped me understand that it isn’t so much about you, it’s about your donors’ big why, their reasons for giving. I have to tell you, it’s one of the most exciting things you can get into when you start really discovering why your donors give and you start creating real relationships with them.

Let’s do a quick recap. Begin by taking steps to create your healthy organizational culture. Then you go into discovery, meet and greet, reviewing your data, your ask-thank-report systems, and your fundraising plan. Is that all? It’s not. I love this quote: “You are exactly enough as you are, whether you believe it or not.” You really do have this already. I love this from Paul Nazareth, who is an amazing Canadian fundraiser. He tweeted this about a year ago: “What non-fundraising job did you have where you learned a skill that has been invaluable to you in your work?” Denisa Casement, who is one of the most brilliant international fundraisers in the world, said event catering taught her project management and making the customer experience smooth and pleasant, because you want to be thinking about your donor experience. I loved Clay’s answer: understanding emotion and motivation, and how to work as a team. Show me a theater veteran and I’ll show you someone intrinsically well trained and ready to be a fundraiser. You see, you’ve got these skills already, is my point. Lisa found that her skills in journalism helped, and the service industry too. If you’ve ever worked as a waiter or waitress, you know this. I just want to say that you are doing beautiful, beautiful work in the world, and however I can help you, I’m here for you. Thanks for being here today. I see we only have a few minutes left. It looks like we’ve got some questions.

Josh Meyer: Yes, we do. Before we do the questions, Pamela, do you want to talk about your fundraising calendar real quick?

Pamela Grow: Sure, if you would like. We do a fundraising and marketing calendar every year. It’s at thefundraisingcalendar.com. If you go there now, you can download the one we’ve still got, what, four months left of this year, and we’ll be publishing a new one for 2023.

Josh Meyer: Pamela reached out to me a couple of weeks ago and she’s already starting for 2023. I got on that list for 2022, and I’m sure when the 2023 one is out there, you’ll be able to download it as well. Before we jump into the Q&A, I’m going to have Sarah pop up a quick poll here. Pamela, if you want to stop sharing, we can migrate back over to the poll, and I’m going to go ahead and turn my video back on. If you would like to learn more about today’s speakers, from Pamela, from Bloomerang, or both of us, feel free to respond to that poll, and someone from one of our teams will reach out afterwards. We’ll keep that poll up for a minute or two. Let’s go to the Q&A. One of the questions that popped up a couple of times, Pamela, was about the “Train Your Board” book that you referenced. People are having a hard time finding it, or it’s listed for a hundred dollars or more on Amazon. Do you know if it’s being printed, or is it just out of print and you’ve got to try to find it?

Pamela Grow: Gosh, I’ve got about six of them here. I’m actually friends with that publishing house, and I’ll ask them.

Josh Meyer: Okay, cool.

Pamela Grow: It’s such a great book. It’s such a shame. I did not know that.

Josh Meyer: All right, so we got that. We had a couple of questions about budget, since you had that slide up. One of them here was, “I’ve been in so many situations where the staff leader at the top, either the CEO or the executive director, is super resistant to learning about fund development practices. Do you hear about this often, and what do you suggest in that situation?”

Pamela Grow: Well, anonymous attendee, if you haven’t already, do we actually have those handouts here, or are they going out later?

Josh Meyer: Sarah’s going to send them out later this afternoon.

Pamela Grow: Okay, definitely check out the handouts, because there are a lot of good ideas in the one on building your culture. It really does take a commitment to it. You have to focus on that culture aspect, because it’s pretty critical to everything else, but you’ll find a lot of ideas in there.

Josh Meyer: That is great feedback. Dana asks, what would be a successful budget for a development office? What percentage is good? If half a percent is not good, what should folks be aiming for?

Pamela Grow: That’s a good question, and I’m not sure I know the answer.

Josh Meyer: I think it varies.

Pamela Grow: It really does, it’s another one of those where, I interviewed Mal Warwick years ago. He was one of my first interviews, and I was so thrilled to talk to him. Throughout our interview, I did a little podcast with him, he kept saying “it depends.” I thought it was kind of a cop-out, but the longer I’m in the sector, the more I see that “it depends” is usually the answer.

Josh Meyer: That’s going to help. Small world: Mal Warwick was my very first internship, at his direct mail firm.

Pamela Grow: Oh, you’re so lucky. He’s such a sweetheart too, isn’t he?

Josh Meyer: Yeah. That’s a small world, right? Small little fundraising world. All right, Dana asks again: “I am the founder of a fairly new organization, and we are in the hiring process for a development specialist. I want to be sure we are setting them up for success. Do you have any tips on setting up a new development employee for success?”

Pamela Grow: Hmm, that is a really good question. I’ve actually just brought on a new client who is doing that. I think they had some heavy-duty turnover in the last couple of years, so they want to make sure. You really need to make sure that you’ve got those systems in place, even if you outsource them for the first year. That’s one thing I’ve discovered in the last three or four years: a lot of organizations probably should be outsourcing more. I always did it all. I did the grants, I did the individual giving, I did the database management. But a lot of times it makes sense either to have your communications outsourced or to have your grants outsourced. Get those systems in place, and that’s going to really help.

Josh Meyer: Oh, interesting. Sarah asked, does Bloomerang have a webinar to show how to do donor segmenting? I am pretty confident we do. It would be under our Academy section. Sarah, if you go to the website and go under Resources and Bloomerang Academy, there are a number of webinar recordings on how to get in there and use the software. Great question, thanks for asking. Here’s an interesting one about sustaining programs: do you recommend having incentives for monthly donors? You get a T-shirt after 15 gifts, a Zoom with the founder after 50 gifts, et cetera. What’s your take on incentives around sustaining programs?

Pamela Grow: I’m not really, overall, a fan of incentives, but you could probably find more information on that over on Erica Waasdorp’s site. I always refer everyone who’s working on a monthly giving program to Erica. She’s written two of the best books on monthly giving, and it’s all she teaches.

Josh Meyer: I see we’ve got a Philadelphian, and someone from Holland, Michigan. Well, unfortunately, we’re going to have to wrap it up. I did want to add to that last question: we were with the donor relations guru last week, and she echoes that sentiment, that incentives can sometimes be the wrong reason. I think a lot of people give not so much for the incentive but just because they want to give, so it’s not necessarily needed. At any rate, I know we had a lot more questions. Pamela, what we’ll do is send them over to you along with the folks’ email addresses, so if you have a minute, perhaps you can respond to some. Otherwise, we can try to respond to as many as possible.

Pamela Grow: Sure, I’m happy to. I could even maybe put them together for a blog post, if there’s enough.

Josh Meyer: Perfect. Or what we can do is put them on the landing page with this video, so if people had a question, they can see the answer there. Again, folks, you’ll be getting the recording shortly, later this afternoon, with the link to watch the recording as well as the slides. It was truly our pleasure. We do these webinars every Thursday, so make sure to check your email for upcoming webinars that we have on the books. Pamela, thank you again for joining us, and thank you for spending this hour with our dedicated fundraisers. Until next time, everyone, have a wonderful day, and happy fundraising.

Pamela Grow: Thank you so much. This was so much fun.

Josh Meyer: All right, take care. Have a good one.