Let’s Really Invest in Relationship Building
By: Ann Fisher
We hear it all the time – the proud declaration that development is all about the relationship. Many development professionals bandy this about as both a badge of honor and a way to separate ourselves from more transactional sales jobs.
While many individuals are doing excellent work in building quality relationships with their donors, especially at the major giving level, I would argue that across the industry we are not equally committed to the relationship building process across all gift levels. To truly be committed, development offices need to update team structure and especially rethink how we view and engage that space between annual giving and major gifts.
Some call the dedicated individuals who are currently working away in that no-man’s land of the space between annual giving and major gifts either donor engagement officers or mid-level gift officers, but for the purposes of this blog, I will call them leadership annual giving officers.
Avoid the Shiny
Why is the leadership annual giving space so important? Industry data shows an average 10-13 years of giving before a donor makes their first major gift, and this has not changed since I began really looking at leadership annual giving data decades ago. Furthermore, that data point will not change unless we take this unique area within development more seriously.
I have seen it repeatedly. Development professionals get so excited when an individual who has never given before, or has made a few small gifts, makes a major gift. To be honest, I do too. But let us face it, those gifts are outliers. We should focus less on finding more outliers who will give big gifts right away and focus more on how we can reduce the amount of time donors spend moving toward becoming a major gift donor.
Take off the training wheels
As an industry we treat leadership annual giving officers like gift officers on training wheels. Sure, there will be one-to-one touches, some visits and lots of phone calls, but to really engage this donor segment we must be open to using more annual giving channels like mass email and text messaging as well. These are still large pools of donors and many just are not ready yet to have the same one-on-one contact as a major gift donor. We should be training leadership annual giving officers how to use all these tools and creating metrics that are unique to their specialized area of development.
Shorten your pipeline
So how can we accomplish this? Although it has been around for years, leadership annual giving is still underdeveloped and many organizations are still understaffed in this space. There are no clear standards as to what their work should entail. Some leadership annual giving officers do more cold calling of high-capacity grateful patients rather than focusing on moving forward those who are already in the pipeline.
Like many fundraising positions, there is constant turnover at this level, which needs to be addressed. Lapses in staffing are causing our donors to feel disengaged, keeping them from moving through our pipeline, causing many to stagnate or even lapse. We have donors who are at one of the most pivotal times in their relationship with our organizations and we give them over to staff who are undertrained, low paid, and thus encouraged to move on to higher-paying major gift fundraising positions as quickly as possible.
If we instead trained our leadership annual giving officers specifically to do leadership annual giving work, and if we paid them adequately so that they stayed long enough to really know these donors and build relationships, what would happen? They would be better equipped to qualify and engage donors with true major gift potential more quickly, focusing in on upgrades, and thus reducing the number of years it takes to move these donors through the pipeline.
As an industry, development needs to do more to recognize leadership annual giving as its own separate track. We should be offering specific training for leadership annual giving officers. We should pay them at a level that will attract and keep quality professional development officers and allow them to look at this area of work as a career path rather than just a steppingstone. By investing in leadership annual giving, we have the potential to open and shorten the pipeline and increase the flow to major gifts.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ann Fisher is a fundraising professional with more than 25 years of experience in annual giving. Ann began her career at Hospice of Michigan where she developed numerous skills from database management to grant and appeals writing. From there she moved on to the University of Detroit Mercy where she spent nearly 20 years in annual giving, eventually becoming their Executive Director of Annual Giving and Data Services. During her time at Detroit Mercy, Ann was instrumental in introducing new initiatives like online giving and crowdfunding while also improving the ROI in phone and mail and coordinating the University’s President’s Cabinet leadership giving program. Ann then spent two years at UC San Diego as Senior Director of Integrated Marketing, where she launched their first Day of Giving and restarted their grateful patient giving program. Ann currently works at Michigan Medicine where she serves as Director of Annual Giving, Leadership Annual Giving and Data Services. In 2021 Ann and her colleagues were selected as CASE Platinum Award Finalists in the Best Practices in Fundraising Award for their Nurses Week Campaign, which raised over $80,000 from 1,300 donors during the height of the pandemic. She has also served as a judge for the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. In her spare time, Ann is an avid runner and has run several half and full marathons as a charity runner to raise money for various causes.
