How to Lose Your Major Donors
Treat your best donors right — but don’t assume you know what that means until you’ve tested.
May 2008 By Jeff Brooks
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Let’s pretend for a moment that you are the proud owner of five franchise fast-food restaurants around town. All five of your restaurants — let’s call them Uncle Jeff’s Greaseburgers — faithfully follow the famous Uncle Jeff’s formula. The menu, marketing and décor are exactly the same.
For reasons you haven’t yet figured out, Uncle Jeff’s No. 3 generates twice the revenue of any of the others. Month in and month out, restaurant No. 3 is pouring revenue onto your bottom line.
What does a smart franchisee do? One thing I’m sure you won’t do is make big changes to Uncle Jeff’s No. 3. It’s the one where the formula works best.
If you have the mind-set of many nonprofit fundraisers, however, changing Uncle Jeff’s Greaseburgers No. 3 would be your top priority. You’d hurry down to the restaurant, remodel it, take down the signs, create a more expensive menu and convert the parking lot into a sculpture garden.
Crazy? Yes. But that’s what a lot of fundraisers do: They hand-pick the donors who are most responsive to their fundraising programs — and put them in a radically different program. And it’s probably costing them significant revenue.
Why do they do it? It’s usually because they have very strong ideas about what major donors are like. They believe these donors are smarter than the others, more sophisticated and deserving of more respect.
Here’s what the communication program for these cherished donors tends to look like:
* Fewer impacts — sometimes dramatically fewer, on the belief that these donors shouldn’t be “bothered.”
* More “businesslike” style — closed-face envelopes, fancy stationery design, fewer images, less color. This is thought to be more appealing to these donors.
* Softer fundraising style — toned-down urgency, less emotion, more facts. It’s meant to be a better match for these left-brained and businesslike donors.
All this is deemed by many fundraisers to be more effective than the hyped-up, urgent style of typical fundraising. They might be correct. Or not.
The problem is, you don’t know. Putting any upgraded donor into a different fundraising program amounts to a risky and high-stakes crapshoot.
Ask yourself: How did these higher-end donors rise to that level? They responded to your regular fundraising program. That stuff worked for them. So you know one thing about them for sure: Your normal material motivates them to give. Any change in communication style is a switch away from something that works. Why would you do that?
For reasons you haven’t yet figured out, Uncle Jeff’s No. 3 generates twice the revenue of any of the others. Month in and month out, restaurant No. 3 is pouring revenue onto your bottom line.
What does a smart franchisee do? One thing I’m sure you won’t do is make big changes to Uncle Jeff’s No. 3. It’s the one where the formula works best.
If you have the mind-set of many nonprofit fundraisers, however, changing Uncle Jeff’s Greaseburgers No. 3 would be your top priority. You’d hurry down to the restaurant, remodel it, take down the signs, create a more expensive menu and convert the parking lot into a sculpture garden.
Crazy? Yes. But that’s what a lot of fundraisers do: They hand-pick the donors who are most responsive to their fundraising programs — and put them in a radically different program. And it’s probably costing them significant revenue.
Why do they do it? It’s usually because they have very strong ideas about what major donors are like. They believe these donors are smarter than the others, more sophisticated and deserving of more respect.
Here’s what the communication program for these cherished donors tends to look like:
* Fewer impacts — sometimes dramatically fewer, on the belief that these donors shouldn’t be “bothered.”
* More “businesslike” style — closed-face envelopes, fancy stationery design, fewer images, less color. This is thought to be more appealing to these donors.
* Softer fundraising style — toned-down urgency, less emotion, more facts. It’s meant to be a better match for these left-brained and businesslike donors.
All this is deemed by many fundraisers to be more effective than the hyped-up, urgent style of typical fundraising. They might be correct. Or not.
The problem is, you don’t know. Putting any upgraded donor into a different fundraising program amounts to a risky and high-stakes crapshoot.
Ask yourself: How did these higher-end donors rise to that level? They responded to your regular fundraising program. That stuff worked for them. So you know one thing about them for sure: Your normal material motivates them to give. Any change in communication style is a switch away from something that works. Why would you do that?
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The Art & Science of Multichannel Fundraising
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