An Exercise in Transformation
For seven years, World Vision U.S. has been working on shifting the focus of its development efforts from silos to support and getting everyone working together to engage donors deeply in the work of saving the world’s children.
August 2007 By Margaret Battistelli
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Whether it’s drawing a picture of specific programming as on-ramps to the highway of donor engagement, or comparing the development of an overall donor-centric attitude within an organization while also keeping a variety of strategies robust to repairing an airplane while it’s still in the air, the senior vice president of donor engagement at World Vision U.S. is clear about his point: Fundraising is far from a static endeavor and, to keep up, an organization — even one as venerable and stalwart as the 57-year-old World Vision — has to keep moving.
That’s why Tandon is not a fundraiser. Sure, he spearheads the division that’s responsible for managing a file of 3.5 million names and 1.5 million donors. And, yes, the direct-mail folks and the major-gifts team and the planned-giving pros et al, look to his leadership on a daily basis. But the World Vision U.S. development team recognized a few years ago that it really is in the business of drawing donors in to the mission of the organization as much by their heart strings as by their purse strings. And it bought into that idea so completely that it changed its name from Marketing & Communications to something that seems somewhat, well, bigger: Donor Engagement.
“Marketing, communications, major gifts … all of these things belong together because they all face outward to the donor, to the public. And so how do we organize them? I came up with the name ‘donor engagement’ because we’re not really marketers in the sense of packaging and selling something. Our job really is to engage and excite people to — in the case of World Vision — serve the poor.
“The core job of everybody involved in the organization really is engaging our current and prospective donors with our work, and not only with our work but with the poor directly,” he explains. “We are simply enablers of that engagement, so we call ourselves ‘donor engagement.’ Frankly, I’d like to call us ‘donor excitement’ but that is, I think, a bridge too far in today’s world.”
Not that Tandon is shy about pushing the proverbial envelope, especially when it comes to the way World Vision U.S. relates to donors.
34834 Weyerhaeuser Way South
Federal Way, WA 98001
Phone: 253.815.1000
Web: www.worldvision.org
Annual operating budget: $946 million
Percent contributed income: $819 million (87 percent)
Mission: World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice.
Programs: World Vision focuses its work on projects that help communities address the root causes — not just the symptoms — of poverty. Among them: Sponsorship (children and families connected to sponsors through life-changing relationships); Child Crisis Partnerships (helping the world’s most vulnerable children escape a life of horror); Food and Water Programs (fresh water wells, seeds, tools, agricultural training and livestock); Health Care (immunizations, health clinics, HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention); Education (school fees, teachers, tutoring, building and repairing schools); Economic Development (microloans, business training, job skills, new markets for entrepreneurs); Emergency Aid (prepositioned relief goods, family survival kits, disaster mitigation and shelter).
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