Cultivating Giving Part 6: Activating others

Welcome back to the final week of Cultivating Giving! We are going to talk about activating volunteers and partnering with community organizations, as well as briefly addressing how to transform Giving Tuesday into a year-end giving campaign. That’s a lot for one week so if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to email us and we’ll dig in more.

Practice skills-based volunteering

Building a reliable volunteer base is crucial in a nonprofit where staffing opportunities can be limited. We all know that staffing a nonprofit can be a struggle for many reasons — there isn’t much time or designated budget to market the position, there is too much red tape from a grant monitor or governing agency and lower salaries make it hard to attract top talent. Because of all these reasons and many more, committed volunteers become the life blood of a healthy nonprofit.

However, developing and maintaining a committed volunteer program can seem daunting and may have been unsuccessful in the past. Every volunteer has other obligations — a job, a family, other philanthropic priorities and the list goes on and on. But truly the key is understanding that a volunteer cares about your organization, wants it to meet its mission and craves to help it get there by using their strengths, despite their other commitments.

Creating a volunteer program based on strengths-based engagement is vital to its success. It is just like building an organization or a company based on the strengths of the staff. You are no longer asking for what you need, but letting your volunteers help build out the strategy drive the execution.

Taking this approach within a business has been proven to increase engagement, stimulate growth, spur new ideas and encourage innovation. Nonprofits deserve these same benefits. Read more about building an engaged volunteer base in the introduction, part 1, and part 2.

Engaging board members (contributed by Laura McCann, President, Philanthropy Partners)

Board members do not often realize the critical importance of their personal giving and their efforts to cultivate donors for the nonprofits they serve. Many board members say they are reluctant to make an “ask” on behalf of a nonprofit, yet they are passionate about the mission. So, nonprofits, how can you help them to make a personal donation or ask others to give? Simple. Give them stories of the impact of your organization!

Giving Tuesday is the perfect, low effort, high-impact way for board members to share the “good news” about your organization. In 2019, almost $2 billion dollars in donations were raised on Giving Tuesday, up $400 million from the prior year.

Although Giving Tuesday is just one day, the connections your board members make when sharing the impact of your nonprofit can turn into potential long-term donors. How do you share the good news with your board members and the general public? If you haven’t already, compile news about the successes your nonprofit has had despite the pandemic this year! Here are some examples of what you can let your board members and donors (existing and prospective) know about your nonprofit:

• Has your nonprofit served a “new” client base this past year, people who never needed your services previously? Let your board members know about this enhanced demand for your services and how your organization fulfilled those needs. Translation — your nonprofit needs increased gifts to support the programs which meets this new demand.
• Was your nonprofit going to furlough staff but because of increased donations you were able to keep them on payroll to continue to provide essential services? As a result, your staff has stayed loyal to your nonprofit and has worked harder than ever to keep the doors open and services uninterrupted.
• Did your nonprofit host a virtual event to generate fundraising dollars, but that you still need donations to supplement any losses?
• Did your organization form any new collaborations enabling you to fulfill your mission in a more efficient effective way?
• What were some of the most compelling ways in which your organization continued to provide services during a challenging time?

Ask your board members to identify ten potential contacts to whom they could connect you via email or whom they could call. Help them do this by drafting an email template explaining that they serve on the board, support the organization’s great work and ask for them to make a gift to continue seeing the impact of the nonprofit. Have a flyer of a “pandemic report card” attached to the board member’s email. Also, post the compelling pandemic developments outlined above and ask your board members to share on their social media. Prior to asking your board members for help, be intentional about asking them why they serve. Simply asking them this question will inspire passion and action on their behalf to help ask for donations. Finally, thank them for their time and continued support of your work!

The nonprofit consulting firm of Philanthropy Partners is happy to help with board communications, engagement and your preparations for Giving Tuesday.

Resource your staff, board, and volunteers

By this point, you’ve started telling your story, determined your audiences, developed your content calendar, crafted a theme, created assets including design, photography, and/or videography, and are ready to roll out the campaign.

All of the strategy and resources that you have are now yours to implement, and so often, these assets are only made available to certain staff members. If you want to be seen and heard, you need to resource all of your staff, board members, and volunteers with these tools and activate their passion for your organization.

What we suggest is to share your Giving Tuesday day-of content calendar and any of the assets that they need from video to designed posts to copy itself. You can do this simply by adding it to a Dropbox or Google Drive and then sharing the link with everyone. Instead of just sending the link of shared resources and hoping for the best, schedule a brief training where you can walk your volunteers through the resources and the plan, and leave time to answer any questions they might have.

The goal of this is to encourage all volunteers to share your message and engage with their own audience on Giving Tuesday. Something we’ve done in the past is assign a different volunteer to each hour of the day, asking them to share a specific post on social media.

Maximize your money

Find a foundation, donor, or business that would be willing to match all funds raised. This is fairly common in the nonprofit space, and not only does it maximize on the money you receive, but it makes the donor feel as they their impact is doubled.

GuideStar published a blog on 5 proven strategies to boost fundraising with matching gifts. However, you don’t need to start in a complex way, start by reaching out to your major donors and supportive local companies who may be willing to match anything from $1,000 to $25,000.

Micah’s Backpack, providing direct food assistance for children from low-income families, does a grant challenge each year with two faithful volunteers who will match funds raised.

If we were in a room together, I would ask who has done a “give back” night at a local restaurant, and most of you would raise your hands. I would then ask you to keep your hands up if it was financially impactful, and most of your hands would go down. They can be fun to attend, give your organization exposure in the community, and make a few hundred dollars. They certainly have their place, but you really need volume to make it worth your time and effort.

Chattanooga has arranged CHAgives for the last five plus years. It is a community-wide effort to increase funds raised for meaningful organizations on Giving Tuesday. Not only does this effort support the organizations in their planning, but it encourages residents of the city to participate. Organizations partner up with multiple restaurants and businesses, instead of just one, for “give back” programs on Giving Tuesday.

Go beyond your audience

Connect with people in the community with a larger audience to share your story and encourage giving. Plan a social media takeover, perhaps you take over their accounts, or they take over yours. The point? Reach a different audience and create more diverse, interesting content.

We mentioned this earlier in the course, but consider guest blogging. See if someone in your area with a well-visited blog might let you guest blog and share your story, just make sure it is a business, organization, or person that you align with. We’ve gained lots of volunteers for Make a Mark simply by guest blogging.

Transform into a year-end giving campaign

Before we close out the course, we want to briefly discuss how you can take all of the ideas, content, and success of your Giving Tuesday campaign and adjust it for your year-end giving campaign.

1. Analyze what worked and what did not work. What elements took far too much time and didn’t perform? What components led to the most engagement and excitement, leading to donations? Look at your analytics from social media, your website, and your email marketing, look at who from your audience gave and how much they gave, chat with your community, board, and volunteers to get their impressions, and finally, hold a retrospective with those involved. Retrospectives are very often used in software development to assess the process with the goal to improve in the future.
2. Adjust language and designs. This might be as simple as going into your templates, changing some words around, and getting ready to publish again. In some cases, this might be digging deeper into your content to figure out how your message will be different. Giving Tuesday, although it has some build up, is largely a one-day push. Your year-end giving campaign will take up weeks, perhaps months, of time and will need to be a more steady process.
3. Keep the same campaign page, if possible. We discussed this earlier in the course, but social proof (aka social influence) and momentum are essential in getting people to do almost anything, but in this case, donating to your cause. If you’re able to keep the same campaign page with money already raised in this season, then potential donors will see your commitment and feel the momentum, making them more likely to donate.
4. Promote success from Giving Tuesday. Again, social proof and momentum are relevant here. Most of your supporters will want to know the results of Giving Tuesday, especially if they donated or volunteered. Showcase your results on social media, email, your website, and anywhere else you make announcements.
5. Say thank you. Send a thank you message to your volunteers, your supporters, and those who helped make Giving Tuesday happen. We like to send personal emails to each supporter, and sometimes send shirts or stickers to those larger donors or supporters. Regardless of how you choose to do it, share your genuine appreciation.

Trust your intuition

You’re going to get plenty of advice (including this course). Some of it will be welcomed and some of it will be unsolicited; some of it will be earth-shattering and some of it will be abysmal, but regardless, none of it is law.

When my husband speaks to students, he always urges them to take his story and glean from it what’s valuable to them, but not to take any of it as a hard and fast rule. I’ve always admired his insight on this subject, and I couldn’t agree more.

No one knows more about the specific work you are doing than you. That’s why it’s so important to trust yourself, believe in yourself, and follow your gut. In my work, I’ve tried to make all of my decisions with the knowledge that I have (supported heavily with my own intuition), and I’ve rarely been disappointed.

Next steps

Need some extra help preparing your campaign? Give our Cultivating Giving Package a look. We’ll walk you through some of the exercises in the course, provide our guidance and strategy, and even create some deliverables like social media templates.

Cultivating Giving was prepared by Purpose Craft, an empathetic approach to design, marketing, and event planning. We believe in leveraging the power of creativity and technology to make something impactful for your organization.