Lowered Expectations

I’ve just gotten back from vacation.  A vacation, I confess, I wasn’t looking forward to.  We were visiting family and friends, on the east coast and midwest and the weather was not enticing.  While there are things I don’t like about LA (Traffic, anyone?  High taxes?), I love our lack of humidity and the  fact that we don’t have all that many bugs.  At any rate, I wasn’t thrilled about this trip.

Perhaps it was my lowered expectations, but in truth, it turned out to be fantastic.

Lowered expectations, I often find, are a miracle drug.  Because I am not expecting much, whatever I get seems that much more fantastic.

Take that too far, however, and you get crickets for your efforts.

Too often when people are fundraising, they lower their expectations so far, even if the prospect says yes the result is less than stellar.  In all my years actually fundraising, I never got pushback because I asked for too much.

They didn’t always say yes to what I was asking them to consider, but my donors didn’t get angry.  To be sure, sometimes they said no. But more often, they asked me why I thought they could make such a large gift.

I would always counter, asking them if money were no object, would they give such a large gift for this project or simply to our organization?  It (almost) didn’t matter what they answered; it always opened the door to conversation.

Fundraising, we always hear, is all about relationships. But how can you have a relationship if there is no conversation?  The back and forth of getting to know each other is critical.

But what if all your connections are made at arm’s length?  You ask via an appeal, a newsletter, a social media post?  What if your peer-to-peer fundraisers all aggregate the funds they’ve raised, and give you all the money but without any of the names or contact information from the peers who gave?  What if your event yes, brings in new people, but you never learn who those people are and don’t have a way to contact them?  Talk about dead zones and inability to connect.

You must consider how you can make this all more personal.

Your asks should always be focused on your donor groups.  Make sure you segment by length of connection, size of gift, frequency of their generosity.  Do you know what generation they are—and sure, not ever millennial gives to advocacy organizations or need to be participatory in the way they give, it is a generational trend that is good to play to.

A letter than thanks a donor for their generosity over the past whatever years, helps to cement a relationship that loyal donors clearly feel to your organization.  One that tells those who have not yet given about the importance of your donors, begins to build a connection.

I believe—strongly—that fundraising that succeeds does so because the organization stops navel gazing and looks up into the stars—their stars, their donors.  It’s more than simply saying thank you; it is saying you are that secret sauce that makes what we do possible.  And let me show you exactly what that looks like.