What is Donor Stewardship?  If you work in the Not for Profit sector and do not know the term….google it and familiarize yourself with it as best you can…it is certainly going to be the future of fundraising and will be an area that all consultancy’s and organizations should invest some time and money into….

The call to action for my particular agency came out of several months of senior boardmembers and management teams following and studying the work of British face-to-face fundraising companies on donor patterns. 

The main shock came with the realization that not all donors were staying on for the duration of time that was contractually obligated to our clients.

More than half of our monthly donors (especially younger donors between the student ages of 18-25) acquired in different mediums such as street, door and mall canvassing, were falling off monthly giving for various reasons including but not limited to: Not Sufficient Funds, Credit Card Expiries / Declines, Cancellations and held payments.

One of the bigger questions that was raised when this department was started and continues to plague the brilliant minds above me is what have we been doing to ensure our donors were taken care of and informed on their monthly gift and charity they were donating to and adversely, what were the charities doing to keep these special donors informed and looked after.

The reason this matters is because we are required to ensure our clients that the donors we capture will maintain their gifts for a year at the very least!

This is June, 2009.

My first goal was improving one of the ways we were handling our donor base in house. 

One of the things I first noticed when I started working here in December of 2008 in PFU was how laid back the verification/courtesy call practices were. 

It was not a thank you call the way I had imagined.  It was very robotic and callers lacked passion and often let financial information go through without it being verified with the donor on the phone.  This meant there was a great possibility we were sending incorrect bank or credit information through.

The first thing I did was revamp how donor info was verified by instilling a “verification checklist.”  This allowed verifiers to follow a simple point form, half page set of guidelines for how to properly verify on the phone. 

The basic outline followed these steps in this order…

1)      Thank the donor for their gift that starts on the date they selected and let them know what a difference their gift is making to the client—sometimes even insert an example—“Client X recently discovered that the second layer of skin that is responsible for regeneration of  skin cells actually contains stem cells that can be harvested and its because of donors like you that discoveries like this is possible for future generations etc etc”

2)      Let the donor know this is also a verification call and we will be required to run through their address for where to send the tax receipt and welcome package and also verify their baking/credit info so the donor knows to have that ready when we ask for them to read the numbers back to us—

3)      Verify address, then verify the amount they selected by asking if they can they see the amount they have selected an amount they can sustain for at least 1-2 years?  If not lets make and adjustment, if so thank you for your generosity

4)      Verify financial information with the donor reading back to us what the number sin their account or on their credit card are

5)      Thank them for their time and gift and be on the way reminding them they receive their welcome package and tax receipt

The checklist meant we were asking all the questions we should be without being too intrusive and condescending.  What we were doing by ensuring proper and thorough verification was passing through “better donors.”  It was basically a Darwinian application of standards that weeded out the weaker donors and allowed us to think we were passing through the fittest to the client.  Donors with issues committing monthly for a year were switched to OTG’s or had their gifts lowered to a sustainable amount.

We still had one problem though.  What to do with the ever ambitious younger generation who were giving the moon and were barely out of high school….

For another time….