Cultivation & Engagement: Beginning A Strategy

I have been volunteering for the Hoboken Shelter for the past two years in a development capacity and it has been a great pleasure to help and advise them on putting their donor information on paper and track it, create concrete and initiatives as well as an operational plan, and develop communication/new media efforts.

One of the initiatives was to implement a strategy for donor cultivation and engagement as well as tracking.  This required the help of volunteers and board because the E.D. is incredibly knowledgeable about donors but also always time crunched.  I mentioned in a previous post that we were holding an upcoming meeting where we could discuss our top donors/supporters.  We pulled together a small group to discuss how to engage and cultivate donors.  We chose this small group because they were interested in doing cultivation and engagement rather than just events, they knew many of the supporters and we thought the group would be manageable and would help us keep on top of sensitive donor information. 

I plan to keep a log of how our strategy proceeds to share with others who may be unsure of how to make the leap to cultivation and engagement with a bare bones staff.  We've taken the steps to:

1. Go through a list of high-level donors and identify donors who've given recently and we don't know why or who they are and donors who've been giving regularly but we've not taken the opportunity to get to know. Now we just need to narrow down the list. We had about 40 people who were highlighted.

2. Create a Donor Contact Report. We will put all donor information in a database but additional we'll prepare background on donors (much of which is in the E.D. head) inc. employment, education, hobbies, affiliations, foundations, assets, partner and family information, why they give to us, as well as the results of any meetings and what the next steps are.

3. We identified an initial approach to talk to our donors about how their donation was used and find out why they give to Shelter as well as talking with them about the Shelter's future and what programs they know about as the Shelter turns 30 this year.

4. Identified ways to thank our donors and cultivate and engage them:  cultivation events, friend-raisers and in-home parties, newsletters, invitations to special events, personalized notes, etc.

5. Agreed to hold a next meeting to begin to discuss the narrowed down list and start to find out what we know about our donors and plan who will make initial contact.

This is all very exciting and will hopefully mean that more donors feel a part of a family of donors who are well aware of where their dollars are going and will help rally more people to give.