DONOR ENGAGEMENT

Earn Your Donors Affection with Strategy and Heart

Today, engage is all the rage. But what is donor engagement really... or better yet, what is effective donor engagement? Ready for a surprise, donor engagement is NOT one-way or even two-way communication. It’s actually three-way communication —you, your donor and someone they decide to share your story with. This means being share-worthy. This is an important measure of success because it reflects a deeper engagement. Think about those things you’ve recently shared with your own networks –what made you share them? Chances are it was one or a combination of the following things; it was memorable, relevant, made you feel good, made you look good or increased connectedness to those individuals by supplying you all with a platform for sharing. Donor engagement is about this level of connectedness. Stop thinking about how often you should engage, and start thinking about whether or not what you’re sharing is share-worthy.

Simple, right? Unfortunately not, there is more competition for your donors’ attention than ever before, bombarding them with an estimated 5,000 marketing impressions per day from organizations with

much greater resource than your typical healthcare foundation. Your donors, like you, have been segmented and cross-segmented by so many of your interests that organizations seem to almost have a sixth-sense about you. To compete in this noise, your foundation must become strategically and tactically savvy. Something we call Strategic Communications with a Heartbeat.

Strategic Communications with a Heartbeat is the ability to think strategically in order to maximize time and resources needed, while also learning to listen to what your heart is telling you about the nature of your relationships.

The first step is deciding what to measure. While foundation professionals tend to be experts when it comes to relationship building, a recent study conducted by GuideStar estimates nearly 95 percent of studied foundations identify donor engagement as a top priority, but only 27 percent of the strategic plans reviewed demonstrate a foundation has adopted a well-defined metric to measure success. While there is a great deal of variance when it comes to defining

proper metrics for a foundation, this is a crucial first step. Without understanding how your goals will be measured, you truly never leave the starting blocks. A sound strategy is one built on sound metrics.

Once we know how our communication goals will be measured, it’s important to take time to segment and understand our donors. There is no better way to strengthen an existing relationship like custom communication. “Hi Mary, I saw this and thought of you –enjoy.” And conversely there is no better way to turn off an existing donor who believes they have a special relationship with you than to send them a communication piece meant for prospecting. It’s critical to build a customer intelligence matrix and process that puts your donors on the proper list. Hitting reset on how a donor feels about you due to careless data management should keep you up at night.

Have you ever wondered what was to blame for Wile E. Coyote’s failures against the Road Runner? Was it his terrible judgment on strategy - thinking it was a good idea to strap an Acme rocket to his back... or was it his execution? Donor engagement can feel a little this way. The best way to avoid the cliffs is to put both strategy and execution on the same page. There is a big difference between informing your donors and influencing your donors. Influence requires you to think through your communications objects –what attitudes and behaviors you’re looking to change in some way. Once you’ve identified your communication objects for your different audiences, it’s time to map out how and when you’ll engage them. Being this deliberate and proactive will actually enable you to be creative with planting and capturing stories that your donors will find compelling. Mapping out your calendar this way will also enable you to be more efficient and effective by helping you reshape and redeploy content strategically throughout each of your communication channels.

Lastly, let’s consider the matters of the heart. The heart delights in pleasant surprises. Don’t feel compelled to always tell the whole story in one shot, leave some mystery, room for contemplation, reaction, wonder. Be bold, have some fun and be the type of personality that attracts others to your organization. But most importantly be authentic. Donor engagement is about establishing and maintaining trust –so trust your gut instincts when it comes to reacting to creative. Your

first reaction is typically a stronger barometer of overall effectiveness than your analysis skills.

Donors and prospective donors are looking to connect where there is the promise of impact, so plan strategically and speak from the heart.

5 THINGS YOU CAN DO NOW:

1 Review your existing touch points and give yourself a positive or negative grade based on how well you think each is received by your donors.

2 Prioritize your donor segments (audiences) from 1-5 and then write down the value proposition (what they want from the foundation and what the foundation wants from them) for each audience Compare to your communication goals. 3 Build a communication panel of donors who can help shape decisions about content, frequency, tone and delivery channels.

4 Settle on the top five ways you will measure donor engagement.

5 Look around. There are some brilliantly simple and affordable ways to keep things fresh with your staff and your employees.

About the Author:Michael J. Beall is a Principal Consultant with AccordantPhilanthropy who leads communications and creativeefforts. Mike brings a unique skill set and approach to healthcare philanthropy shaped by many years building marketing strategies, delivering internal and external communications and implementing creative brandand marketing ideas.

DONOR ENGAGEMENT

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