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The Fundraising Masterminds Podcast
72. How to Follow Up With Your Donors at Year-End [Year-End Fundraising 7 of 8]
00:19:25
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- [00:00]
A
You're listening to the number one podcast for nonprofit leaders getting your nonprofit fully funded. This is the Fundraising Masterminds podcast.
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About 60 to 70% of ministries just send out a letter or an email and don't follow up. But if you really want to take your development efforts to the next level, you have got to follow up with that.
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A
We're talking about a major donor. Right. Or a major partner are people who write $25,000 checks. $100,000, $500,000 checks.
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It's much easier to be passive and to just sit back, but if you follow, it's going to be a game changer.
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A
Welcome back to another episode here at the Fundraising Masterminds Podcast. We are so excited to have you on board. Today we're going to be diving into part seven of eight.
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B
Right.
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A
We started our eight part series on year end fundraising back in September.
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B
Yes.
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A
And if you haven't seen any of that, definitely go back to previous EP and listen to those first. Because we're building upon, you know, what to do year end and we're trying to be sensitive to the time and the date.
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B
Right.
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A
So today is December 4th.
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B
Right.
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A
And we are talking about what we should be doing. Yesterday was giving Tuesday.
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B
Yes.
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Hope you had a good time with your Giving Tuesday campaign. I hope you were able to use Fund Easy and, and reach your goals and, and all the matching gift stuff that we talked about last week and this week we're going to be talking about following up. And one of the reasons why we told you to use Fundeasy or something like Fundeasy is so that you can capture names, emails, phone numbers and addresses. Because we want to start a follow up process.
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B
Right, right.
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A
Continue our year end campaign.
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B
Right.
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A
So today we're going to be diving into how to follow up with your donors at year end. But before we get into it, we wanted to talk about just kind of where we are at in the year end.
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B
Yeah. Kind of remind people of our timeline and how it got to us at this point.
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A
Yeah. So we're officially in December.
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B
Right.
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A
You should have a match all ready to go with your letters. Giving Tuesday was yesterday.
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B
Yep.
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So hopefully that went well. And over the next two weeks we need to be following up with letters and visits and we need to be sending out reminder E blasts.
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B
Right.
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A
So Jim. Yeah. Talk a little bit.
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Yeah. If everything worked out well besides, you know, getting your cause concept and getting your matching gift, you got your letters out the door and hopefully you got them out by the week before Thanksgiving and now it's time for you to go ahead, follow up on those individuals. If you did it in the way that we recommended, you segmented your letter so you had of course a lot of people that got a dear friend letter, but then you probably had mid level, those individuals giving 1 to 5 and then you probably had 5,000 above donors that got a Dear Jason and Jennifer letter. Those are the individuals that we're going to be following up on and that we're making sure that we're either following up with a phone call or following up with a visit. That's what's so important.
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A
And when you say like the different kinds of letters, we're not talking about just the name at the beginning, we're talking about like the content of the letter is geared towards those types of people.
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B
Yeah, it's, it is, exactly. It's, it's, it's more personalized.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And it's more targeted, more focused, specifically writing it to those particular individuals.
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A
Well, Jim, you always talk about some important statistics and the statistics that I remember you saying is that typically when you send out just a letter and leave it alone, and leave it alone, you typically get a 2 response, 2.
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To 3% response, right?
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A
Yep. But there are some things you can do to follow up that will actually get you a 25% response rate or even a 50%.
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B
Yeah. Because following up with a phone call, you get a 25 to 30% response. When you follow up with a visit, you can have 50% or more success rate.
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A
So, Jim, we've identified three things you can do to maximize your response rate. So.
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B
Right. The first one is to determine who to follow up. Now, it is so important that you are going to, once again you're going to focus in on the 20% that brings in 80% of the giving. But you've got to also look at who do I have as callers, how many names does that equal and who is the best person to be calling that? Of course we know that probably our top five to top ten partners, our donors should be called by the executive director without question because they probably have the best relationship. Plus people want to hear from the decision maker, they want to hear from the leader. But then as you start to move down to maybe the next 25 to 30, those might be some really good people. Either your vice president, your development director, or potentially your board member would move down to that next group. So you've got to see who it is that you're going to go to. I talked about making sure that we understand who the critical Few is we also want to make sure that we are evaluating all the way down the line. So in other words, we don't just need to call the 20%, although at year end, that's not bad for everyone in your 20% to get a personal conversation. But as, as you get closer and closer to year end, the key thing that you want to be evaluating is which of the, of the 20% gave last year but have not given yet this year. And you want to make sure you get to those people so that you can say, hey, Jason, this is Jim Dempsey, and I'm with Reaching the Heart of Zambia. And I noticed that last year you gave a gift of $25,000 somewhere around the first week of December. I haven't seen that gift yet. Do you think you're still going to be able to do that gift again this year and leave it in their hands? So it's so important now, again, the worst thing you'd want to do is call Jason and say, hey, Jason, this is Jim Dempsey. Hey, I know last year you gave a gift of $25,000 around this time. Do you think you'd be able to do that again this year? And then Jason turns around, says, jim, I wrote you a check for 50,000 about 10 days ago. Did you not see it? Did it not? Was it not meaningful to you? And then I'm thinking, ooh, I'm sliding into my chair feeling like, oh, man, bad news. So you need to make sure that you're tracking those things. Number two, you need to determine who to visit face to face and who to call. Yeah, almost 100%. You want your executive director to be going face to face with your top five to ten people.
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A
Wait, my executive director has a development director? What do I. What is the point of having a development director Director?
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Yeah. The development director oftentimes sets up and tees up that conversation. But to be honest with you, someone who is of high income, high net worth, and in high standing generally wants to meet with the number one person. They don't want to meet the second or third in command. That's almost insulting for them.
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A
Yeah, just a little bit of a rabbit trail here that oftentimes nonprofits hire development directors thinking that they're going to offload the entire development process to this person. And the director just kind of wipes his head and goes, glad that part of my life is over. And then they start focusing on the ministry. But actually, it should. A development director's position should be more like a helper to the executive director. In a sense of like, I don't know if you've heard of like the setter closer type system for sales, but anyone who's involved in like sales and marketing, there's a system where you can have a setter and then a closer, and the setter is the one who's kind of, you know, dealing with all the front lines, you know, answering the emails, making phone calls, leaving voicemails, doing all that kind of work. And then they typically, once they make some traction on a relationship and the person's really interested, then they pass the baton, they pass the lead off to the closer. And that's the expert. Right. That's the person who really knows the product, really can understand and close the deal. Typically really good at closing deals.
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B
Yeah.
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Right. And so I kind of see the development director and the executive director in those kinds of things. The development director really should be like setting things up for the executive director to close, in a sense. Is that a good analogy or, you.
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Know, there are, there's some really good analogies out there and, and certainly there's some situations where that's true. Unfortunately, what happens so often is that an executive director for a nonprofit organization almost feels like they're not qualified to be the closer. That's why they hired the development person to be the closer. But, but it's important if you have a quote unquote closer, it doesn't have to be the executive director, it could be the development director, but the executive director has to be in that meeting and has to be part of that. So they may open up the conversation, the person may close, and then the executive director ends things.
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A
Well, the executive director is the one that should be carrying the vision, should be having the most passion about where you're going.
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Right.
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And that's typically when a, when a major partner is writing a check.
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That's right.
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They're thinking about the future.
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Right.
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So they want the guy who's thinking about the future to be there to, to kind of communicate, you know, what's. What they're investing in.
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Yep. Bottom line is you just, you need to determine who can live with just a phone call and who needs to have a face to face appointment number three. What to do on an appointment or a call. Now, first of all, one of the most difficult things is securing the appointment. The good news is in this situation, this is a person who loves the organization, has helped the organization financially, has probably been around for a long time. So securing the appointment is generally not as difficult as someone who's never heard of the organization. There's a lot of times if you have done your homework and you've built a relationship, the executive director or even the development director could text the major donor and say, hey, would love to meet with you with our executive director on Tuesday at 2pm Would you have 30 minutes we come by and talk to you. That's getting the appointment. Then you need to make sure that you're preparing for the meeting. This should not be a lot of preparation with this. This is not like it's a first meeting where you need to explain who the organization is, what your mission vision is. And you don't have to bring a lot of proposals with you. You may bring some appendices or extra information that was not in the original letter. But you need to make sure you're prepared. But you also need to be prepared for all options. When you walk in there, you need to be prepared for how am I going to respond to a yes? How am I going to respond to a no? Does a no mean never or does a no mean just right now? How about if you get a maybe, what do you do? Can I pray about this? All those things you've got to prepare for. Then you want to make sure that you're setting the stage. You want to get them to the point where they have great understanding, great clarity. You've answered all their questions and now it's time that you ask. And it's so important. Now asking towards your year end concept is what you want to do. You don't want to throw in a brand new concept here unless you walk in and you ask a few probing questions. Did you get the letter? What'd you think of the, the letter? And if the person would just all of a sudden out of the blue say, I think that was the most ridiculous program I've ever heard. You are bringing the gospel through a website. The Internet's of Satan. I just, I don't think that's good. Well, you should have something in your back pocket. But likelihood you want to make sure that you're giving to the cause concept.
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A
Yeah.
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Now you also want to make sure that you know how much you're going to ask. Don't make the mistake of walking in there and saying, Mr. Galasinski, we would love it if you help. Whatever you give is just fine. And then of course Jason turns around and goes, well, would $5.55 be okay? Yeah, you need to go in there with a dollar amount. And I typically determine that by what their past giving was and the potential that they have. And you can do your potential as well based on Wealth Engine and other things. If they have given in the past $25,000 at year end, that may be one of the areas you start with. But if since you their last year's gift, you searched on Wealth Engine, you found that they had a fourteen million dollar net worth, well, you may even consider expanding that to 50 or 100,000 in your ask. And that's so important.
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A
Yeah. And, and Jim, you're talking a lot about, you know, meeting with major partners, potential major partners, and the whole idea of, you know, preparing for the appointment and getting mask and, and all that stuff. You know, we cover all that stuff in our Major Donor Mastery course.
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B
Yeah. So if that scares you to death, if you, as I was talking, sweat was pouring down on your head, on your forehead and your palms were getting sweaty.
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A
Yeah.
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B
We've got something for you.
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A
We have an online course called Major Donor Mastery. You can purchase it whenever you want. You can go through it self paced. It's not like the perfect vision dinner where we have a specific start and end times. This is a self paced course, but there is a ton of video content in there that is super, super valuable. I mean, I'm telling you, if you, if you put into practice even just 10% of what you learn from this program, you're going to make it back easy 10 times over and you could.
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B
Even get fully funded this year.
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A
Yeah, I mean we're talking about a major donor. Right. Or a major partner.
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Right.
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Are people who write $25,000 checks, $100,000, $500,000 checks. And you know, believe me, one new major partner could make all the difference for your ministry. So it's definitely worth checking it out. It's called Major Donor Mastery and we've got a QR code on the screen so you can scan that with your phone or you can click to fundraisingmasterminds.net and check out Major Donor Mastery. The beautiful thing about this program is that we're taking the 40 years of experience that Jim has working in development. And Jim, you've met with a lot of major donors.
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Oh, I have, yes.
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You know, I've, I'm behind closed doors. You've said, you know some pretty high profile people. People who've worked with presidents. Yep. People. Presidents of different countries, Athletes.
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Professional athletes.
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Yeah. So I mean it's, it's a little bit nerve wracking, you know, meeting with people like that. Or the average, I would say maybe the average person would be intimidated by that. So you've you've had to learn some mindset things. You've had to learn how to be prepared. You've had to learn how to communicate with those people. And that's what you need when you are talking to people outside of your social class. Right, right. You know, if you're not a business owner, you don't know how business owners think.
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That's right.
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So we teach you in Major Journal Mastery how these people think and how you can go into an appointment being prepared.
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Well, a lot of it has to do with confidence, Jason. And I didn't get confidence overnight. I won't go into the story of my very first appointment, but I can tell you I am much more confident than I was 40 years ago. I can go into just about anyone's office with confidence and without sweating through. And those are some of the secrets that I'm going to be sharing with you.
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A
Yeah, well, Major Donor mastery is all about taking you from that timid, shy, you know, person and taking you all the way over to going into an appointment with confidence. And so, but it's not just the appointment. It's, you know, how to find them, how to meet with them, how to prepare, how to do the appeal, how to follow up, how to do reporting. So, I mean, we cover everything, right? And so this would be a worthy investment. Again, implementing just a little bit of it is going to pay off big time for you guys. And we've. This is probably one of the biggest requests, right? I mean, out of all the episodes that we put out there on YouTube. Major donors. How do you get major donors? How do you find major donors? This is like what everyone is asking us, right? So based on popular demand, we created Major Donor Mastery. So check it out. It's Christmas time and it's a good time for you to check it out, learn some new things and create some New Year's resolutions to get some new major partners in your organization. Well, Jim, any last words you want to say regarding following up with your end?
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B
Well, it's so important. Once again, you could just send out a letter or an email and not follow up. And in fact, to be honest with you, about 60 to 70% of ministries don't do anything beyond that. But if you really want to take your development efforts to the next level, you have got to follow up with that. It's not easy. It takes confidence, and that's generally why people don't want to do it. It's much easier to be passive and to just sit back. But if you do it, it's going to be a game changer.
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A
Yeah. Well, and I get it because this time of the year is a busy time of the year.
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B
I mean, it's a great time to make excuses. Right.
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A
We have stuff going on ourselves, you know, and so it's easy to say, well, you know, I've got to do this and I got to do that and the year end is just an extra thing that you got to do.
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Right.
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A
But it's actually, you know, worth critical. It's very, very, very critical that you do it.
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Yeah.
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A
And it will pay off. So I hope that this year end series is helping you stay on track. I hope it's providing a little bit more accountability. If it has been helpful, let us know in the comments. We would love to get your feedback on it. And also please subscribe to the podcast whether you're listening on Spotify or Apple or YouTube. Some people may not know this, but this is actually a video podcast as well as audio. So if you've discovered us on Apple or Spotify, you might be listening to us, but you can actually see us. And sometimes, you know, Jim and I are doing some crazy expressions.
- [18:48]
B
Yeah, I'm a little scary, but you hold the phone.
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A
I mean, you definitely want to be looking at me. Me a lot more than Jim.
- [18:53]
B
So. No, I'm joking.
- [18:55]
A
But no, seriously, if you, if you find these to be valuable, you can, you can actually watch us on YouTube. And some people are video people, some people are audio people. That's right. But anyways, thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. We will see you next time.
- [19:09]
B
Take care. It.