← The Fundraising Masterminds Podcast
The Fundraising Masterminds Podcast
81. How to Build an Effective Mid-Level Donor Team That Can 10x Your Investment
00:29:47
Loading summary
Transcript98 lines
- [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.
- [00:11]
B
We had five callers last year. We paid them a cumulative salary of $125,000. You want to take a guess at how much those five callers raised?
- [00:21]
A
Well, why don't I go for a safe. They tripled.
- [00:26]
B
Wow. Okay. That would be $375,000. That is a good return on investment. Yeah, Jason, they raised $1.4 million. Our team has become so good at the mid level that they actually scared our major donor reps. And they said we need to step up our game because we don't want to downgrade the care of our major donors.
- [00:51]
A
Well, welcome back to another episode of the fundraising Masterminds podcast. I'm your host, Jason Galasinski, and with me, my co host, Jim Dempsey.
- [00:59]
B
Hi, Jason.
- [01:00]
A
And together, Jim and I have over 60 years of combined development experience working with thousands of nonprofit leaders. So we are so excited that you have chosen to join with us today. We've got a great episode lined up for you. Yes, we're going to be talking about mid level donors.
- [01:16]
B
Yeah.
- [01:17]
A
So the title of this episode is how to build an effective mid level donor team.
- [01:22]
B
Absolutely.
- [01:23]
A
And Jim, you had mentioned on an episode recently where you had said one of the best things you ever did was focus in on the mid level partners.
- [01:32]
B
It was, Jason. In fact, I will have to admit to you here tonight that this was my fifth try and I probably would have given up if this one didn't work. But five years ago, we decided to give it another shot at starting a mid level team. And what I refer to that is that calling a team of individuals who are gonna be communicating on a regular basis with our mid level Don. And we've seen so much success that that prompted this broadcast and why I want to talk about this today.
- [02:04]
A
Well, you kind of got me interested. Would you mind sharing a brief history on, like, the four that didn't work before we get into the fifth one that did work?
- [02:12]
B
Sure. I mean, Jason, for various reasons, some didn't work. Number one, it is so important to have an effective team leader. I think our first, if not two times, we. It probably cratered because we didn't have the right leader, somebody who was going to lead out with the calling and be involved. Number two, we also, on the third attempt, we really felt like by having full time, eight hours a day on the phone, callers are going to work. It didn't work. It just. It is so grueling. To be on the calls, on the phone eight hours a day for people, five days a week. And I'm going to share with you that how we kind of crack the nut on that one. And so a number of those attempts either if they failed because of leadership, unrealistic expectations were enormous. When you're paying people full time and you feel like they're going to be essentially the saviors of the world for your organization. Yeah. You're setting them up for failure and then, and then just the expectations of what can be accomplished over time. So they would probably be the big things.
- [03:24]
A
Well, before we get into the one that worked. Yes, I am wanting to get to that. Let's just talk about what is a mid level donor.
- [03:31]
B
Absolutely. And actually this number can vary based on the organization, especially the size of the organization. But this is probably the most standard in the industry, if I had to say for nonprofits. And you know, if an organization the size of crew has this little area in here, it's a pretty good size for everyone to be honest. But the standard size is an individual has the capability of writing a check of $1,000 all the way up to 4,999. That's that little window. One to $5,000 is typically what defines that. And it's important to remember we aren't talking about cumulatively. So you and I could probably easily write a check for $100 a month, but we couldn't just sit down and write $1,000 check. And so that's the difference between the two. So we're not talking $1,000 or even 4,999cumulatively, we're talking about sitting down and writing a single check of that amount.
- [04:37]
A
Yeah. When you said mid level, I was thinking it was going to be somewhere like people who wrote checks between $100 and $1,000 a month. Right. But that's not mid level.
- [04:46]
B
Well, and, and that would be, you know, that would be the same in a way, Jason. It's the same amount of money. But there, there really are different kind of donors. They really are these, these partners. These are different kind of partners. When you're talking about someone who is cumulatively gives that amount of money versus someone who writes a single check.
- [05:05]
A
So the mid level donor is not focused on the masses. It's not focused on the hundred dollar.
- [05:11]
B
You know, checks 25, nothing like that.
- [05:13]
A
Okay. So it's really focused on the thousand dollar to five thousand dollar range. Now I'm really curious to know what you actually did to crack that Nut so maybe you could talk a little bit about what an effective mid level team is supposed to be doing.
- [05:27]
B
Yeah, well, Jason, one of the things, I mean, what really gave us this concept of the mid level, and I just saw it so often, more and more organizations. In fact, I seem to be reading an article almost every week about organizations that are stumbling on these same things. But we learned early on we had a very strong direct mail effort that was individuals who give one to 999. That was a strong program. And we also had a very strong major donor area that's 10,000 and above. But we really. There was that little middle area in there that we felt like people were falling off the edge of the cliff. And I really felt like if you can picture just this valley and you had a cliff here and a cliff here and a big valley. What we wanted to do was build a bridge so that people could easily get from direct mail to the major donor and they weren't falling through the cracks because the gap was so big between the two. So we built that bridge that people could slowly stepped through once they got to $1000 and they went to1200, then 1500, then 1800, then 2500, then 3000, 3500 and 5000 till they get to the point where they were on the major donor side. And that has just worked so effectively for us. So what we decided to do was.
- [06:52]
A
That's over time.
- [06:53]
B
Oh, absolutely.
- [06:55]
A
How much time is it?
- [06:56]
B
You know, it could be anywhere from 5 to 10 years. Believe it or not. You've got to play the long game. Development is always about playing the long. It's not looking for the big easy fast.
- [07:06]
A
So you're not talking about like, oh, yesterday we got a check from Johnny for $1,000 and let's see how we can, you know, hit him up for.
- [07:14]
B
2,000, like three months later or even 10,000. And that happens a lot in a lot of nonprofit organizations.
- [07:20]
A
Basically, the bridge that you're describing, as, you know, they might have given $1,000 when they were 25.
- [07:28]
B
Right.
- [07:28]
A
And as they continue to age and get, you know, management positions or, you know, their, their pay increases, you're challenging.
- [07:36]
B
Them to give more at a higher giving level.
- [07:39]
A
Right?
- [07:40]
B
Yeah.
- [07:40]
A
As they have the ability.
- [07:41]
B
Right. Yeah. And, you know, it really makes sense because it goes back to the old principle that we have. Win, keep and lift you. When people to your cause, you keep them through cultivation. And in our case, it's phone calls, writing letters, communicating, emails, and then the lifting. You're Constantly lifting people to another level of giving. So when you asked about the team, the first thing we saw about building a team was we needed a good team leader. We needed someone who cared about the people. We started out originally with someone who had experience because we wanted at least the team leader to be successful on the phone, to be a good communicator, to be someone who was warm, genuine, but someone who also had some analytical skills. Because that person not only had to be good on the phone, part of their job, also had to analyze the results of where people are at. Now, one of the things that we decided early on is that we didn't have success with making this a full time. So we decided to test making this a part time. That meant that as long as someone could get 20 hours in a week, we were fine. So whereas one of our previous attempts at this, we had people just checking in at 9 o'clock and going till 5 o'clock at night. And they were running the playbook eight hours a day and being exhausted at the end of the day. And if you can imagine this, very rarely do you catch anybody at 9 o'clock in the morning. When you start to dial at 9:00 in the morning, you barely get the people on the East Coast. You certainly are not going to get people on the West Coast. But by the end of the day at 5:00, when you are just starting to kick it in, where majority of our phone calls, where we got people were at home at night, we didn't even have that option because people checked out at 5:00. But when, when we went ahead and gave them the freedom to work at any time during the week, as long as it was 20 hours, we started to get people who had jobs in the daytime, part time or even some full time in the daytime, they clocked out at 5:00, went home, ate dinner, put the kids to bed and started calling. That is also happens to be the most effective calling times of the day. Now, we do have some individuals that tried and tested sometimes at 3 and 4 and 5 o'clock. And when we had home phone numbers, those worked well. But we found that a lot of our people, giving them the flexibility to call from home to be remote, they don't have to be in our office. In fact, every one of our callers are outside the Orlando area and we've got callers in St. Louis and we've had callers in Washington, Arizona and Michigan. And you've got people in different time zones calling in those time Zones. It makes it so much easier than having to just. Everybody is on the East Coast. And so we really saw so many wins to this. Now, what we didn't expect and didn't anticipate were the costs in this. When you're talking about paying somebody for eight hours a day and they're full time, you have to pay benefits, and you have to give them vacation leave and sick leave and all the other kinds of benefits that come from full time. When we were only paying someone part time, we didn't have to offer them benefits. If they decided one week that they only wanted to work eight hours in the entire week, you only pay them for eight hours. If someone is being paid a salary and they decide they're going to work eight hours an entire week, that really hurts me because I'm paying them for 40 and they're working 8. But when I'm paying someone part time and they're only working eight hours, I'm only paying them for eight hours. And the next week, if they want to kick it in gear and they want to work 25 hours, that works just fine for me, too. So what we hadn't anticipated is how much people love the flexibility of being able to call when they wanted to call. And that meant calling at night, which we didn't have that opportunity before. And that's a prime time. We have some of our callers that it benefits them to call on a Saturday, some even call on a Sunday. And believe it or not, those are very good calling days to reach people. So our effectiveness level went up, the motivation level went up because they had flexibility. They could do it anytime. They could have another job. They could work full time if they wanted to. In fact, we have an individual on our team who's a pastor full time, and he makes his calls to make some extra money. And he is probably one of our most effective callers. The motivation level went up. We give them the flexibility, and they just. If they have a crazy busy week and they can't get 20 hours in, that doesn't hurt them at all. It doesn't hurt us at all. And so it's extremely effective. To give you an idea of what I mean by effectiveness, we had five callers last year. We paid them a cumulative salary of $125,000. You want to take a guess, Jason, at how much those. Those five callers paying them? 125,000, doll?
- [13:19]
A
Well, I would say they should have at least paid for themselves, right? So why don't I go for a safe. They tripled wow. So okay, that'd be, that would be a pretty.
- [13:30]
B
That would be $375,000. That is a good return on investment, Jason. Yeah, don't know if I can top that, Jason. They raised $1.4 million. Yeah.
- [13:41]
A
Wow.
- [13:41]
B
What a good investment we had. Wow. So I learned on my fifth attempt, just so that, you know, trial and error, we finally cracked a nut and find the right way to do it. And I am sold on this right now. So recruiting individuals, recruiting a good team leader, recruiting people, giving them a part time option and giving them the flexibility to be able to call when it works best. Now if someone said to us the time that works best for me is 9 to 10am every morning, we'd have to say, I'm not sure if this is the position for you because there's such a narrow minimum amount of time. Well, there need, well, exactly. Well, there needs to be, we need to say 20 hours in a week, but that 20 hours should include some of those key times which typically is at least six to eight at night and sometimes seven to nine at night. Yeah.
- [14:38]
A
Well, let me back up a little bit because everything that you're talking about with this mid level donor stuff is about phone calls. Right. And I wanted to kind of just mention for people who maybe aren't aware, is that a lot of times with when you're doing campaigns, whether email or mail campaigns or social media or whatever, a lot of times you see like a very small response rate, like a 1% or whatever.
- [15:06]
B
Right.
- [15:07]
A
But you found when you follow it up with a phone call changed anywhere from 1 to 2% to like 25 to 30%.
- [15:14]
B
Absolutely. Yeah.
- [15:15]
A
So that's a pretty big difference. That's why we're talking about phone calls. Just wanted to say that.
- [15:20]
B
Well, and I think it's important to say though, Jason, is that our medium of communication is not just phone calls. We see a lot of effective communication with people by writing notes, thank you notes to them, by sending Christmas cards, by sending Thanksgiving cards, by sending creative communication pieces, reports on how their money's used. So when we say phone, that is, it's a primary mode of communication, but it is not the only, the biggest difference there though from that mail that you talked about, which is 2%. That's low touch. We're talking high touch mail here.
- [16:00]
A
So these are the people who are on the team also the ones sending out the Christmas cards.
- [16:04]
B
And they do. Yeah, yeah. In fact we will send them, you know, we'll buy Christmas cards or we'll buy Thanksgiving cards in bulk and we'll send them to them. And in fact, one of the funnest things that one of our teams did last year was that when they met for their annual meeting, they went out to an alpaca farm and they took a picture next to an alpaca with a whole team, and they just created. They put their names underneath there and were able to bulk print that, and they sent that to all their people. And so it was really neat. In fact, one of the things that was just really fun that we enjoyed a lot was that they had created a card that they each had blanks on there. And our executive director for the campus ministry also had a blank card. And they created a thank you across that in the cards, just writing on those blanks. And it included the executive director into as one of the callers. And it really, really touched people's hearts that the executive director was part of that when technically she wasn't. But it was one of those things that really connected, so just a lot of fun, creative ways.
- [17:16]
A
So you mentioned that you have five people on your calling team.
- [17:19]
B
Right?
- [17:19]
A
Right. Let's say I'm a smaller organization.
- [17:21]
B
Right.
- [17:22]
A
You know, I'm not a national organization, so let's say I've got like maybe one person on my calling team or maybe two.
- [17:29]
B
Right? Right.
- [17:30]
A
So what exactly are these people doing other than phone calls? I get the phone call thing, but do you have some kind of regular thing that they're doing other than phone calls?
- [17:39]
B
Yeah. Well, here's the thing. We ask them. We give them three campaigns a year. So we've got a winter, we've got a summer, and we've got essentially a kind of fall campaign. And so when they call on those campaigns, they essentially are following up on a direct mail letter. So a letter goes out and really all they have to do, I mean, it is a fairly easy job from the standpoint that they're just following up and saying, Mr. Jones, did you get the letter from Shannon and would you be able to help with that, or did you get the letter? How much do you think you'll be able to help with that? It really is a slam dunk. There isn't a lot of arm twisting involved. So most of their time they're on the phone in between loving on those people. The people that they're calling, for the most part, already give to the organization. So 90% of these people came in through direct mail. So they started out at fairly lower amounts and moved up to that point. So they already loved the Organization. They already know something about our organization. And a lot of what we're doing is calling and just carrying on them. Mr. Jones, I just wanted to call today. I have no ulterior motive other than to say thank you. We appreciate all that you've done. Let me tell you a little bit about how your latest gift was used. We were able to, as a result of your gift, we were able to help to fund a launch of a new campus at XYZ University. And I want to let you know that already six weeks in the school year, we've got 10 people meeting regularly as a result of your gift. Thank you. That means a lot to us. Is there anything I can be praying for you about before I leave you today? And then talk about it, pray about it, record those things in there. We rely heavily on our CRM. We are constantly that contact management system. We're constantly putting the information in there so that we can refer back to them. If Mr. Jones tells me that his mother's dying of cancer and they're really struggling, that's an important component that we're gonna put it in there. Because when I call next time, I wanna say, you know, last time I called you, we were praying about your mother. How is she? Did the chemo treatments work that we talked about last time we were on there? And I wanna just check in with you. So there's a lot of loving calls in between. Now you may say, wow, Jim, that's not like telemarketing. That's not like a boiler room. No, it is definitely not. And in fact, we've actually had a few callers that we've hired that we've asked them to ratchet it back or dial it down. We had one individual that came in as one of our of our callers and they had come from a radio station that constantly did. They're callathons, you know, they're trying to raise money for their radio station. Yeah. And he had high goals and he was always trying to be the top caller. So we got a really great caller. But we had to say to him, you don't have to ask for money every time. We don't need for you to do that. We're only asking you to talk about that three times a year. And because we want you to balance, we don't want you to talk to someone say, every time I talk to you, you ask for money. No, we want to have good balance. We'd love for you to reach out to them once a month.
- [21:13]
A
So how did he handle that? Conversation.
- [21:15]
B
Well, it was tough, to be honest with you. It took a while for him to dial it back. And you know, it was different because our measurement was a little bit different. Now what we did was originally, and I'd recommend this, we originally set a baseline. So a lot of these people inherited. People were giving to us already and we set a baseline when we hired them. These individuals are currently giving this much, would like you to increase their giving by this much. And so each person had an individual goal. And so as long as they were continuing to move those people along, that's all that mattered. But we, this particular individual, we kind of had to teach him to slow down, love the people, care about them. It doesn't have to be. We only need you to contact them or ask three out of 12 times. We don't need you to contact them three times. But you asked three times, so. So that was an important element for us.
- [22:17]
A
That's a good word of wisdom too, is don't let every single communication with your partners be asking for money.
- [22:24]
B
Right.
- [22:25]
A
They're very quickly going to start associating you as the drive by salesperson who's always trying to get money out of them.
- [22:32]
B
Exactly.
- [22:33]
A
We really want to be building those friendships. So asking for money, you know, three times a year, you know, spreading it out. I've actually been doing that kind of naturally with reaching the heart of Zambia because I typically only do two or three campaigns a year. I typically do one in the fall and I do one in the spring. Sometimes I'll do one in the summer, but not very often. But I found that that seems to work nicely. It would feel weird to me to be like mailing people every single month and asking them for money. I feel like my people would get awkward. Like the relationships would get awkward.
- [23:10]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [23:11]
A
And. And because my organization is small and I do know a lot of the people personally.
- [23:16]
B
Right.
- [23:16]
A
You know, I don't want to damage those relationships, you know.
- [23:20]
B
Right.
- [23:20]
A
So it just, it doesn't feel right, you know, when you're asking for money every single time you see a person.
- [23:25]
B
That's right.
- [23:26]
A
You know, it feels right if it's like kind of a once in a while thing.
- [23:29]
B
Right.
- [23:30]
A
So definitely makes sense that you are focusing on the relationship and not just asking for money.
- [23:35]
B
Now we had a really funny moment, Jason, this September that for me could have been one of the funny development highlights of the entire year. We had called in a few members on our development team, on our mid level team, the more charismatic team members to join in on our Meetings that we have annually with our major donor reps. And, and the idea was to let these people know the major donor reps, that these are the kinds of things that are being done at the mid level and realize that these people are going to come to you at some point in time. So in other words, the mid level team's goal is to constantly keep pushing people up, so moving people from 4,000 to 5,000, 5,000 to 10,000. And so that's the goal. And what they're going to attempt to do is to move them to the point where they go on a major donor caseload. And the major donor's job was to just start to meet regularly because we know mail does one thing, calling, adding a phone call does another. But visiting people is the ultimate. The funny moment was though, that after our mid level partners, those people on the team said all the things that they did, the person who was their leader transitioned and said, you guys need to ratchet up your game because they're probably gonna currently they're caring more about their people, treating them better than you're currently treating your people. Now the idea is that the major donor reps should be the ultimate. They should be the ones that are treating people the best because they've got the highest donors. But, but our team has become so good at the mid level that they actually scared, in a good way, our major donor reps. And they said we need to step up our game because we're not, you know, we don't want to downgrade the care and feeding of our major donors. So if they're going to hand them up to us, we need to be prepared. That was a great moment because I just, I felt like they really got it.
- [25:47]
A
Yeah. Well, as you're listening to this, if you can think, wow, you know, I could really use to ratchet up my game.
- [25:53]
B
Yes.
- [25:53]
A
You know, is there, is there any practical things that I can really go deep in? Actually, the answer is yes. We actually recently released a brand new online course called Major Donor Mastery. And this course goes really deep into the areas of how to find major donors, how to build relationships with major donors, what to do at a major donor appointment, how to give presentations, and how to follow up with them. So it's all this stuff that we've been talking about, relationship building. Right. It's all built into this major Donor mastery course. So scan the QR code on the screen or go to fundraisingmasterminds.net to check out the Major Donor Mastery course. And while you're kind of clicking around and doing stuff. Go ahead and subscribe to our channel. Let us know in the comments below if there's anything that really spoke to you, if there's any changes that you want to try or if you disagree with us. Us, we'd like to know that too. We personally read all the comments. Right.
- [26:53]
B
We do.
- [26:53]
A
Jim, is there any other final comments that you want to make about a mid level donor, especially speaking to maybe a smaller nonprofit.
- [27:02]
B
Yeah.
- [27:03]
A
Who maybe just has, you know, one team. Yeah, you know, they just have, they're just, they just have a, you know, one or two people on the team that may be just treating everyone the same.
- [27:13]
B
Yeah.
- [27:14]
A
What would you say to that?
- [27:15]
B
Yeah, well, you know, and you may even say, golly, that's easy for you. You know, 125,000 DOL doesn't sound a lot to a $750 million organization, but 120,000 is a lot of money for me to pay to people. You don't have to do that. You can start incrementally. Bring on one part time worker who is your team leader, pay him 25, maybe $30,000 and even less potentially in more rural areas. You don't have to start big. You can start small with one caller. That person can be extremely effective. That person actually can build, doesn't have to build with part time people that you pay. You can test out some volunteers. There may be some stay at home moms or dads who are willing to donate some time and they'd love to be on the phone just calling and thanking people. So you actually could get to five people just with one part time manager or even potentially a part time volunteer. But just one. But you could build through volunteers. So just start incrementally. But you have to start somewhere. That's where five years ago I just, I was tired of it and I said, you know what, I've been putting this off too long. I just need to start it. And we started and look what happened.
- [28:32]
A
I think the key principles here are to do something and not to do anything. And also you don't want to treat everyone the same.
- [28:40]
B
That's right.
- [28:41]
A
I've made that mistake plenty of times. You know, treating everyone like the masses, you know, not calling anybody because it just takes too long.
- [28:49]
B
Right.
- [28:50]
A
So it'd be better to, you know, send people campaigns and then get one person to just make some key phone calls. If they feel overwhelmed with calling 400 people, then just have them call the top 20%.
- [29:02]
B
Right.
- [29:02]
A
You know, it's better to call the top 20 people than not calling anybody.
- [29:07]
B
That's exactly right.
- [29:08]
A
And so there's little things you can do to just implement.
- [29:12]
B
Right.
- [29:12]
A
That would make a big difference. So don't get overwhelmed by the. The. The sheer size of what crew does, but take the ideas that we're talking about here and just figure out how to apply it.
- [29:22]
B
Yeah. Make it yours.
- [29:23]
A
Well, thanks again for tuning in to this episode of the fundraising Masterminds podcast. We look forward to seeing you next time.
- [29:30]
B
Take care.