In this final post on Managing the Major Gift Pipeline, I will discuss the importance of developing a strong stewardship plan for the purpose of retaining and upgrading your major donors.
Stewardship:
Stewardship is the process of acknowledgment, recognition, and donor involvement that follows after an individual has made a major gift. Effective stewardship should (1) further establish the donor’s positive feelings about their gift and (2) strengthen their relationship with the organization.
The Rule of Seven
Stewardship best practices indicate that a donor should be thanked or acknowledged approximately seven times. Recognition can range from large and extensive efforts, ranging from programmatic reports to simple gestures that indicate that the donor is remembered and appreciated. The best stewardship plans include highly personal touches that indicate an authentic knowledge of the donor’s interest and engagement level. Examples include a simple hand-written card from the Executive Director, Board Member, or beneficiary to a personalized thank-you video that allows the donor insight into the impact of their gift. Regardless of the method, the rule of seven insists that we must be creative, so as not to seem repetitive, personalized, and consistent.
Creating a Stewardship Plan
The stewardship plan outlines the relationship manager’s responsibilities, prescribes the organization’s automatic processes, and ensures that the organization’s ongoing responsibilities are aligned with its resources. Having a plan takes out the guesswork and provides peace of mind to all involved in major gift solicitations. When creating the plan consider your organizational capacity and the unique opportunities provided by your community or organization.
Questions like, “Can donors participate in some meaningful way?” or, “Does the Executive Director or Board Chair have time to provide personal tours or engagement opportunities?” will help you fill in the first column.
Simple Donor Stewardship Plan
Stewardship & Cultivation
Once you have created a sample stewardship plan, take the time to review how it can be integrated into the next cultivation plan for this donor. When done effectively, stewardship becomes the first step, or multiple steps, in cultivating the donor towards their next gift.
Instead of guessing ways to engage the interest of the prospect, the process required for cultivating a prospect, you are now in the privileged position of knowing exactly what your donor is interested in! Sending client stories, statistics, and the progress of the program that their gift partly, or wholly, funded provides a natural basis for connection and further relationship building.
To better understand the integration of the cultivation and stewardship plan, take a moment to review this Stewardship Cycle. Ideally, the stewardship of a donor, if done well, will translate into a continued beneficial relationship with the donor, with multiple major gifts over time.
To recap our three-part series on Managing the Major Gift Pipeline, major gifts fundraising is a process based on the premise that it takes time to prepare donors and ask them for a major gift. This preparation can be broken down into the following stages: identification, qualification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship.
Being at the end of a highly work intensive process, stewardship is often disregarded or might only include the bare minimum of effort, the gift acknowledgement letter. The reason is understandable, the gift is already in the door! The result is that for many organizations, many of which are stretched for time and resources, they only contact their major donors once they need a gift. The rule of seven is a useful guideline that stresses the importance of frequent, personal, and creative communication.
Stewardship is the cornerstone of any successful major donor program. If done well the cycle is reduced down to only three steps: cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship. With cultivation and stewardship blending from one to the other based on the timing of the gift. Think of the resources saved by the organization by being able to skip identification, qualification, and cold cultivation! It is much, much more efficient to retain a major donor than find a new one. Stewardship, therefore, must be treated with the same level of effort and thoughtfulness that went into securing the gift in the first-place.
What are your stewardship practices? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
All my best,
Carolyn