(Editor's Note: This weekly series is a feature of The Online Nonprofit Information Center (TONIC), sponsored by David V. and Sonya Williams of Cutler Bay, FL. TONIC includes the full text of six nonprofit management books, including Fundraising Online. The TONIC homepage may be accessed at: http://socialworker.com/nonprofit/tonic)
by Gary B. Grant
During the 2020 pandemic, many colleagues in fundraising have told me the things that changed for them and, most importantly, the ways they are permanently changing. For example, while some are quickly requiring their staff to return to the traditional office environment, others have become quite used to working from home and creative in how they adapted. A new flexibility seems to be emerging. In my own office, while I may require in-person staff meetings, I am more willing to allow staff to work from home if they feel that makes them more productive.
I’d like to share in this blog ways my team adapted, and I really hope to hear some stories from you, so please share your own ideas and innovations.
When the pandemic first hit, we braced for a huge financial impact. In addition, we knew that our clients (our students) could be affected by parents being laid off or losing jobs or businesses. We (and most other institutions) rallied around raising funds to assist families.
We had a chance to test crowdfunding platforms and to rapidly respond with a campaign that was not in our work plan at all. It was successful and gave our donors a chance to be useful in a deeply personal way that strengthened our sense of community by directly helping students and their families most hard hit by the pandemic. Moving forward, we will now keep in our plans this kind of emergency plan. The next crisis might be one that only impacts our institution or region, but rapid response fundraising is now in our toolbox.
We also adapted in our contact center and annual giving program. Like many institutions, we employed a number of students for alumni outreach, a program we were already evolving from a call center (using phones to solicit gifts from alumni and parents—our main donor populations) into a more relational model, using all forms of communication for students to do outreach with a portfolio of annual fund prospects.
I really did not want to release my student callers and add to their financial woes, so we challenged ourselves to shift their jobs to work from dorms (or homes, if they were remote learning). We found tools existed that had never really been applied. For example:
- Students shifted to working in shared calling lists on Microsoft Teams.
- We extended access to the donor database for students.
- We gave them a virtual office using sococo.com, which allowed managers to “see” who was in and working.
- Each student had a videoconference room and was expected to be available for face-to-face immediately when managers popped in.
- We used internet phone systems (VOIP—voice over IP) to replace the hand-held devices we were previously using.
This new model worked so well that we do not plan on going back. My institution has a significant number of students in our online degree programs, and they are now able to participate as contact center callers. And we no longer have to worry about outgrowing our phone room.
Moreover, we evolved into soliciting by videoconference. The idea of asking for $25 or $100 in person during a face-to-face videoconference had never been imagined. But we were seeing up to 80% pledge rates by using this method.
And on top of this, we utilized LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify all of our graduates who changed jobs or were promoted. Every day, our team reached out to congratulate any alums for new jobs and promotions the day before (based on the alum updating their LinkedIn page). Since they were obviously using LinkedIn, communicating over the professional network gave us a high certainty our outreach would be read. Messages basically said “on behalf of our institution, congratulations on the exciting new role. I’d love to visit to hear about the position and share in our magazine alumni notes, and by the way, this is the email we have in our records. Is it accurate?”
Forty percent of those we reached in this way (who were almost always never donors), responded with a willingness to meet. In fact, they were excited and honored. And as stated above, 80% of those pledged or gave. This new practice is now a permanent part of our contact center operation, and we will be looking at next year to see if a face-to-face visit each year can continue to drive up donor engagement, participation rates, and overall dollars raised.
This tool existed before the pandemic, but somehow the event jolted us out of our practices and into trying some new things.
The Major Gifts team was also impacted. Prior to the pandemic, our major gift officers would travel frequently to discover and qualify prospects, to cultivate relationships, and to solicit gifts. What would we do when travel was halted? Well, the reality was that our donors were open to virtual visits. No, these were not as bonding as in-person visits, but there were counterbalancing advantages. I could have other leaders join in the conversations. I enjoyed being in their homes. “Do you play that guitar on the wall?” “Is that your family in the picture?”
We pushed the boundaries, including first visits, check in/cultivation visits, and even major gift asks. We are eager to return to travel again but anticipate cutting our travel budget in half and balancing out the two modes of interacting with larger donors.
And, finally, as noted above, one of the biggest changes we made was not just in working remotely but how we did it. We decided early on that we would not satisfy with email, phones, and the scheduled videoconference. We instead created a virtual space where we could “see” each other and have a sense that we were still in the same place and together. Sococo.com offered an excellent and very inexpensive way to do this. And behaviorally, we normalized the idea of having our camera on all day long, so colleagues could “pop in.”
We felt in practice that this was like having an open door. It even ensured (in a gentle way) accountability and presence to comfort managers. One fun example of our evolution was the response when you jumped into a person’s virtual office when they were in a meeting. The initial response was to close that window as fast as possible. Instead, we decided that the proper etiquette would be to stop and say, “Sorry I’m interrupting…I can come back,” and let the host decide if they wanted to introduce you, because maybe your presence added value in an unanticipated way.
All in all, I encourage you, as we have, to experiment and explore the future of work.
And now, please do share. What did you find worked and didn’t work for you in using the available online tools to reinvent your own fundraising efforts and workplaces?
Gary Grant has a BA from the University of Chicago and a JD from Illinois Tech's Chicago-Kent College of Law. He currently serves as Senior VP for Development for Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech). Founded at the dawn of the Space Race in 1958, Florida Tech is the only independent, technological university in the Southeast. In this role, he oversees all fundraising and leadership engagement for the University. Gary has authored several books on the use of the internet in nonprofits and fundraising.