Summer Stakeholder Engagement Plan

Annual Giving in One Hour a Week has reached Week 26 — halfway through the year, and the close of the fiscal year for many nonprofits. I selected this garden image because my neighbor, who has maintained an incredible vegetable garden for years, says, “It’s two weeks of hard work and the rest is easy.” Fundraising may be more than two weeks of hard work, but the idea of working first, maintaining for a significant period of time, and finally harvesting is exactly what we’re doing. In the first quarter, you took stock of your data and organized your fundraising information. As the second quarter closes, you are wrapping up three months of outreach and relationship work, which you’re about to hand off this week so you have time to prepare your fundraising logistics for successful solicitation in the fall. You want to be ready to harvest the gifts you’ve been cultivating all along.

This week’s task is straightforward: using your One Hour to build on the last two weeks, meet (however you are meeting these days) with your Engagement Team, two or more people who will continue making outreach calls over the summer. Have them touch base with important people you spoke with earlier in the spring. Investing in relationships with stakeholders insures you against that dreaded response to a solicitation, “You only contact me when you’re asking for money.”

Launch your folks with three things this week:

• Two to three talking points
• Five to 10 names of people to call
• A time and means to touch base with you and the rest of their team next week

Check-in team calls should take only a few minutes; set them for the same day and time every week through September. You can always adjust the calendar item later. If you would like feedback on your talking points or to discuss strategy, 30-minute calls are free, find me here and at lisaverges.com. Visit me next week to start setting up the logistics for your fall campaign!

​Train and Deploy Your Engagement Team

With just one more week left in Q2 (and perhaps your organization’s fiscal year as well), now is the time to set yourself up for summer success by deploying your engagement team. Building on last week’s task of adding one to three people to make check-in calls to extend your engagement reach, this week your One Hour is to create a script outline for the kickoff call.

Your habit of committing just an hour every week for fundraising sets reasonable expectations for others. A team of four contributing one hour of their time per week is a half day of solid outreach and engagement efforts!

The goal of your kickoff call is to thank your volunteers, set expectations, and give them the tools they need to be effective. Properly prepared, they can enjoy the experience. In your first call to train and deploy the team, you’re going to give them exactly what they need:

Clear Purpose: Why are we doing this? To connect with people who care about your cause. No one is asking for money, or time, or work from the people who answer the phone – this is strictly a listening effort to build stronger relationships.

Bite-Sized Assignments: Every week you’re going to send each volunteer a short list of people to call. I recommend a goal of reaching at least three people every week, so send five names per week.

• Use the technology you enjoy the most. I create a spreadsheet with name, contact information, and if it exists, how the person is connected to the organization. Work through the list in any order you like – by ZIP code, alphabetically forward or backward, largest to smallest gift, it’s up to you. Each week, copy and paste five lines into an email for each of your callers and have them work from that. Use a consistent email subject line so it’s always easy for them to find.

Positive Direction: Before the group kickoff call, talk with your #1 volunteer and ask that person to share their calling tips with everyone. Assuming that person is outgoing and confident on the phone, and especially if you don’t consider phone calls to be one of your own strengths, invite that person to take the lead in coaching the group on the kickoff call.

Set Schedule: Come up with a day and time for a weekly progress call. These can take just five to 10 minutes and they serve more than one purpose: you’re going to tell your group that this is a time to compare notes and tips, and together you will see themes emerge in real time. They can also share names of people that are hard to reach, to see if anyone else knows them. It’s fine for volunteers to trade names from one person’s list to another.

• This is oddly specific, but the best time I’ve found for this is 9:15 on Tuesday mornings. You only block 15 minutes for the call and will likely finish before then. People are more likely to dial in because they know they will be off the phone shortly – and you get the information you want.

Social Pressure: The other two reasons for the weekly call are to create a deadline and group accountability. Volunteers will want to report that they at least placed calls to their five people, and if someone is avoiding the group call that’s an opportunity to go offline and ask what’s up. If they hate the phone this might not be the job for them.

Loose Talking Points: The purpose of outreach is to provide a listening ear and a sincere offer to raise questions that come up during the calls and get back to people. There is no formal script – you are looking for authentic communication. Ask your team to put this opening in their own words:

• “I’m a volunteer with (Organization) and a few of us are reaching out to folks like you to check in. How are you doing?”
• If you don’t have relationship information in your database (whether the person is a past Board member, subscriber, program participant, parent, volunteer, etc.), use these calls to collect it with an open-ended question like, “How did you first become involved?” Call team members take brief notes to share on the weekly call.
• If you have any event or significant date coming up, deliver that message before signing off.

As you close the kickoff training call, thank your volunteers again. Follow up with their first list of names and put the weekly check-in calls on everyone’s calendar for the coming three months. After every weekly check-in call, take a moment to note important information that surfaced, and send the next round of lists.

Build Your Engagement Team​

There are just a couple of weeks left in Q2, before we shift gears for the summer and get into writing, vendor selection, and other operational work to prepare for fall fundraising.

Since April the effort has been all about building and maintaining relationships, laying the foundation for people to be receptive to solicitation later. There is no shortcut around one-on-one outreach and checking in with people. Those conversations improve organically as you put in the work every week. You experience common themes and questions, so every conversation makes you better prepared for the next one.

It is time to build an Engagement Team to carry your momentum through the summer. The Week 19 task was to recruit one person to help you with calls, someone who could handle perhaps five calls a week. Grow that squad with one to three additional people to make calls along with you. As you turn your limited time to the logistics of preparing for your campaign, take this opportunity to engage advocates who are willing to connect with about three people every week. That means a list of five to 10 names weekly. It’s not a heavy lift individually, and with a team of four, every week you’d be giving 10 or more of your stakeholders an ear for their ideas and concerns. Investing in this personal touch shows your donors and volunteers that your organization cares about them.

This week’s job is to recruit; next week it will be to train them and set up your feedback loop.

Consider where you are likely to find future donors, and seek Engagement Team members from those circles so the conversations are peer-to-peer when possible. It’s good to have a Board member (current or past) and people who can speak to the benefit of your work, like:

• For youth development/sports/music, a current or past parent of a program participant;
• For arts organizations, a member or subscriber;
• Health care, a grateful patient or family member;
• If you work with older adults, a family member of a resident or program participant;
• Teens/young adults in your programs now or recently;
• An adopter that your animal rescue worked with to successfully rehome a pet;
• And program staff, as long as they are not overloaded in the summer.

Ask your #1 volunteer to help you train the new caller(s) so you can get your Engagement Team up and running for the summer. Clear two or three times around the end of this month for a training session. During your recruiting conversations, find the date and time best for everyone and confirm it. Stop by in a week for tips on how to craft the session so that you build a strong, effective team that saves you time.

What To Do In Early June … This Year vs. Any Other Year

Welcome to Week 23 of Annual Giving in One Hour a Week. My vision of this yearlong course is that it is evergreen. Rooted in the fact that individual giving is the least capricious branch of fundraising and that those individuals reliably cluster their giving activity at year-end, then the course takes a year to put you in the best position for success at the time when your solicitations will be most productive.

If we were having a normal year, I’d be advising you to use your One Hour this week to connect with Board and Committee members to ask about their summer schedules. Call your key people and send a cleanup group email when you run out of time. This works on two levels: as a simple transaction, when people tell you when they are away, you can plan meetings, conference calls, and summer friendraising get-togethers to accommodate the schedules of your most influential stakeholders. That’s your stated reason to call, but the information goes deeper. As part of your relationships with those people, you create an opportunity to understand people better, what their life situations may be. Is there a special trip planned? What made them choose that destination? Are they taking a couple of days for themselves after dropping off children at summer camp? Are they “staycationing” instead, to do a project at home? And for your research files, this may yield information that could change your understanding of their assets (and liabilities).

But we aren’t having a normal year. People have no idea if they’ll be able to take any kind of vacation this year, if they’re even thinking about it at all. The world around us remains an ever-shifting combination of awful, hopeful, and disorienting. Communities are cautiously reopening, yet events two and three months out are still being cancelled because we remain in a worldwide “developing situation.”

So, my advice for your One Hour this week is to connect in a supportive way with the people who are doing the work of your organization – staff and/or volunteers. Just call and ask how they are doing. Lots of us are not OK, and who is and who isn’t may surprise you.

For you Gentle Readers following along, I brought home a rescue German Shepherd-Siberian Husky mix last week and she … has a long way to go to be OK. This image shows her just now, snoozling in my office where she has one of several dog beds. Do what you need to do to be OK, to care for yourself, to be the caregiver you’re called to be. Connect with your compatriots, listen to them, and I’ll see you right here next Monday.

To Nourish Others, Fill Your Cup First

Welcome to Week 22 of Annual Giving in One Hour a Week. Last Monday I was sharing tips on staying organized and in touch with key people while we cope with the impact of COVID-19 behavior restrictions. That evening, Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, and the world changed again. Coronavirus no longer leads the top of the news broadcasts because our cities’ parks and streets are full of people pouring out their rage and heartbreak, and we are all reacting in our own way as we try to process and find a way forward.

It doesn’t seem appropriate to offer you technique tips and strategic to-do lists right now. As you decide how you will respond to what’s happening and where you can identify ways to make change that are in keeping with your values, I encourage you to check in with yourself, as a foundation for the mission work you do. You can’t pour anything from an empty cup, so do what you need to do to fill your own cup first, whether that means rest, nourishment, letting your feelings wash over you, getting support, unplugging from the news – restoring yourself to service is the most unselfish thing that you can do right now.

As part of your work, you’ve been talking to stakeholders for a couple of months now. Before you make another call, press pause and ask yourself what you’ve been asking others: how are you doing, what are you worried about, how might someone help? Talk it through with a close friend, write it out, meditate on it, whatever works for you. For me, walking in silence seems to produce the best ideas. Maybe next week will feel more like a time to talk about workplace strategies and techniques, but for now, please take care of yourself so you can be strong and successful at the work you do.