Do the Word

Take a hard look at your donor file.

What is it, anyway?

For most of us, it’s a list of all the people who have given us money at some point in time.

Some donor files also contain lists of people who we think may give us money at some point in time. Other donor files are segmented into people who have given us money recently (“active” donors) and those who haven’t given money to us in a while (“inactive” donors).

What would happen if we ditched the idea of a donor file and instead created a community of practice–a list of individuals and organizations ranging from…

• Those who blog about our cause
• Nonprofit leaders from other organizations who share our cause
• Experts in fields related to our cause
• Churches, clubs, and service groups actively practicing our cause
• Individuals who have taken steps to become involved in our cause?

(That last category would include but not be limited to those who have given financially. And it might even exclude those who gave but did so in ways that did not reflect involvement in the cause, i.e., they gave because they knew the founder, because they participated in an auction or wine tasting or golf scramble or jog-a-thon where their giving was tied to the non-cause related event rather than the cause.)

What if, in other words, the glue that held our donor file together was a commitment to practice the cause and to grow in that practice with others of like mind and commitment rather than a financial transaction? 

McKnight and Block, authors of The Abundant Community, authored a recent post entitled Gifts, Skills, Interests and Passions: The Glue That Holds Communities Together that is ostensibly about neighborhoods but has at least as much applicability to donor files:

When we consider your block or neighborhood, if it is organized it is because something in common leads people to want to come together. Where blocks are not organized, it is because neighbors don’t know what they share or have in common.  Just living on the same block is not enough to pull many people out of their homes to join with neighbors except for an annual block party.  One step up is the block club created to deal with crime, safety and security.  But that is a community drawn together by fear — creating a fortress mentality.

There are some neighborhoods, however, drawn together because they have discovered the gifts, skills, interests and passions of their fellow residents.  This knowledge is the catalyst for all kinds of new relationships.  The connections may be between two neighbors who discover a mutual interest in jazz.  Or it may be several neighbors with an interest in gardening. Or it may be all the neighbors who discover their common interest in being a village that raises a child.

Whenever a neighborhood comes together in powerful and satisfying ways, it is because two things have happened.  First, they have found out about each other’s gifts.  Second, they have made new connections based on these gifts.  It is the sum of these connections that “glues” a neighborhood together.

Is your donor file a group of individuals “glued” to you because at some time in the past they wrote you a check? Or is your donor file a “virtual cause neighborhood” glued to each other with you in their midst because they have found out about each other’s–and your–gifts and made connections and commitments to grow together accordingly?

How would our approach to our donors change if we thought of them as fellow students of the cause rather than as supporters of our organization?

“Well, what if they grew in the cause but didn’t give to our organization?”

My question in reply: Is it really possible for them to genuinely grow in the cause without growing in their giving?

Change your identity. Stop being the recipient of your donors’ gifts and start being the vehicle for your donors’ maturing and comprehensive activity in relation to the cause.

To that end, rebuild your newsletter around your donors’ ability to answer the following five questions after reading each issue. These come from Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed, a great site on learning and instruction that doesn’t have anything explicitly to do with donor development only because, regretfully, we persist in thinking of donors as supporters and not students of the cause.

• Learn (What did you know? What are you able to do?)
• Understand (What is the evidence that you can apply learning in one domain to another?)
• Share (How did you use what you have learned to help a person, the class, the community or the planet?)
• Explore (What did you learn beyond the limits of the lesson? What mistakes did you make, and how did you learn from them?)
• Create (What new ideas, knowledge, or understanding can you offer?)

If we think that donors can answer these questions well and passionately without giving, we understand neither donors nor causes at all.

Sadly, that very well may be the case.

Instead of just buying your gelato from the ice cream shop, why not help them make it by supplying organic fruit from your own garden?

That’s the premise of New Zealand’s Giapo Gelato, whose new “Giapo Certified Organic” line is crowdsourced from its customers. From Springwise:

Located in Auckland, Giapo Gelato serves up an all-natural line of healthful gelato and sorbets, with inventive flavours including Spirulina, Feijoa and Chili Chocolate. Earlier this week, it kicked off its new crowdsourcing effort to incorporate organic fruits supplied by the crowds. To be eligible for consideration, consumers must guarantee that no herbicides or pesticides have been used within the growing area of their fruit; samples will be randomly tested to ensure compliance. The price of the fruit supplied will then be calculated in current market prices, and Giapo will give suppliers free Giapo Gelato in return.

Springwise goes on to note that trading extra produce for gelato is an exchange that many gardeners will likely be willing to make. But I think there’s more here than free ice cream. If I’m supplying the fruit for an ice cream store, am I likely to mention that to my friends? Invite them down to the store to taste it? Explain how I got involved and challenge them to do the same?

Yes on all three counts.

And this is the “secret sauce” that has powered Habitat For Humanity for years.

It would be infinitely less enticing to say to people, “The poor in our community need homes. Our organization can build them for a good price. Please make the most generous donation you can today.”

Instead, Habitat sticks a hammer in your chest and says, “The poor in our community need homes.” And we reply by saying, “But I don’t know how to build a home?” And they reply by saying, “We’ll show you how, and we’ll do it with you.”

As we noted in a previous post, volunteers donate 50% more than non-volunteers. What that tells us is that when we crowdsource more than money from our donors, we end up crowdsourcing more money from our donors as well.

This is the most basic lesson of fundraising in modern times and yet perhaps the most resisted. We nonprofit leaders protest that it’s more efficient if donors give us money–rather than their labor or their creativity or their word of mouth–so we can use the money to fund our labor, our creativity, and our advertising that is the cost of not equipping and relying completely our donors to share the cause in their sphere of influence.

What can you crowdsource from your donors other than their money?

Yes, it will require you to fundamentally rework your “supply chain”, your way of approaching the cause, your identity as an organization, and your management structure.

But lest you protest that your cause doesn’t lend itself to this, note that it’s the causes we never dreamed could be crowdsourced–from building homes to microlending in the developing world to large-scale adoption of children–are now the hottest and fastest growing causes.

What cause will be crowdsourced next? I hope the answer is:

Yours.