Use Your Board to Launch an Individual Giving Program

How to Launch an Individual Giving Program?

In an age where grants and large donations are flat-to-down, many of us are thinking about launching individual giving programs. It sounds really good in the boardroom: “Just 1,000 people giving $20 per month would be almost $250,000!”

Well… it’s much easier to say than to do.

For starters, do you have a “house list” at all? To get 1,000 people to donate using traditional means, you might assume a 2% response rate on direct mail or direct email, which would mean you would need a “house list” of 50,000 people. If you don’t already have an individual giving program, it is unlikely you have a database of 50,000 people to market to. So where do you start?

Your board of directors.

If your board really wants an individual giving program, they can be instrumental in getting it started. Here is what you do:

Have board members set a “give or get” personal fundraising target

• Collect board members’ contacts
• Have board members make personal appeals
• Have board members follow up
• “Rinse and repeat” with youth boards, alumni boards, local boards, fundraising committees–any group you can get organized to do the same thing–set and hit targets.

The reason this works is as follows: A personalized outreach from a board member to a friend has a 10x higher response rate than an email blast or a piece of direct mail sent from the cause itself. And the resulting gift is over 50% higher. So to get the same $250,000 cited above, you would need to reach out to only 3,500 contacts vs. 250,000. All of a sudden this seems doable. It might take a year or two.

Let’s say you have 15 board members, each with 100 contacts they could reach out to. That’s 1,500 contacts. Get each of them to upload their contacts into a volunteer fundraising system (like Fundly), construct a personal outreach, and send out emails to their contacts. You have now built the seed for your “house list,” and you can take advantage of the personal affinities that usually drive donations anyway. 20% of the people you reach out to (depending on how well written the appeals are and how strong the message is) might donate. And some of them might give big. Have each of your board members pay attention to responses, and have them follow up as necessary to hit their individual fundraising goal.

You will be surprised how effective this is vs. direct mail or email. And if you didn’t have a house list before, now you have one!

If you can recruit other committees or teams or youth boards to do the same thing, you can continue to grow your list.

The last piece of magic is this: Every giver is a gatherer… you just have to ask. Each of the people solicited through this process may be willing to reach out to his or her friends also. Maybe they can’t take a board seat or sign up for a number, but they are likely willing to let their friends know about their support for your great cause. So don’t let them walk away without asking them do that! At Fundly we call this a “social donation,” and every donation page support this.

If you continue the math from above, let’s say you find 1,000 donors. Consider the following:

• 70% of those donors might agree to post to their Facebook walls after making a donation
• The average Facebook user has 135 friends
• 1,000 * 70% * 135 = 94,500 additional impressions

So you give yourself almost 100,000 more chances for someone to see your cause and decide to get involved.

This is how you start an individual giving program from scratch–you tap into the social networks of the people who already support you. First your board. Then other committees. Then their friends and their friends’ friends. Within a year of concerted effort you will have an individual donor program you can be proud of!

By Dave Boyce, CEO Fundly