Source: Jason Fisher, Senior Counsel, Advancement
Solutions Consulting, A Division of RuffaloCODY,
Cedar Rapids, IA.
--------------------In-house
Gifts--------------------
Achieve 100 Percent
Employee Giving on the First Try
In her first year as director of development
and alumni affairs at Midway College (Midway,
KY), Di Boyer helped achieve the first 100
percent participation rate for the faculty
and staff campaign fund, with gifts averaging
$250.
Boyer credits the campaign’s
success to a combination of setting the bar
high and
encouraging practical, yet creative campaign
management.
After much discussion with
her staff, Boyer says she realized one reason
the staff campaign
had never achieved 100 percent giving was
simply because faculty
and staff had never been challenged to do so. So her department’s first
step was to set 100 percent participation as a tangible goal.
The next decision
was just as innovative:
“We did not run the campaign
out of the development office,” she
explains. “We specifically picked a campaign chair who was a faculty
volunteer. Not only did this take the heat off the development office, whose
time and talents
were already overstretched, but it also forced them to throw out the old
story. There would be no more walking around with pledge forms.”
Charged
with encouraging giving at a college located in the heart of horse country,
the volunteer committee came up with the campaign theme, “The Midway
Meet.” Each
faculty and staff department was treated like one horse in a race, so it
became a fun challenge for each department to try to cross the finish line
ahead of
the others.
As a thank-you for giving,
all donors were taken to see Smarty Jones — the
2004 Kentucky Derby winner — at a nearby horse farm.
Midway College
has kept up the 100 percent participation streak every year since,
making only a few tweaks to the program.
The annual campaign now has
two co-chairs — one
from the faculty, the other from non-teaching
staff to equally represent both constituencies.
The co-chairs
choose a theme. For the 2009 Thanks A Latte campaign, donors received
McDonald’s
lattes and Midway coffee mugs and had their pictures taken with their
mugs for their mug shots.
Source: Di Boyer, Director of Development and Alumni Affairs, Midway College,
Midway, KY.
--------------------Schedule
Pledge Payments---------------
Two Giving Seasons
Helps Manage Cash Flow, Boost Contacts
To
keep gifts flowing year-round, take steps
to encourage pledge payments and donations
at set points throughout the year.
Christina
Thrun, development and marketing director,
Big Brothers Big Sisters Northwestern Wisconsin
(Eau Claire, WI), says her organization
used to have a
couple of really close months in terms of cash flow. Now they bring in a considerable
amount of money during the summer months, which easily helps them through the
fall, when giving traditionally slows prior to their holiday mailing.
So what
changed?
The organization implemented
a dual-invoice system that goes like this:
Donors who make multi-year
pledges are invoiced twice a year (July and
November/December).
Summer invoicing is tied in with a summer annual giving letter. With
the summer invoices, donors are asked if
they prefer to be invoiced in December
or want
to set up a payment schedule in which gifts are automatically deducted
from their bank account or charged to
their credit card monthly, quarterly, semi-annually
or annually.
Follow-up phone calls go to
donors whose invoices are left unpaid after
both mailings.
Along with enhancing their
ability to manage cash flow, Thrun says
the system has helped
annual giving numbers consistently increase
and strengthened
the
giving program through more frequent contact with donors.
Source: Christina Thrun, Development and
Marketing Director, Big Brothers Big Sisters
Northwestern Wisconsin, Eau Claire, WI.
