Fundraising Tips: How to Get Yourself to Ask for Contributions Every Day
by Andrea Kihlstedt
Lauren Phipps, Major Gifts Officer at the New York Civil Liberties Union, had just been assigned a portfolio of more than 200 donors and it was her job to raise money from them. When I met with her, she was very excited. She said that she didn’t know many of people on her list, but that she was planning to make a fundraising call a day–every day–to get to know them better.
Lauren Phipps Has a Portfolio of Donors
When I checked in with Lauren again recently, she told me that even with the best of intentions she’s had trouble keeping up the pace of asking for donations every day. It’s been hard to manage her time and put asking front and center.
That got me thinking about the things that might help Lauren (or you for that matter) actually maintain the discipline to ask for gifts every day.
No matter how good your intentions, if you’re a lone ranger in an office that doesn’t know how important asking for gifts is, you’ll probably find it hard to muster the discipline and energy it takes to ask for gifts every week let alone every day.
But if everyone in your organization gets behind that work and supports it fully, you’ll find it much easier to keep it up.
5 Ways You Can Make it Easier to Ask for Gifts
These five tips will support you in asking for gifts so you’ll find it hard not to ask!
- Spend time with your colleagues setting personal asking goals and then reporting to one another on your progress at the end of the week.
- Let your supervisor know how important that work is and ask for her support. Imagine how good it would feel if she took the time and attention to ask you how your donor calls are going.
- Find a more experienced fundraiser to mentor you so when a call seemed off or you weren’t quite sure how to approach a particular donor, you could talk these through with a mentor.
- Track the number of in-person calls and visits you had with donors each week. Post your results prominently in your office. If you can, get your colleagues to do the same.
- With your most important donors, get someone to sit with you while you make the calls so you can discuss them in advance and debrief how each of them went afterwards.
In the video below, Lauren describes how the development staff in her organization supports her Executive Director’s work with donors. She says it works like a charm!
Lauren Phipps Helps Her Executive Director Make Donor Calls.
Approaching your work with donors with the help and encouragement of others in your office will give you the courage, discipline and energy to ask donors for contributions every day. And with that sort of laser focus on asking, you will raise more money.
