My daughter likes puzzles. As I was helping her one day, I got frustrated. She was fitting pieces together so effortlessly, and I was struggling to fit a single piece. A piece looked like a match but was not! When she looked at the picture on the box, I thought she was cheating. She explained, she needed to keep the whole picture in mind. When she changed location, she looked at it from a different perspective. Wow, I thought, that is development, good thing I am better at it than puzzles.
Yet it made me understand why some executive directors struggle with fundraising, especially major gifts.
Most Executive Directors and their board members seem to believe that is all about the way you ask. I recall attending a meeting where a prominent business leader was speaking. During the question part, an executive director stood up and asked him to support their cause. Another time, I was at an event for an organization when the board chair of another organization stood up and did a pitch for their organization. They thought they were fundraising. Yet, they were only forcing puzzle pieces together! And forced so hard, it would tear things to get it back on track.
We have our mission – our picture and it has lots of components. The puzzle is not complete until all the pieces fit together and fundraising is a major part that takes many different perspectives. Take major gifts for example.
Picture a puzzle that has a large blue-sky section with floating clouds. My daughter would gather all the cloud pieces and build the sky around them. Some correlations to think about with major gifts;
The cloud pieces would be all of the donors who stand out with potential to be major contributors to our cause .
The pieces with some cloud and a lot of blue, are the people who give consistently with smaller capacity.
Pieces that are mostly cloud are perhaps our best prospective donors or influencers.
What shape or color are these clouds? Are they light and fluffy or ready to rain? How many clouds are there?
How do they fit into our overall picture? What might their overall picture look like?
What tends to happen in major gifts is we try to force pieces together. We do not know the prospective donor, but we think they should give toward our mission. We try jamming them in instead of taking the time to see where they may fit. Just like looking at the puzzle from a different perspective, look at your donors the same way and ask — how do we connect them? How can we leverage the other pieces? Get curious about your donor pool.
I often tell a story of a prospective major donor – a wealthy individual, who had only given small amounts of money. As I worked to understand him and what was important to him, I was able to slide him effortlessly into the major gifting puzzle piece by listening. I did not try to force this role upon him by asking too early. Instead I built a relationship. I took the eyes off me and looked at the bigger picture from his perspective.
So next time you think that major gifts are such a difficult task, think about how the puzzle could fit together and build a relationship with your donor that helps you understand where they might fit into your mission picture.
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