If the donor experience, not fundraising targets, should be at the heart of future fundraising strategies, how will our organisations achieve what they need? Some years ago I squirreled away a cryptic comment from a Read more…
You are writing about upgrading, cross selling and cash gifts. Why these three? I covered retention separately in my two blogs (here and here) on relationship fundraising and (here) on recruitment. These three are the Read more…
Now here’s a thing I don’t understand. I’ve picked it from a very long list of things I don’t understand which includes; differential equations (obviously), how to get jam to set properly (recent problem), and Read more…
Today’s post is a morsel.
Short and sweet, it’s a petit four or, if you’re more of a savoury person, a piece ofbleu benedictinto finish a sumptuous year of blogging on101fundraising.org, our crowdblog.
A year ago next weekthe very first blog postwas published on this site. Since then, many more fundraisers have written, shared, and debated on many aspects of our profession: the theoretical, technical, and ideological. I have no agency to speak on behalf of anyone but myself, and so I thank you personally, Reinier and Jeroen, the Men in Black, for your genius and hard hard hard work bringing fundraisers of the world together in this space. And of course a multitude of thanks to my fellow crowdbloggers: your content has enriched my professional practice.
Now.
On the subject of thank you’s, today’s blog post subject: a quick case study on email subject lines. (more…)
A basic donor lifecycle map
A few months ago I posted a blog critical of the donor pyramid and asking why it is still so widely used in the Netherlands (and undoubtedly also some other countries). So now I’d like to propose an alternative. The problem with the pyramid is that it is only useful to show one metric – donor financial value. But it doesn’t tell the larger story of engagement – how a donor interacts with and builds a relationship with an organisation over time: the lifecycle.
So what does your donors’ lifecycle look like? And more importantly, are your donors growing in value (whatever that means to your organisation – financial value, volunteerism, advocacy, etc.) over the duration of that lifespan? How can you visualise how your organisation is performing and how you want to be performing? A simple tool that I favour is the donor lifecycle map. The primary purpose of this tool is to show the correlation of donor value with engagement – both of which, of course, should be growing!
(Klik hier voor de Nederlandse versie)
A number of fundraising headlines have proclaimed the donor pyramid to be dead. And working in America, I hadn’t heard too much about it since my early days in fundraising (way back in the ’90s!) except an occasional chuckle and a “that old thing!” retort at its mention. It used to be that in America, where major gifts represent a large share of fundraising income, the pyramid could illustrate which 20% of donors contribute 80% of giving income.
But even before my time as a fundraising professional, the pyramid had already come to be seen as a very simplistic measure of success. So naturally, I too thought it was dead until I moved to the Netherlands, where it’s alive and kicking (and screaming). In fact the donor pyramid is not just alive here in the Netherlands – it is beloved.
Why exactly? Is it that the pyramid is actually so useful or is it that there are no good alternatives?
(Click here for the English version)
De donateurpiramide is in een groot aantal artikelen over fondsenwerving al vaak dood verklaard. Als fondsenwerver in de VS, heb ik er al vanaf de jaren negentig weinig meer over gehoord. Vroeger was het zo dat in Amerika -waar major gifts een groot deel van het totale fondsenwervingsinkomen uitmaken- de piramide een instrument was om te laten zien welke 20% van je donateurs 80% van je totale inkomsten vertegenwoordigt.
Maar al voor mijn werkzame tijd als fondsenwerver, werd de piramide beschouwt als een simplificatie van de werkelijkheid. Voor mij was de donateurpiramide dan ook morsdood. Totdat ik naar Nederland verhuisde waar de piramide ‘alive and kicking’ bleek. En niet alleen dát, maar hij is ook nog eens erg geliefd!
Waarom eigenlijk? Komt het omdat de piramide echt nuttig is of zijn er misschien geen goede alternatieven?
