Engaging Stakeholders in Building a Donor-Centric Program

Rebecca Geragosian
Director, Stewardship & Donor Relations
CJP

Photo Credit: Adobe Stock

Part of creating a strong philanthropy program at any nonprofit is understanding the wants, needs, and interests of your donor base—complete with all their nuance. Not a single non-profit out there, no matter how specific the mission, has a homogenous donor base with singular wants or concerns. Within each, there are micro-communities based on such things as specific areas of impact, giving behaviors, giving thresholds, tenure, and depth of involvement in the organization. For those of us in stewardship and donor relations (S&DR) who are trusted to maintain these donor relationships, the challenge is knowing what resonates with whom, and understanding what the best vehicle is for delivering that information. 

Our donor populations are diverse. It is important to audit the donor experience or journey, from beginning to end, and through various lenses (the many types of donors), to understand how donors interact with our organization’s processes. We ask ourselves, “Who might be falling through the cracks between various stewardship efforts,” and “who are we not engaging with on a meaningful level?”  The many identities within our donor base come with unique opportunities and challenges from the S&DR perspective. 

As part of my team's donor-centric approach, we endeavor to speak to donors within the context they view themselves to learn what matters to them. We acknowledge that in many cases the best way to do that is to solicit feedback from those who understand that nuance, the contextual donor landscape, and to do some investigating about what resonates with donors. As S&DR professionals, we wax poetic about best practices and innovations in our field, but our job is to figure out how to marry those ideas with the information we are receiving from those closest to our donors about how they want to engage—and then to apply those tactics, which are rooted in best practices, based on what we learn. In addition to bringing our colleagues from other departments, especially those who work closely with segments of our donor population regularly, into our thinking and co-developing S&DR strategies and tactics with their perspectives and feedback, we also engage with our donors—the very people for whom we are developing these programs. These donors are usually involved as committee members, volunteers, or simply trusted, longtime supporters. Not only are they readily able to identify barriers they experience in their donor journey, but they can also identify meaningful solutions. And, in doing so, we are offering them an opportunity to influence change and decisions and access our organization in a meaningful way. 

Adopting this process as practice means embracing a willingness to evolve. We present our plans, our stakeholders react and advise, and we adjust, apply, and test these evolved strategies. There are risks involved in this process. Asking for input creates an extra step, and it requires relinquishing some of our control over planning. However, it is indisputably riskier to spend money, staff time, and other resources on strategies and tactics that give donors the impression that we do not know who they are. Retention is hard, but reacquisition is much harder. As a bonus, the act of asking for feedback from our internal and external stakeholders is, in itself, a meaningful way to steward relationships that the organization relies on to thrive.

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