Gift Recognition Levels: Who sets the bar?If your getting ready to campaign (and who isn’t?), one of the most important decisions your campaign team will need to make is how you’ll recognize significant gifts. In a traditional nonprofit, staff might make these decisions. In a tiny room, with no input, the leadership team decides. Then, development officers shuffle off to meet with donors to match dollar goals with donor capacity and interest and thank them in whatever way the staff decided they’d be thanking donors. Don’t do that. It’s a formula for an uphill battle and puts you in danger of entering a process that does not necessarily have any meaning beyond the tiny office where you decided what your donors think. Instead, put the question of gift recognition to your most important donors—your soliciting donors. Sound scary? Asking your donors to sit in a room and hash out what they think is fair gift recognition is much more labor intensive, and potentially frustrating early on than deciding for yourself. But, it pays off. Let them discuss everything from the top 100 corporate, foundation and individual donors, key nuances of the case statement and, of course, the appropriate levels of recognition for gifts. The gift recognition committee specifically identifies the following:
By asking your volunteers/donors to help you make these choices, you’ll get invaluable information about what they truly care about. Interestingly, with a good facilitator, you can watch your top donors develop creative competitions over choice naming opportunities. And, finally, you’ll build essential buy-in that will prevent your soliciting officers from facing criticism over acknowledgement processes or confusion over the value of a gift. If that sounds like the kind of campaign you’d be interested in running, consider a pre-campaign process that includes a gift recognition committee. We can help. Call John Brown Limited for more information about your next successful campaign.
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December 2009:Archived Newsletters |
