A green idea

Our production manager introduced me to a very cool idea this week.  Vy & Elle is a company out of Tuscon, AZ that creates bags, totes and carrying cases from old billboards and banners.

  

We always seem to be looking for something to do with old vinyl after a marketing campaign is done.  Sadly, most of the time it ends up just getting trashed.

If you produce banners or billboards for shows and exhibits, I'm betting you have the same issues of what to do with the materials once the closing date has passed.  

Consider whether it makes sense to recycle the material into an item that could be sold in your on-site store.  Or whether that item would be a good giveaway to promote membership or season ticket upgrades this year.  It has the potential to be a profit center and a nice PR story if you are the first one in your market to do it.

Right now I'm looking into it for our friends at the Nasher Museum and as I learn more, I'll share it here.

To see the ideas for yourself, here's Vy and Elle's site.

Why donors leave

I promised to share some more data from the 2008 Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy. In it, Bank of America and The Center on Philanthropy spoke to 700 households with a net worth of over $1 million.  

Almost 40% of those surveyed said they stopped supporting at least one organizations in 2007. When asked why they stopped, their top five reasons were:

#1 No longer felt personally connected 57.7%

#2 Decided to support other causes 51.3%

#3 Too frequent solicitation 42.3%

#4 Mission no longer relevant 19.7%

#5 Organization not fulfilling mission 18.7%

(multiple answers were allowed)

Now assuming you are continuing to fulfill your mission, I would suggest that if you take care of #1 and #3 you can decrease your donor/annual member defection rates dramatically.  

Obviously it's a tricky thing when donors say they don't feel connected but in the same breath say they are solicited too much.  Step back a second though, and you can understand their point.  We all have someone in our lives that we only hear from when they need something. It makes you dread getting phone call or email from them.

Your donors agreed to support your organization because they like what you do, support your mission and want to hear more about it.  They want to know about your exhibitions, come to your performances, see your lectures and presentations.  Sure, they understand you'll be asking them for money again, but if the only time they hear from you is when you want something, they'll start dreading you as well.  Worse, they'll find somewhere else to spend their time and money with.

A friend that's a fine fundraiser told me her golden rule was to always ask on the seventh touch. Follow that rule and it will give you six opportunities between every ask to build a personal connection.  That's the very connection that could have kept the contributions flowing from the  donors in the Center on Philanthropy's survey.

Fundraising Pipeline

I was taught very early in my career that sales and fundraising is a numbers game.  The more qualified prospects you talk to, the more successful you'll be.  Bloomberg reported on two studies this week that, to me, make increasing the number of prospects going into your fundraising pipeline a top priority.

The first study, from the research group the Conference Board, says that 45 percent of corporations will reduce their philanthropy budget in 2009.  Another 19 percent have philanthropy cuts under considerations.  Support for the arts and culture led the list of causes for which cuts were expected.

Bank of America and the Center on Philanthropy originated the second study.  The 2008 Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy shows that individual giving among wealthier Americans, those with household incomes over 200K and net worth over $1 million, has decreased over the last few years.  The study monitored charitable giving for the calendar year 2007, which included the starting period of the housing decline.  They report overall charitable giving was down from '05 to '07 by 9.7%.

More importantly, for arts organizations this same study showed in 2005 that the group's annual support for the arts was $16,465 per household.  In 2007 the figure dropped to $4,792.  That's a pullback of over 70% among those most likely to make charitable donations.

Both these reports tell us clearly that you  cannot expect current donor bases to support your organization at the same level they have in the past.  The logical conclusion is that to offset those losses you'll need a larger overall pool of donors.  That's easier to say than to do, but it brings me back to my initial point, it's a numbers game. 

If you look at your development plans and it took 8 proposals to secure one funder two years ago.  Count on having to approach 15-20 to get the same funding level this year.  If your membership program went to 10,000 addresses before, it's probably going to take 20,000 this year just to stay even.  

It's hard work to find twice as many qualified prospects.  It takes more time and effort, but the alternative is most certainly further cuts to staff and programming that we all want to avoid.  I'm guessing that if you look around you'll find plenty of people in your organization that will pitch in to help fill the pipeline.

A final note, there is interesting information on why donors leave from that same report on High Wealth Philanthropy that you may find useful.  I'll share that in a future post.