By Joyce Penland, CFRE
What makes your palms sweat, causes your heart to race, and turns your knees to jelly? For me it’s riding a roller coaster. Or seeing any kind of rodent or snake. Both of those things frighten me more than I’m willing to admit. But for your organization’s executive director, your board and even for some of your staff, what scares them most is making a solicitation visit.
As the development professional in your nonprofit, this phenomenon offers an opportunity to deliver guidance and training so that your entire team can be effective in asking for support. So how do you go about it? We recommend going back to the basics: divide and conquer.
1. Ask your Executive Director to give you 30 minutes each week to work with her one-on-one to build her comfort level in making calls. Review with her the dynamics of the fundraising visit:
- asking questions,
- building rapport,
- listening and responding to the prospect,
- sharing your organization’s “case for support” and then
- inviting the investment.
There are many tools on the web and several excellent books that outline the ABC’s of the solicitation visit that can help you train your boss. Once she’s comfortable in this role, you can use those 30 minutes to brief her on upcoming visits or allow her to share any challenges.
2. For your Board members, it’s important to stress that fundraising is an expectation from the very start of their terms, so that this is not an unwelcome surprise. Setting aside a specific time during the board’s regular meetings for training and coaching is essential to alleviating their fears and building their confidence in asking. We recommend a combination of teaching them the basics above, along with role-playing to help diminish their fears. Your responsibility is to remind them that they are not asking for themselves but for the people you serve. Give them tools that include:
- compelling stories of clients served by your organization,
- relevant statistics that reveal your strengths, and, most of all,
- a convincing case for support to propel them out the door.
Pairing board members with your Executive Director on visits will allow them to play to their strengths. We often encourage the Executive Director to articulate the nonprofit’s mission and vision, while the Board member makes “the ask” for the gift.
3. Your nonprofit’s colleagues can benefit from learning the art and science of the fundraising visit. Make time during staff meetings to share the outcomes of a few of your most successful fundraising calls with the data entry clerk, the research associate, and other front-line fundraising staff. This allows them see that the time you and others spend cultivating prospects and donors leads to tangible results. Don’t forget to share a few of those “not so successful” visits as well. As we all know, even talented askers are told “no” or “not now” far more often that they’re told “yes.” Sharing the “stories” of your fundraising visits can help personalize donors among your back office staff who may not have the opportunity to know them. And it makes the work more enjoyable!
If the team at Bacon Lee & Associates can assist you in taking the fear out of fundraising for your boss, your board, or your staff, contact us at www.baconlee.com.