Love your donors
Ooo, this is SO fun and easy! There is NOTHING more important to donor relations than stewardship – the information the donor gets from you after making a gift.
What we want to do in stewarding our donors is to let them know that they made the right decision and that their funding caused the positive impact we told them it would.
We can deliver this kind of information through newsletters, reports or face-to-face meetings. The first two are industry standards, but newsletters are rarely donor-centric and reports are rarely interesting. In-person meetings would be amazing, but are limited by the amount of time it would take to visit everyone.
So how do you achieve customized, personalized stewardship? Through the miracle of video!
Here are three examples to inspire your team.
- Cheap and easy: example 1
- Find a key spokesperson, ideally a front-line mission worker like the vet at an animal shelter.
- Craft a short update they can deliver in two minutes.
- Point your phone at them in a brightly lit area and hit “record.”
- Upload it and send to your donors.
- A bit more sophisticated: example 2
- Work with a marketing firm to create a story line.
- Use a professional video crew to film and edit your video with real lighting and sound.
- If you don’t have a budget, reach out to communications firms you’ve worked with before and request a pro bono job. Or try advertising for a freebie on social media.
- The gold standard: example 3
- Break open the piggy bank for original music and high production values.
- Get a professional production company involved and include starring roles for the donors themselves.
- Upload to your Youtube page and share on social media…because it’s that good.
Bottom line? Video gives you everything – personal connection, customization, visuals, audio, smell-o-vision… so jump in there!
Siobhan
"F" is for Fundraising 