Animate Your Development Process & Maximise Success
This blog is part 4 in a series of 6 about transforming Regular Giving.
You will have a lot of people committed to what you do, and having people who want to help you, there is the opportunity to turn this goodwill into a great volunteer programme. If you can recruit, train and manage them, and monitor and administer their activities effectively, you can leverage much greater success than you could do alone.
Your volunteers can really make a difference when you can empower them to do so much more through the right tools and processes. They can encourage their peers to give, which hugely grows your leadership programme. They can be mentors helping your careers programme cement the link between generations and demonstrate what educational philanthropy can do to transform lives.
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When managed and supported in the right way, your volunteers become ambassadors who will work tirelessly to promote your cause, which can really transform the success of your giving days, your phonathons, your text campaigns and your DMs.
Serafina allows you to run a thriving volunteer programme. It gives you the tools to recruit and manage volunteers everywhere and extend your team. It unlocks a potential far beyond anything you will ever get resourced internally and liberates you to create a programme far beyond anything you have ever achieved before.
When you do reach out, it's clear people like being communicated with in different ways. Some people painstakingly read letters, others will watch a video, some will quickly read a text. Some people won't pay any attention until they are phoned or someone goes to see them.
Approaching people across all channels makes sense, but the work involved often gets in the way. Yet it’s so powerful when a letter preludes a call, or a text reminds about an email, or an event makes a donor feel good so that the renewal is successful. It would be so good to use multiple channels in every campaign. That would be ideal. But all these channels demand lots of different systems. Omni-channel may be what everyone is striving for but marketing theory often stays as theory. Now, more than ever people need to be touched many times before they take note of your message. They will need multiple nudges from multiple channels so that when you make an ask they say yes. However, far too often, it's more than enough work just to get out a mailing, or get a phone campaign together without lots of build-up, let alone segwaying one campaign into the next on a journey that will get more and more people giving.
That would change if you had the tools to deploy every channel from one place. No more transferring data here, there and everywhere. Imagine segmenting a list and sending a text or an email or mail there and then; easy, immediate dispatch right now. And with these communications so personalised that your supporters feel like individuals, like they are your alumni and parents and supporters, you will be able to transform your engagement and culture of giving. You will be treating them not as prospects but as members of your institution for life, who are respected and talked to in just the right way and who hear from you often and appropriately. As a result, they will feel involved, cared about and they will want to support.
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With everyone working in concert to a coordinated plan, multi-channel campaigns are now easily achievable. Serafina seamlessly delivers engagement, asking and thanking in a cycle that continually grows your giving culture. With the right tools at your disposal, you will save a huge amount of time that was previously used upon endless manual tasks. This free time allows you to focus on core activities, such as building your development programme, delivering greater success and growth. You will be able to deploy touches, nudges and asks in ways that cross-fertilise all of your activities, whether it's career programmes, events, leadership campaigns, legacies or showing impact. The regular giving programme will be at the heart of all you do, a central hub around which everything spins, so that each year more and more donors come on board and the opportunity for obtaining transformative gifts increases.
By deploying Serafina you join a new generation of development professionals: people who see that advancement is not a series of steps; it is a symphony of activity that is always engaging and asking. You join a worldwide community of amazing offices who share a vision of energising and liberating their teams to work in extraordinary ways; a world of coordinated multi-channel marketing that gains the admiration of your supporters, and that turns them from donors to partners. You will have a community who do not simply want to give but who want to give you their time to make this vision greater, better and wider day after day. You will discover what it means to be part of a culture of giving, a community who truly believes and wants to change the world.
Development hasn’t always been as it is now. Far from it. Years ago, when development started to get going, campaigns were sporadic. People tried different things and they often put off new initiatives for lack of resources. Then they started to do more, but lots of isolated activities, not a whole year round programme. That’s not the world now. People need to hear so many times to register a message, they need to be so enthused towards giving, that when the ask comes they are ready.
Many people today are giving. Many people are listening. Lots feel great about what you do. But there are so many who are hardly getting involved, indeed some not at all. That can change. And it will. With the labour-intensive obstacles removed and the tools to reach out at your fingertips, you will take all of your constituents on a journey. It will be a journey of building belief, of gaining support, of delivering benefit and making your donors feel great. It is a journey that will deliver the culture of giving you want and need.
Focusing on success, building an incredible programme, applying higher thinking to achieving excellence: that is the future. Pointless mundane tasks suck the life out of your fundraising. Why waste time on them? Data insecurity stops you actioning your plans. Rid yourself of the worry and focus on ‘doing’ instead of ‘preventing’. Cumbersome systems stop you making your approaches personal and immediate. Have technology that unlocks your professionalism and creativity to change the world. Show everyone what happens when relationships keep deepening, donor support keeps growing, participation soars. Benefit builds and builds; belief becomes a certainty and your community is one of opportunity and educational prosperity.