Everyone's a fundraiser

Putting fundraising campaigns at the heart of your organisation by BEN PARK  and ALEXANDRA SHEPHERD

This is an extract from our new whitepaper. The full version is available here.

In a climate of funding cuts and council-run organisations being spun-off into trusts, many not-for-profit arts organisations are feeling the pinch and formulating strategies to plug gaps in revenue and raise money for capital projects with fundraising activities.

But it’s not enough to just plug the gaps. In this climate, fundraising is mission-critical so it’s more important than ever for arts organisations to supplement their income through fundraising. As a result, fundraising needs to become core to the activities of not-for-profit arts organisations and fundraising teams need to work more closely with teams across all departments. This is vital to the success of marketing and sales too. No other department can communicate the vitality of the organisation’s work to the community and instil a sense of shared purpose in every department.

So what needs to happen? Every organisation is different, but one thing we think you should always be doing is continually questioning your approach to raising funds and asking whether this needs a rethink. In this whitepaper, we help you get the ball rolling in five steps.

How to turn everyone in your organisation into a fundraiser

Many arts organisations have a ‘development team’ or a ‘fundraising department’. There’s a temptation to think that the people in those teams (and they alone) are responsible for bringing in charity income.

But while development teams are primarily responsible for that, creating a fundraising culture is part of everybody's remit and needs buy-in at the most senior level. Put simply, everyone is a fundraiser.

The aim here is to turn your customers into philanthropists. That means your external communications need to reflect the message that fundraising is essential and that everyone who comes into contact with your audiences knows it.

Supporters and potential supporters don’t perceive your organisation as broken up into a ‘development department’ and a ‘marketing department’. They just see you as one single group of people running an arts organisation. Therefore, don’t consider marketing and fundraising as separate functions. Both of them are there to serve the organisation by generating income and developing audience relationships with your output. This requires a change in mind-set which might be difficult, but it’s not impossible.

How to maximise your box office data to understand your audience

Box office databases contain huge potential in their audience data, but it’s often underused. Not only are the people in your box office database already engaged with your organisation and know who you are, but the data you hold on them is full of vital information for fundraising.

Unlike other charities, ticketed not-for-profit arts organisations have the best excuse ever for collecting customer data. With a finite number of seats that people like to buy in advance, arts organisations need to know who is coming along and where they’d like to sit. That means you very likely know the name, address and purchasing history of many of your visitors. That’s data that many charities just don’t have, so having a list of people who have already given you money for a ticket is a huge opportunity just waiting to be seized.

So how to seize it? You need to make sense of all this data so you need a segmentation strategy. It’s likely that your marketing team already has a good segmentation strategy in place for marketing purposes that they can tell you more about (if not, get them to read our guide to simple segmentation). Your goal is to segment your audience in a way that helps you identify potential supporters.

PICK OUT THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT
Analyse their annual spend to see if they’re a different group to your main audience. Low-hanging fruit includes:

• Local audiences who attend more than average, spend more money and donate whilst booking
• Members who spend more than average and live in locally affluent postcodes
• Audiences who aren’t members but nevertheless spend significant amounts of money
• Less frequent attenders who spend big when they do come e.g. Panto-booking grandparents
• Summarise the prospects you have open to you

Once you've completed this research, you should have a list in front of you that comprises:

• Major supporters: a small group of individuals who are wealthy and could support you with a large individual donation.
• Advocates & mid-scale donors: A slightly larger group of individuals who might be able to make a moderately sized gift, or a regular gift over a longer period.
• Small, regular supporters: A large group of individuals who could probably support you with regular small donations and/or by joining a membership scheme that provides benefits.

How to plan targeted campaigns that match your donors’ interests

 Now that you’ve thoroughly made sense of your box office data, put together three campaign strands for each of the groups you identified above. How much time and resource you allocate to cultivating each should depend on how confident you are that you can get a good number of conversions from each segment. For example, your ‘small, regular supporters’ will probably generate a very large number of donations, but they’ll also require significant administrative input which can reduce the benefit of the donations received.

Consider involving other teams in planning the finer details of your three campaigns, starting with a core group of the sales team. Developing the campaign with their help will get them excited about it and when other colleagues see it’s going well, they’ll want to join in. Here are the kinds of things you should consider when planning a campaign for each segment.

Planning a campaign for ‘advocates & mid-scale donors’

These are the people who might be able to make a larger, one-off or regular gift. They’re going to take some looking after and you’ll need to build a relationship with them. They are important advocates of your organisation and often know lots of other people that can help.

A membership scheme or low-level donation isn’t what always appeals to this group. If they’re willing to help, a larger gift that is widely recognised by the organisation might be more interesting to them. Donation structures that might appeal to this group include:

• ‘Patron’, ‘silver circle’ or ‘directors club’ style schemes that provide limited tangible benefit, but do include access to a small group of like minded individuals.
• Cultivation events that make it clear that a gift from an individual affords prestige and gratitude that is marked by the organisation in some way.

Cultivating these gifts requires effort on several fronts. You might want to start off with ‘above the line’ mailing campaigns, but it is pretty likely that donations will be made by these people when they have a personal relationship to your organisation.

 Continue reading on Spektrix.com to learn about managing campaigns for major prospective donors, getting buy in from sales and marketing teams and managing long term donor relationships ->