Successfully Steward Donors in 3 WISE Ways

All fundraisers know the importance of stewarding relationships with their donors, but many feel they are falling short following the pandemic for two reasons:

More Responsibilities Than Ever

Many development team members took on tasks they don't typically handle after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Maybe because of a revenue downturn, there were layoffs at your organization. Maybe there's a volunteer shortage since you’ve moved to a hybrid or virtual working environment. Maybe the need for your services is greater than ever and you’re in an all-hands-on-deck situation.

More Donors Than Ever

This is the gift horse of the pandemic. In response to the tremendous need, there was tremendous generosity. If you’re in an organization that has benefitted, however, it has been nearly impossible to form personal relationships with each of these new donors, let alone maintain consistent stewardship. Even so, you know full well that a lack of stewardship can make you lose these generous supporters and you might already see some lapsing since 2020.

Both situations can feel overwhelming and cause things fall to through the cracks – unless you have systems in place to keep your stewardship running like a well-oiled machine. Your contacts that require fewer personal touches than major individual donors – such as mid-level donors, foundation contacts and corporate contacts – are prime segments for stewardship automation.

Using this system will help increase donor engagement and can even result in donation upgrades.

 1st WISE Way: Content Planning

The first step in automating your stewardship is segmenting your audiences. We suggest dividing them into mid-level individual donors, foundation contacts and corporate contacts. You can further divide these groups into whatever categories are relevant to your nonprofit – but the simpler the system, the easier it is to maintain.

Next, you can start to plan your stewardship content. Lay out your messages for the next quarter, six months or even a year. Different messages will appeal to each audience, but here are some content ideas:

·        Impact Story

·        Press that mentions your organization

·        Testimonial or note from a client

·        Volunteer or staff member highlight

·        Survey/solicit feedback

·        Value add (share an article or resource about a mutual interest)

·        Event invitations

Use a spreadsheet or calendar to plot which audience will receive what content, and when.

2nd WISE Way: Batch Your Writing

Instead of waiting for the date to arrive and rushing to put something together, set aside quiet time early on to attack this writing in a “batch,” or all at once. Draft emails that include the stewardship content and gather details as needed from program staff or other members of your team. Having this content ready to go for the following months will save you a lot of time and stress.

3rd WISE Way: Automate

Outlook, Gmail and many other email platforms have tools to mail merge emails or insert personalization just like you would for a letter you were sending to several people. This can give your email the look of a personal note from you, in contrast to sending it from your email marketing platform. An email with your signature and from your Outlook feels like personal correspondence and encourages more engagement with your stewardship.

You can take it one step further and schedule your email to be sent at a later date. You may, however, want to double-check your messages the week before they are scheduled to send so that the information included is relevant and respectful of current events.

We hope this system makes you feel more empowered to keep up with your stewardship even when your responsibilities have increased over the past few years. I also hope it inspires you to look at your other fundraising processes to see where automation and batching can help you achieve greater results!

To dig deeper into donor stewardship, check out our free stewardship webinar.