Transitioning Donors from Transactional to Mission Centered – Opportunities and

Challenges

Kristine RichterDirector of Marketing

The Passionists of Holy Cross Province

Session Overview:

• Learn how to connect your donors to your organization/mission/ministry by taking a different approach using personal stories, photos, emails, letters, magazines, calendars and acknowledgments.

Objectives:

• Show challenges The Passionists faced moving from transactional to mission.

• Show opportunities to engage your donors to your mission.

• Offer ideas and suggestions to help your organization become more mission/ministry centered.

As a fundraiser, your goal is to build and enrich the relationships the donors have with your organization/mission/ministry.

Periodically you need to take a step back and look at what your relationship is with your donors.

Ask the questions: • How do donors perceive our organization?

• Why do they donate to us?

• How can we improve our relationship with our donors?

• Do the donors know what our mission is?

• Do the donors know who we are?

During 2010 the Passionists were in the process of making multiple changes.

• New Executive Director(s).• Due to the illness of the current Spiritual

Director (Fr. James), they were transitioning to a new Spiritual Director (Fr. Mike).

• The new Spiritual Director wanted to start writing the appeal letters and use his voice to connect with the donors.

• New Executive Directors wanted to update the acknowledgment letter.

• Our organization was in the process of switching to a new data software system.

I DO NOT recommend making multiple changes like these all at once because you need to test any change so you can analyze the results. These changes gave The Passionists the opportunity to ask and obtain answers to those questions:

• How do donors perceive our organization?• Why do they donate to us?• How can we improve our relationship with our donors?• Do the donors know what our mission is?• Do the donors know who we are?

During this process we obtained a lot of insights:How do donors perceive our organization?We learned that our donors viewed us as the Catholic “Hallmark” of cards.

Almost all of our packages included a card or enrollment.

Further review of the package showed that the letter didn’t engage the donor with our mission/ministry or organization.

Enrollment Folder Package

This became an opportunity for us.

• Fr. Mike introduced himself to the donors by starting to write the appeal letters.

• Fr. Mike wanted to start building a relationship with the donors.

Letters to Fr. Mike

Why do they donate to us?Our donors donated for a variety of reasons including:– A personal relationship with a Passionist

Priest from church, school or family.– Attended a retreat from one of our retreat

centers.– Desire to support our missions/ministries.– Received one our mailings and used our

cards or enrollments.

A majority of our donors donated because of receiving one of our card or enrollment packages. They were transactional based donors. They received. They used. They donated.

We wanted to transition donors to be more mission/ministry centered.

This became an opportunity for us:

• We highlighted our different missions with photos.

• We specified how their donation supports these missions.

• We tested packages that were more spiritual and did not include cards or enrollments.

• We sent emails that coincided with our mailings.

How can we improve our relationship with our donors?

• Updating to a new database software system.- Easier to run reports

- Easier to analyze data - Create better selections

This became an opportunity for us.

• Easier for our Planned Giving department to analyze and target specific individuals on the file.

• One of the ways to improve our relationship with the donors was to make “Thank You” phones calls and start the one on one personal communication.

Reviewed our acknowledgment letters/packages.

• Current letters were static and generic. Fr. Mike wanted to use this as another way to communicate and connect with the donors.

• He wanted a more personal letter from him thanking them for their gift, but also providing them more spiritual or mission information regarding what is happening during each liturgical month.

Acknowledgment Letters

Old Letters Current Letters

Do the donors know what our mission is?

• Other ways in which we tried to improve the knowledge of our missions was to send other mailings:-calendar-magazine-newsletter These mailings highlight priests, lay volunteers, retreat centers, schools and our different missions/ministires in the US and internationally.

Do the donors know who we are?• The Passionists are known as Preachers of the

Passion of Jesus.• Founded by Paul Daneo in 1721 to tell the

world about Jesus Crucified.

• We include this information on our enrollments and cards.

• Through phone calls and personal visits, we ask how they know about the Passionists.

What we learned:

• To build better relationships with our donors.• To listen to the needs of our donors.• To educate the donors on who are the

Passionists.• To educate the donors on the Passionists

missions/ministries.• To improve personal communication.

How has your organization built better relationships with your donors?

Thank you!