"Love Relationships" in the Development Office

The eHarmony Method

I think that eHarmony is brilliant!  Not that I’ve found a love connection there (nor am I even on the site looking for love), but their commercial intrigued me when I learned that there are 29 Dimensions of Compatibility and that they’ve been defined.  That got me wondering:  "How many dimensions of capability are there for the planned giving relationship?"

I’ve spent my 25-plus year career seeking, prospecting, qualifying, cultivating and soliciting for planned gifts; and, like a great romance, have come to realize that compatibility, not just simple attraction is the key to finding the right match.

Be More Personal than Personal Ads

The e-Harmony website says that “determining compatibility through conventional dating methods could take months, or even years, of interaction between you and your potential partner…. We are committed to matching you with truly compatible [individuals] in order to provide you with the best online dating and relationship experience possible.”  Isn’t that what we want too?

I’m convinced that prospect research, not the organizational CRM system, is the key to planned giving compatibility.  If you’re a lonely prospect researcher, looking for a love relationship in the development office, I’d suggest you look to your planned giving professionals.  They’re often lonely and feel misunderstood, bypassed in favor of the eye-catching major gift donor prospect with his or her fancy car, stately "McMansion" and confirmed asset holdings.

4 Easy Steps to Find the Right Match

While we won’t have time or space in this blog to consider 29 dimensions of compatibility (I’ll save that for a future white paper topic or conference presentation), we can review the simple steps to find the right planned giving match.  Your current research, analytics project scores and giving history hold the keys:

1. Complete our Relationship Questionnaire and get your FREE Personality Profile. We already know the characteristics of a great planned gift prospect.  Among other things, they are fiscally conservative, philanthropically generous because they give to many organizations, are at specific life stages such as the accumulation of assets, preparing for retirement and preparing for end-of-life circumstances.  They have few children living in the home and may be on the move having downsized or relocated recently.  If you’ve been gathering data, you probably already know the codes to find these individuals in your system.  An easy alternative is to let a vendor do the work for you by analyzing your prospect base.
   
2. Review your selected, highly compatible matches FREE!  Prioritizing your resultant prospect pool comes next.  To highlight the warmest prospects, I’d use long-time giving, current giving and frequent low-level giving as parameters for ranking.   Additional wealth factors could also be used if you’re looking for planned gifts that count toward a capital campaign or an expectancy gift goal.  This data is FREE because you’ve already got in from wealth screenings conducted and data gathered.  There’s usually no added cost for planned gift prospecting.
   
3. Pick the plan that best suits you when you're ready to communicate.  Face-to-face and telephone contact produce the fastest and largest results.  Help your planned giving professionals by limiting your list to those top prospects for whom you have phone numbers and email addresses and who live in an area easily visited by your team members.
   
4. Get to know your matches at your own pace, and start dating!  Find out how many prospects your planned gift staff wants to learn about each month or each quarter.   Conduct qualifying activity that helps determine if the prospect is best approached for a bequest, gift annuity or lead or remainder trust vehicle. 
   

Armed with your good research, your development office colleagues will joyfully reach out to the prospects you’ve identified and qualified and a love match all around is bound to develop.

Katherine is a senior fundraising consultant with Target Analytics, a division of Blackbaud, Inc.  She’s raised over $200 million dollars during her development career and now blogs about planned giving programs, travel and the inadequacies of luggage currently available on the market and learning to eat more varieties of vegetables. You can connect with her at Katherine.swank@blackbaud.com