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The Urgency of Resiliency

4/27/2022

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When the Santa Fe Community Foundation engaged my services last year to help design their 40th anniversary campaign, we thought hard about what New Mexico needs most. SFCF generously spreads their giving statewide rather than just regionally -- something that became almost essential during the terrible, sweeping fallout of COVID. 

We hoped to strike a tricky balance -- focused enough to inspire donors to give, yet flexible enough to accommodate health care, food insecurity, climate and environmental crises, racist policies, and even unknown threats. We landed on the idea of the emergency. It's what all of these areas shared in common -- a moment in time when one big problem sweeps the state and cascades out several more. Resiliency is the antidote, SFCF's interim president Sue Coliton wisely pointed out. The Resiliency Fund was born.

While I'm not surprised that the emergency we're seeing in our home state today -- fires in northern and southern NM simultaneously due to stunning wind -- is climate related, I'm proud that we created a fund that can indeed help our communities respond to the moment. You can support the Resiliency Fund directly here.
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April 23rd wind radar image from Windy.com.
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Arts Fundraising in a Pandemic

3/27/2020

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Concern #1: Donors might shift their focus to health-related projects.

Your Best Response: Your donor communications should explain how your organization is responding to the situation
. Include details about what you’re doing to help protect the well-being of stakeholders at your organization that your donors care most about.
  •  Students / youth
  • Teaching artists
  • Musicians and artists
  • Adult students in education programs
  • Audiences
Concern #2: We've cancelled events and/or performances that we were relying on to bring in audiences and revenue.

Your Best Response: State upfront that your organization puts your community’s health and well-being first. Then make the appeal that support now is more important than ever to ensure your organization is in a strong place when this lifts to get back to creating joy and great art.
 
Think about ways you might use digital events to engage your donors. A performance might not make sense, but what about a conversation with your artistic staff about how a project is developing? Could you do a virtual script reading?
 

Concern #3: Corporate giving is the first to contract in a down market.

Corporate donors should be a low priority now for solicitations. Put the top priority on family foundations and individuals. They’re most likely to take the long view on the markets and have some cushion. Reach out to the business partners and sponsors who you have very close, long-running relationships with. Otherwise, most corporate/business contacts will need time to see how they're impacted.

Concern #4: Older donors are totally self-isolated. 

For major gift plans long in the works with individual donors, ask for the  meeting when your campaign is ready, but start out by asking how they're doing first and listen.  It's possible they might be willing to do a video call for a request if you've cultivated them well and recently -- and if they signaled that they were ready in the past several weeks to be asked for a big project. Be prepared if they say they need to wait a month or two for the meeting and be diligent about follow-ups.
 
Isolation means many major donors likely welcome your update call or email. Everyone is answering their phones right now. Reach out to your top priorities to keep the relationship warm and keep them updated on how you're managing through this.

Concern #5: It’s uncertain how long this will affect daily life.

Develop contingency plans for the efforts that really matter.  
Your board should have an emergency meeting if it hasn't already to plan 2-3 different scenarios. One of those should anticipate a six-month recession. How much capital do you have to get through the next months without new revenue? What can you do to stretch what you do have? Can you create new revenue streams with digital content? Are there any major restricted grants or gifts that you can talk to the donors about, asking them to loosen restrictions right now? How much would your fundraising team need to raise exactly to fill the gaps? By when? What if the fall appeal is impacted? They can't fundraise without goals and a clear picture. Larger donors will want to know.

 
Remember that since 1980, the US has been through five official recessions. Donors have continued to give through all of them, but with more focus on the organizations that earn their love and trust. We still saw growth in giving over those periods – but it was slower.

Concern #6: We don’t know where to cut the operating budget if we need to.

The last place to cut is where you’re still generating revenue. A strong fundraising effort needs to stay in place no matter what. Meet with your board, make sure they understand that their focus and collaboration are critical to help keep your fundraising programs strong to weather this. Can they call lapsed donors at the higher levels and ask for a renewal? Can they assist in nudging donors thinking about bigger requests? This is the time to make sure that the organization's leaders pull together.


 

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​Grow Your Individual Gifts Up to 20%  with One Simple Fact

5/8/2019

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PictureTwo checks are better than one.
 Did you know that 20% of individual donations could be matched by employer companies? That adds up to a LOT of money left on the table every year.

Why? Most donors aren’t even aware their (or their spouse’s!) employer matches gifts, or they forget about it when they donate, or they aren’t sure how to request it. Few companies push the benefit, meaning it often goes untapped. 
The frequent users tend to be top executives. 

That’s why it’s so important for your donation forms to ask for the names of your donors’ employers.  Not just a box to check. 

We love our local businesses in NM, but only a handful have these programs. This is where big companies from out of town are an asset – many have them and they’re surprisingly generous. 

Here’s the process:

My husband works for a company that matches 100% up to $2,000. I make a gift to a local shelter for $2,000. I fill out a company form detailing that gift, and my husband emails it to his internal contact. Then they cut a check for an additional $2,000, including our names, and send it right to the shelter. The shelter credits us for the full $4,000.

Ta da!

A few  matching gift companies operating in the Albuquerque area:

Intel – will double a gift by matching it 100% up to $10,000 for all employees, full-time, part-time, or retired. Not bad! 
Bank of America – matches 100% up to $5,000 for full-time, part-time, or retired.
Quest Diagnostics – 100% up to $5,000 for full-time employees.
Progressive – 100% up to $3,000 for all current employees.
HP – 100% up to $2,500 for all current employees.
Wells Fargo – 100% up to $2,000 for all current employees
PNM – matches 100% up to $1,000 for all current and retired employees.
CBRE – 50% match with no limit for all current and retired employees.

There are hundreds more in NM.

Update your donor forms to ask for company names and follow-up with the ones who could be matching! At a minimum, take a look at the list of companies where your board members work. Are they all matching where they can? 

For my New Mexico clients and past trainees, I provide a free look-up service on matching gift companies. If you’re curious about a company that you know a donor works for, reach out, and I can tell you if they have a program, plus the contact info for that employee to request the match. 

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Do You Know the Cycle?

6/7/2018

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About a year ago, a colleague recommended that I look into The Cycle, Michael Kaiser's management method for running high-performing arts organizations. At the time, I was just starting up my practice and needed to focus on other things, so I put a mental pin in it. This spring, after finishing up a house renovation and moving in, I was hungry to focus on some meaty professional development while *not* thinking about the miles of trim that I have yet to paint.

I was DELIGHTED to see that The Cycle isn't just a book now -- it's a free online course on Coursera. And WOW. It's excellent work well worth the time to watch the lectures, if not complete all the exercises.

Who's Michael Kaiser? He's the executive director that brought Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater back from the brink. And then he ran the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, for about 13 years. He started a management institute there, honing this method of focusing tightly on making great art (the easy part!), marketing institutionally, and building relationships with what he calls the "family." Guess which part is my favorite? As Kaiser acknowledges, the lessons apply to all sorts of organizations beyond arts and culture - that just happens to be his bailiwick.

The institute how lives at the University of Maryland, and has expanded its scope. I can't say enough about the quality of this course. And hooray for free!
www.coursera.org/learn/the-cycle

 

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Your Biggest Board Challenges

5/17/2018

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Talking with clients and potential clients, I'd say that these are without question some of the most common comments that come up in our conversations:

- No one on our board fund raises. We don't have anyone who wants to.
- Our board members don't seem sure what to focus on. I wish they'd do more.
- Our board meets a few times a year. That's about the extent of their involvement.
- We want everyone on our board to give, but they don't always. It doesn't seem like we should have to have the same conversation every year. 


Sound familiar?

​Comment below with your most common board-related frustrations, and I'll pick a couple to focus on in subsequent posts!

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A Face-to-Face Request is 34 Times More Successful than Email

4/17/2017

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I saw this article in the Harvard Business Review today and had to share it. Its findings:
​
People tend to overestimate the power of their persuasiveness via text-based communication, and underestimate the power of their persuasiveness via face-to-face communication.


In person requests are a whopping 34 times more powerful, in fact. Mathematically, that means, "you need to ask six people in person to equal the power of a 200-recipient email blast."

Amazing, right?
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LinkedIn for Fundraising? A Word of Caution

2/15/2017

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An article in Albuquerque Business First today touts the use of LinkedIn as a free, easy relationship mapping tool to prospect for major gifts. While it’s not the worst fundraising advice I’ve ever heard (in a category of journalism that can often range from the tone deaf to the truly misleading), it is flawed. Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t over-rely on LinkedIn for this task, especially for gifts that trustees will solicit:
  • It’s a free tool, and to a fair extent, you get what you pay for. Why? Lots of people on the site are connection collectors who accept less than meaningful links to increase their number. Call it social media ego or just plain friendliness. It’s going to cost you a huge amount of time to research and eventually weed out feeble connections that should never be considered for a $5,000 first-time campaign gift.
  • LinkedIn tells everyone when their profile has been viewed and by whom. Potentially makes that solicitation meeting just a little more awkward, doesn’t it?
  • Prospect research and relationship mapping are time intensive with any tool, and your endgame here is having a trustee successfully solicit a friend. You want to home in on quality connections like a heat-seeking missile, while ensuring that the trustee feels 100% in the driver’s seat the entire time.

So my advice – whether you have a consultant or are doing this solo – is that the quickest, most effective method is still a largely human-centered one:
  • Develop your wish list of dream prospects for your project. They will need to have both the dollars and the affinity for your cause. Finding them in programs and annual reports is great, but nothing is more valuable than beginning with your own database of past donors.
  • Request a prospect meeting with your trustee. Tell them it will definitely take an hour, and ask them to export and bring the list of their LinkedIn contacts. (Instructions here.) If they decline to do this, it’s probably telling. Ask if they have other contact lists, including board lists from their other top priority organizations, to bring.
  • You have two lists to review during the meeting: your dream list and their contact list. They will automatically gravitate to the names that they would feel good about soliciting. My experience is that several more names will come up that aren’t on either list –- the real value of this conversation is jogging your trustee’s memory about who might be a good fit.
  • Ideally you want to identify 5-10 people they could solicit. Now delve into who those people are, what size and type of gift they might give if really energized, and sketch out a plan to cultivate and ask them. At a minimum, this should involve the trustee inviting each prospect in to experience firsthand the current work that you do, followed by an in-person solicitation in the weeks after.
  • Make certain your trustee understands the true nature of peer-to-peer giving: They can only solicit gifts of the same size or less than they themselves have committed to the project. If they’re close to a prospect that can afford to give far more than themselves, you will need to find a partner they can co-solicit with who is in that same target giving level. Call it law of the jungle or good manners, breaking this one can result in serious offense to your prospect that can potentially be irreparable.
  • Ideally every trustee should go through this process before you make the final decision about whom should solicit whom. Gather all the relationship data and determine which trustee is most likely to maximize support from each prospect – in terms of giving and strength of relationship. In many cases, two trustees can make an excellent co-soliciting team. The more energetic and enthusiastic the team, the better.

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Board Chemistry for the Win

1/11/2017

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PictureOne more place in life to cultivate balance. Namaste.
Board work is one of the most rewarding things about nonprofit development. No matter what your structure, it’s absolutely where you learn all of the big leadership lessons for your organization, and in my opinion it’s the engine that either gives it vitality - or not.

Vitality is about balancing all the right elements and getting them to play well together. Here are the five profiles of people that I think you absolutely need on your board – plus a rare one that’s a huge find.


  1. The Anchors – people with the long view, they’ve been through more than one stage with your nonprofit and have worn multiple hats with you. Why do you want them? Wisdom. A steady hand. A reassuring presence. If you’re going through change or crisis, these are the ones you lean on. Likely your most loyal donors and fundraisers.
  2. The Young Bright Ones – young with an impressive resume already, they’re bursting with ideas and eager to prove results. Why do you want them? Innovation. Entrepreneurism. Enthusiasm. Energy. They help remind everyone that red tape and too many rules serve no one. They want projects to sink their teeth into.
  3. The Primes – middle-aged and at the peak of their careers, they’re very quick on their feet. Why do you want them? They’ve tested big ideas in the marketplace, know how to calculate risks, and handle success and failure. They align your organization with the people in the city/country doing big things. They’re excellent philanthropists and can be brilliant fundraisers if they’re comfortable with it.
  4. The Independents – these are true independent thinkers. Some people might consider them rebellious or disrupters. Why have them? They arrive at their own decisions. There’s no group think, confirmation bias, or Emperor’s new clothes with these folks. They’ll be the first to tell you when a grand plan or initiative just doesn’t add up. Almost always entrepreneurs. They have a small but fiercely loyal circle.
  5. The Socialite / Master Networker – can be any age, any gender. Why do you need them? Social currency counts for a lot in arts and culture organizations, and you can’t have fun without these people. They magnetize your organization and events, build community, grow your donor pipeline, and literally bring life to the party with their miles-long contact lists. They’re happy to be your donor and some make great fundraisers.
  6. The Sage – a deep thinker. Quiet. Doesn’t say a lot, but when they do, they tend to blow everyone away. Very rare. They don’t seek out board roles. You have to hunt for a sage and coax them out gently with their favorite cocktail and a good book. Why find them? They’re an anchor, a prime, and an independent rolled into one. A tremendously adaptive and valuable ally.

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    Emilie, Principal and Owner

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