Over the years my colleagues and I have been asked the same question during every downturn: what should we do about our major gift campaign? We were asked it when interest rates were above twenty per cent, after the stock market crash of 1987, through the dot-com collapse, after September 11th, during the housing and market crash of 2008, and again throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
The answer has changed far less than people expect. Through all of those years we learned that the principles and best practices of fundraising do not change in a crisis. What changes is that we need to reinforce them, and find new ways to put them into practice.
Start with your donors, not with your campaign
Before you revisit a single goal or timeline, reach out to the people who have carried your organization this far. In a crisis your most loyal supporters are often the most isolated. During the pandemic, many of our clients’ older donors were shut in at home, wondering how they were going to manage a trip to the pharmacy or the grocery store. A friendly telephone call goes a long way toward making someone feel remembered. If you can offer something practical, such as running an errand or collecting a prescription, most people will appreciate the thoughtfulness as much as the help itself.
Your organization has relied on these people through its own times of need. A difficult period is when you give some of that back. Not because it produces a gift, and not on a schedule, but because it is the right thing to do, and because relationships tended that way tend to outlast the crisis that prompted them.
Pausing the ask is not the same as going quiet
Organizations often make the same mistake under pressure. They decide it would be insensitive to solicit, and then they stop communicating altogether. Donors notice the silence and draw their own conclusions from it. If you judge that this is not the moment to ask, say so plainly, and then keep talking about the mission, the people you serve, and what the current situation is actually doing to your work. Candour earns more goodwill than a well-timed silence ever does.
Test your assumptions before you change your goal
The instinct in a downturn is to cut the campaign goal, or to postpone the campaign altogether. Sometimes that is right. Often it is a decision made on a feeling rather than on evidence. Before you move a goal, find out what your leading donors are actually thinking, which is precisely what a campaign planning and feasibility study is for. A short, honest round of conversations with the people who will make the largest commitments will tell you more than any amount of speculation around a board table.
What does not change
The fundamentals hold. Your case for support still has to be urgent, specific and credible. Leadership still has to give before it asks others to give. Gifts still come from relationships rather than from appeals. Volunteers still open doors that staff cannot. And the organizations that keep stewarding their donors through the hard years are the ones positioned to campaign successfully when conditions improve.
What does change
The pace, the tone and the channel all change. Timelines stretch. Conversations that would have happened over lunch happen over a screen or a telephone. Language that sounded confident last year can sound tone-deaf this year. Those are real adjustments and they take thought, but they are adjustments to delivery, not to strategy.
We prepared a presentation during the pandemic setting out the principles worth remembering and the practices worth adopting in a difficult period. You are welcome to download it here.
If you are weighing whether to start, pause or continue a campaign in an uncertain period, we are glad to talk it through. Call (602) 920-3775 or write to ron@thehuddlestongroup.com.
Ron Huddleston, FAHP, CFRE
President
The Huddleston Group