Podcast: Unlocking Donor Motivation: The Key to Successful Capital Campaigns

Season 3, Episode 63

In this episode of All About Capital Campaigns, hosts Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt delve into the essential, yet often overlooked, aspect of fundraising: understanding why donors choose to give. They share examples of how understanding donors’ evolving interests and life events can guide how organizations interact with them, ensuring that fundraising efforts are aligned with their passions.

Join Amy and Andrea in this engaging episode to gain valuable insights and practical strategies for unlocking the motivations of your major donors and transforming your fundraising efforts.

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Andrea Kihlstedt:
I’ll bet you don’t spend enough time figuring out why your largest donors really want to give.

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi, I’m Amy Eisenstein. I’m here today with my co-founder and colleague, Andrea Kihlstedt.

Unlocking Donor Motivation

Today, we are diving into the fascinating topic of understanding or the importance of understanding why your donors might consider a really large gift for your organization or for your campaign.

Andrea, why don’t you kick us off as always.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Sure. You know, Amy, we spend so much time worrying about how much money our donors have. Right? We spend a ton of time doing that. We spend a ton of money doing that research, trying to understand what their holdings are and how much their houses are worth, and whether they’re paying alimony. We spend a huge amount of money and time and energy understanding their financial resources.

But when it comes to really figuring out and thinking about why our donors might want to give, we’re not creative enough in our thinking. And I think we should spend some time thinking about that.

• How do we do that?
• What are the things we want to be looking for?
• What are the clues donors would give to us?
• How would we figure that out?

Amy Eisenstein:
Well, it’s so interesting. It’s such an interesting and important topic, and it came up because our chief happiness officer, Sarah Plimpton, is working with one of our clients thinking about how to approach a donor or a prospective donor, someone that I think the organization doesn’t have a relationship with. And they were going to reach out potentially and say:

“Well, you like art and you live in our state, and you give to other organizations that support art in our state, so why don’t you meet with us?”

And Sarah said:

“Slow down. Slow down. Let’s be a lot more specific and intentional and thoughtful, and strategic than that.”

Because those donors are going to read right through that and see:

“You know we have money. You’re coming after us just because we give to some other art institutions that look similar to yours.”

So let’s take a deeper dive.

How to Become More Strategic When Approaching Donors

So what kind of deeper dive and how can organizations and nonprofit leaders be more thoughtful and strategic when approaching donors?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I mean, first of all, there may well be a lot of information online, not about how much money your donors have, but about gifts that they’ve made. And that’s a great place to start. Find out if that information is available, and chances are, if these are major donors, some of that information will be available. Find out who else they have given to. Not how much they have given, when they have given, how they’ve been recognized.

If there are stories in that organization’s material about that donor, if they’ve been highlighted at an event. But watch the recording and find out. I mean, really dive into everything that’s available that has to do with their giving and how organizations that they really are involved with have thanked them, have stewarded them, have treated them.

And that’s all going to give you some clues that you can then follow up on.

Amy Eisenstein:
I mean, another example that came up was a press release. Are they quoted as to why they made a specific gift? Can you find any patterns? Can you take away anything from their giving? Not just they give here and there to art or they support the arts. That’s very generic. That’s surface level. But when do they support the arts? What kind of arts? In what cases? Do they have specific passions for modern art or performing arts or studio arts and when and, why, and how? And see if you can figure out any trends in their giving.

It’s Important to Drill Down

Andrea Kihlstedt:
For example, who is the major force behind a particular gift? Is it the woman? If it’s a couple, is it the man? Do they happen to have kids in the arts? Right? Is that one of the reasons they’re involved? Was one of them involved in the arts? Do they have an art collection, for example, right? Do they go to Sotheby’s and buy at auction? As Amy said, what kind of art are they involved with? Find out, do they go to gallery openings? If so, when and what are they interested in?

I mean, not only can you see what their interests are, but you may also see where you might rub shoulders with them. And rubbing shoulders is always a great way to get started.

• Do they go to concerts?
• Do they go to theater or do you know who might know them?
• Do they serve on the board of an arts organization that has a connection to your organization?

So if you really drill down, I mean, we’re looking for clues. But really we’re looking for clues that will help us understand how we can begin to talk to them to find out what they really are interested in, what lights their boat. Is that the expression?

Amy Eisenstein:
Hat lights their fire.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Light a boat. What lights a fire, something like that.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah, that’s right. Because if you can say, “Oh, I saw you across the room at the gallery or the concert the other night. I tried to say hello, but we were swamped. And what did you think of the concert?” Or some way to show that you have some interests in common, something specific and tangible, not just, “We’re an art organization. Will you support us?” But actually showing that you’ve done your homework. It may seem like a lot of work and it is. It takes work to do things like this. It takes work to research on the internet. It takes work to do some digging.

You probably want to talk to people at other arts organizations who might know them, talk to people on your board. But if you are considering… If this is a prospect for a hundred thousand dollars or more, a million dollars or more, it’s going to take some work. It’s going to take some effort. It’s going to take some inspiration — something to inspire that donor to dig deep and to consider you among their charities, their important charities.

So it’s worth the effort. It’s critical that you do it. Otherwise, if you’re surface level, they’re going to give you a surface gift, if anything at all.

The Psychology of Giving

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Amy, you talk about the fact that this takes work and it does take work. It’s true. But for my take, this is the fun part of fundraising.

Amy Eisenstein:
I knew you were going to say that. You love this.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I love this stuff. I need to know people and figuring out who they are. It’s much more interesting to me than how much money they have. It’s much more interesting than what their stock holdings are. I mean why people give? Why they’re generous? What turns them on about a particular project? Why that happens to make them happy and excited to be generous? I mean, that’s what’s fun about this business.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. It’s the psychology of giving.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Psychology of giving that’s interesting and fun. And even if you spend the time and energy and getting to know people and it turns out they’re not donors, having a relationship with them is going to lean you other places. It’s not going to be a dead end. It’s not going to go nowhere. It’s going to go somewhere. It’s going to take you to some door they can open for you.

So from my perspective, thinking about fundraising in this way is this sort of unending gift of fundraising, right?

Amy Eisenstein:
Right. I think when you talk about the clients that you’ve worked with over the years, the campaign clients, this is the part that lights you up. And what you’ve taught and instilled in the advisors that we have coaching or advising Capital Campaign Pro clients, is that during the quiet phase of a campaign every week? They’re talking about two or three potential donors.

What do they know? Who knows them? What research can they do? What can we learn? What patterns do they have? What giving patterns do they have? What more can we find out? And I just love that unending curiosity that you have and how we coach our [campaign] advisors to work with non-profit pro clients in order to raise the biggest gifts possible.

Noticing the Finer Details of Donors

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s sort of like being a Sherlock Holmes of fundraising. You ever read Sherlock Holmes or watched any of the TV series on Sherlock Holmes? He always notices things that the rest of us don’t notice. He notices the dirt under someone’s fingernails and figures that they like gardening. I mean, he notices details of people. And we can use that same Sherlock Holmesian sort of approach when it comes to fundraising:

• What do people wear?
• What do they talk about?
• How do they present themselves?
• Do they like to be first in the door?
• Do they like to be last in the door?
• Do they like to be a quiet contributor?
• Do they like never to be outed in something?
• Or do they like to be recognized?

All of those are such important human characteristics, and we all are so different from one another, but we’re so consistent often in how we behave.

So if you watch and see as how someone behaves in one area of their life, they’re likely to behave in similar ways in another area of their life. If you look at it as a puzzle, as an unending puzzle about what can we learn about people, about what makes them delighted? And if you spend your life thinking about how to delight people, what happens is that you end up delighting yourself.

You end up having fun doing it. And fundraising doesn’t feel so onerous because when you then get ready to go ask people for money, and you can say:

“I’m coming to ask you for money. Yes, I know you have resources, but what I really have learned about you, I’ve been watching you for a while and what I’ve learned is that you really enjoy giving to projects where young people are front and center.”

Where the people in our community are whatever it is you learned about them. Say:

“Here’s what I’ve learned about you and I think that you might enjoy getting involved in or contributing to our organization. Can we have a conversation about that?”

It’s not just about money, it’s about THEM.

Amy Eisenstein:
Right, absolutely. I was talking to a prospective client, somebody who’s thinking about working with us for their campaign, and they were saying… I was asking them about potential donors and if they knew who their donors were, and they said, “Well, there are these three foundations in our community.” And they do projects together, so they decide what projects they’re going to do, but they come in at the end of the campaign to wrap it up, which is so interesting and important to know that pattern, that behavior.

So they said, “Listen, if we can get to 50 or 60% and these foundations, they’ll tell us in advance they’re supportive of the project and that they’re interested, but first we have to raise the front end of the money, and then they will make sure that they come in together and provide the last few million or whatever it is to support the project.”

And it’s important to know these things about donors so that you can behave accordingly and plan accordingly.

The Importance of Donor Stewardship

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. The other kind of related topic is on the other side of the gift is on stewardship and thinking about how people want to be stewarded because the stewardship — how you deal with people after they’ve made a gift — will make a huge difference in whether they make their next gift. And often for capital campaigns, we have the same donors making multiple gifts to the same campaign.

Some people will give an early gift, some people will give again later on in the campaign. And how you treat them, how you communicate with them, how you share early information with them, how you decide to recognize them should be based in part on what you know about how they like to be treated. And if you do that well, then you’ll find that they keep on giving because they’re happy to have given. All of it is based on your willingness to be curious about your donors, not to just dismiss them for their money, but genuinely to be curious about them and to understand how they may be changing.

I mean, I’ll give you a good example of that. Actually, an interesting example. So one of my clients, one of the early gifts to the campaign they got was from a family foundation. Now, this family foundation had supported this organization. The parents who set up this foundation had supported this organization for a long time, for years. The campaign came about at a time when the father had died and the mother was getting on and was no longer involved, and she had just turned the foundation over to her son and an attorney.

So all of a sudden, the people running this big foundation were no longer the people with whom the organization had a relationship. And they were young in their experience of how to give money away with these people. They weren’t tried and true. They hadn’t done it before. So the client, my client, the organization started this long process of understanding how they would like to give, how this new generation of people running this foundation would like to give.

And they really helped the people in the foundation understand what the issues were. And through those conversations, they came up with a plan for what their gift would be, and they made an early gift to the campaign sort of out of a whole lot of conversations. Well, then the campaign goes forward, right? Two or three years later, as the campaign is reaching its close, they thought about going back to this organization. Well, by this time, the people, the son and the attorney had now found their footing in giving away money.

They had found their footing in running this foundation. So when this organization went back to them. The conversation was quite different. It wasn’t, “How can we help you figure out how to run your foundation? It’s, “Gee, what have you learned as a foundation? Where do you want to be as a foundation? And what does that mean in terms of your giving at the end of our campaign? What would you like to do now?”

So the whole trajectory of these conversations changed between the organization and the foundation, acknowledging how the people who were running the foundation matured. Just thought it was an interesting example of how sophisticated these relationships are sometimes and how you need to not assume that the foundation gives in one way or people give in one way. That’s likely to change over time and you need to stay curious about what’s happening with the person or the foundation over time.

Amy Eisenstein:
I think we see that all the time with donors. I mean, when life events happen, certainly at certain points in their life, they might be interested in giving to their alma mater because they have fond memories. And at a different point, somebody in their family gets cancer and they’re going to shift their attention to giving to cancer, and then their priorities shift to something that their grandkids are involved with or whatever it is.

But I think that it is important, and you gave such… I think that is such a good example of being curious and not focusing the conversation on money, but donors interests and passions and motivations instead. And that’s where the truly big gifts come from.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yeah. I mean, just one more thing about this particular example, because this is sort of a complicated example. Imagine what it would’ve been like had my client organization gone back to this foundation and these foundation people, the son and the attorney, and said:

“Well, you gave a big gift in the beginning to get us going, and now we think you should give a closing gift at the end of the campaign.”

Right? That’s one way, it makes my skin crawl to think about it.

Amy Eisenstein:
Hopefully nobody does it that way.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Hopefully nobody does that. As opposed to saying

“Gee, you’ve been in this business now for three years. What have you learned? You gave us such a marvelous gift to begin with and what would you like to do now, if anything? Where are you and how can we work with you so that this is going to fit where you currently are?”

What a difference.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. That is a huge difference.

Final Thoughts

Well, such an interesting topic because these are the exact kind of conversations that our expert campaign advisors guide our clients through every single day, every single week, month after month, as the campaign slogs on. And sometimes it does slog on, but really thinking about and strategizing how to reach out, how to engage, how to work with various donors who have different interests and different passions and different motivations is exactly what we do.

So I hope listeners will visit the Capital Campaign Pro website. And if you are thinking about a campaign, sign up to talk to us. We’d love to talk to you about your campaign and see if our services might be a good fit for you.

Andrea, you want to close us out with one more point?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Yes. I have one more point which might wrap this up nicely, Amy. And that is this:

Donors, no matter how wealthy they are, don’t give to you because they have money. They give to you because they want to make a difference in the world. And sometimes you or your organization can help them do that.

So it’s your job to find out what kind of a difference they want to make in the world and be a partner to them if it’s appropriate in making that happen. And that to me is the whole point of this podcast and the fundraising, honestly.

Amy Eisenstein:
Andrea, I think sometimes you make the wisest points right at the last minute. So hopefully nobody clicked off early because they missed that gem.

So thank you so much for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.