Model Overview: Section 3

How to leave a legacy of sustainable funding—a model for building sustainable funding from lifelong individual donors

Q: How can I achieve that legacy?

A: By building or growing a self-sustaining individual giving program from a large base of loyal, long-term supporters. People who feel like they're part of your organization's "family." People who love being involved with you, who tell all their friends about you, who are as committed to the mission as you are.

Let's talk about the model.

Here is the diagram of the model:

What you're aiming for is a continuous cycle, like a perfectly round little electric train track that just keeps looping around.

Once a potential donor gets on the track, you want them to keep circling around and around, eventually spiraling higher and higher.

Q: Where does a potential donor get on the track?

A: Let's start with Step 1 in the upper left. We call it the Point of Entry^®. It's a succinct, one-hour introductory event. It provides the generic "101" story of your organization. Once you have it designed, tested, and perfected, you never vary it at all.

Q: What must a Point of Entry include?

A: Only three things, but they must be done exceptionally well. The program must convey the Facts 101 and the Emotional Hook^™, brilliantly intertwined, and it must allow you to Capture the Names^™ of your guests with their permission. The event can be a tour, a lunch meeting, a pre-rehearsal evening, a reunion, etc. The format must be generic enough to convey the same powerful message every time. (Note: You do not ask for money at the Point of Entry.)

The Facts 101 are the basic facts about your organization. What's your mission? How long has the organization been around? How many people have benefited from your work? How big is your budget? What are your sources of funding? Your plans for growth? Your dreams for the future?

Fact sheets are good for conveying the Facts 101, usually in the form of a simple handout with bullet points that you can walk through or allude to. The goal is to educate your guests about your organization's work. You want them to know what you're doing. You're credible. You're not going away. Their trust would be safe with you.

The Emotional Hook is equally important. If you don't have an Emotional Hook, don't bother doing a Point of Entry at all. The facts alone won't be enough to engage a long-term donor. You've got to move and inspire them as well as educate them.

It may take a bit of experimenting to arrive at the true Emotional Hook for you. A good place to start is with what hooked you about this organization in the first place. Why did you start working there? Or, if you are the founder, what about the issue hooked you? It may be as simple as telling your story. Or the story of a real or hypothetical client or consumer of your services.

Q: What happens after the Point of Entry? What's the second step?

A: Step 2 is to follow up with every single person who attends a Point of Entry Event. The most effective form of Follow-Up, by far, is a one-on-one phone conversation within a week of the time they came to the Point of Entry.

This is a simple phone call in which the caller (this must be a person they met at the Point of Entry) says the following:

1. "Thank you for coming."
   
   
2. "What did you think?"
   
   
3. Caller stops talking and just listens. Caller takes detailed notes during this call!
   
   If you got your job done at the Point of Entry, your guests have been thinking about you a lot since the event, and are delighted that you have called. They have plenty of advice for you, ways they would suggest you tinker with your Point of Entry, etc. But mostly they want to tell you all the ways they'd like to get involved.
   
   If you listen to them carefully, they will tell you how they want you to involve them.
   
   
4. If for some reason they are not forthcoming, ask them: "Are there any ways you might like to become involved with our organization?"
   
   
5. Finally, ask them: "Is there anyone else you would suggest we invite to another (Point of Entry) event like the one you attended?"

Q: Now what? We've got all this great data and all these eager volunteers, what do we do with them?

A: It's true, this could look like a problem. Now you will have to deliver. If they want to help you start or grow your arts program, for example, you might have to admit you have no budget or staff for that. Ask them how they would suggest starting.

Be prepared, if you implement this model successfully, to significantly retool what you used to call your volunteer program.

Q: Okay, now we've brought them through the Point of Entry and Follow-Up. We're getting them involved in just the ways they want. What's the third step?

A: Now, after all this build-up, if you've done your job well, is the step you've been waiting for, Step 3 in our model: asking for their financial contribution. We won't say a lot about Asking here in this brief overview. For most people in the nonprofit sector, this is the most dreaded and scariest part of fundraising.

If you follow this model, it need not be. Imagine this: by the time you're ready for Step 3, people will be ready to give; they will actually want to give!

Just think of how good you feel when you make a real contribution to something you truly believe in. You feel like you're making a real difference and, in many cases, you don't care whether or not you receive any credit for it. You are doing it because you want to. That's true contribution. And it's completely natural.

Q: So, how do we make it easy for people to give?

A: There are two essential elements to any Ask in this model:

1. Define your Units of Service^™. These are your categories or levels of giving, with names the giver can relate to, like sponsoring an athlete, student, scientist, or team. They are all unrestricted gifts to your organization.
   
   The minimum giving level in this model is $1,000 a year to join your Multiple-Year Giving Society^™. The next units up are either $5,000 and $10,000 a year or $10,000 and $25,000 a year. You must have only three categories.
   
   
2. Ask for multiple-year pledges for each category. This is often the most difficult part of the model for people to accept. That's because you think you're begging or tricking someone into giving to you. But remember, these are people who believe in you. They want to support you. What's one year to them? The odds are, if you keep them involved and happy, they will want to give to you every year anyway.
   
   So why not let them commit to it now, while you're asking? Let them know the kind of long-term stability it would provide you with to know you have their pledge for several years to come. You're asking them to commit to, for example, sponsoring an athlete (artist, library, student, etc.) for $1,000 a year for each of the next five years.

Q: How should we be asking these people? What sort of venue do you recommend?

A: There are two ways to ask in this model—one-on-one in person or at a Free One-Hour Ask Event^™, the one-hour Benevon signature fundraising event. Either of these methods is acceptable; we will not elaborate further on the two methods here.

Q: And the final step in the model?

A: Step 4 will flow naturally out of the multiple-year Ask. Now that the donors consider themselves to be long-term members of your organization's family, they are proud to be associated with you. So they do what any proud family member does; they begin to brag about you.

In other words, they tell others about you. In resounding terms. But instead of pressuring their friends to write checks to you, they do something even more generous; they introduce others to the organization by inviting them to Point of Entry Events. They invite their friends to come and find out about you for themselves.

And then it's up to you to tell your story in a way that grabs them and hooks them in as powerfully as you can, so that, by the time the new folks get to Step 3 on the cycle, the Ask, they too will be delighted to make a multiple-year gift and, in turn, to introduce others.

Q: Is that it? Is that all there is to it?

A: Yes. It's actually quite simple. And so the model goes, round and round, spiraling ever upwards, building lifelong individual donors for capital and endowment, and allowing you to leave the legacy of a mission-based self-sustaining individual giving program.

Are you sure you're ready for that kind of legacy?

Let's go on to Section 4: How to tailor the model to your organization.