know your donor

When was the time you  spoke to one of your donors about their giving strategy? Sadly, good listening gets lost in the panic to “make the numbers.”

Here are excerpts from a personal email I received that are well worth sharing:

“the night before Christmas” is the way we do our donations.  Mostly VISA, sometimes on line, but online sometimes takes longer!  I know, we still do too many small ones, but numbers of members also count.

I should really do a count on how many appeals we get from whom.  NRDC is awful, seems like more than once a month. WWF isn’t much better.    (NRDC uses return stamps so I keep the envelopes.  I added up my stash of “return envelopes the other night and there were about $27.00 worth of stamped envelopes in my “shoebox” that I can’t bear to throw out.  Every time I get ready to use them, the postage cost changes!    (You’re allowed to smile at this but not laugh).

P.S. For fun, I just counted:  75 envelopes in my shoebox –and most common one is ACLU, NRDC, and Simon Weisenthal Center.