Hi, my name is Angela Joens. I'm the assistant vice chancellor for the University of California, Davis. I'm going to be talking today about the annual fund: building your base for support. We worked on this presentation in collaboration with Michelle Poesy, who you're going to hear from in the second course and she'll be talking in great detail about the annual fund. So today, we're just going to give an overview of what it is. So annual giving, let's talk a little bit about it and what it is. Annual giving is the smaller gifts that come in in a recurring fashion to your organization. These gifts can range in size from five to up to $25,000 a year, depending on the type of organization that you have. These are gifts that come in through lots of different vehicles or channels, as we call them, that can be direct mail, or phone calls, in person meetings, even special events and memberships. So, that's just an overview of what annual giving is. First of all, it provides the operational support for your organization, it provides a lot of the base funding to help you do some of the bigger, larger types of fundraising. So, annual giving feeds sort of the overall operation. Secondly, it also provides funding for really special projects or initiatives. Let's say, your president or your chancellor wants to do something like, let's maybe say special lighting on campus for more security, annual fund gifts might be small but if you add them all together they can help fund a really special project like that. It also builds, and I think this is the most important point, it builds the donor base to really feed the pipeline and find those donors that are giving annually, who have the potential to give major gifts to your organization later on. Today, we have four learning objectives: what are the fundamentals of an annual campaign, how do memberships and events fit in, we're also going to talk about how and why it's important to track your results, and then, again, another really important point is, how do we demonstrate to these donors how their smaller gifts have an impact to the organization. So, let's talk about your audience for the annual fund. We sort of need to think about it in two columns as we have here on the slide. Current donors, which are folks that give on a regular basis, we call those recently lapsed, they give every year. We also have folks who've given in the last three to five years, we call these folks SYBUNTS, some year but not this year. Retention. These are current donors who we just want to retain and get year after year. And then of course, we also really need to think about how do we upgrade donors. So, these are the people on the one column when we talk about current donors, that's part of our audience. Another really important audience are those non-donors. They're not as easy to acquire and it's more expensive to get non-donors to become donors. But we need to think of how do we add that into the mix of all of our solicitations, because non-donors are where the new donors are at. So acquisition is our important audience. We also need to think of folks that are long lapsed, so if they haven't given for maybe five years, so they gave at one point and then they decide maybe five years to come back into the fold. So, we need to focus on those two audiences. So, when you think of who your audience is, you need to think of all of these groups and this is a really nice way to sort of compartmentalize them. Okay, so let's talk about your message. This is really critical and the most important thing is to really talk about your case for support. Why should someone give to you? And these are annual donors, so we're trying to get lots and lots of small gifts. So, why should they give to you? Throughout this course, you're going to be learning about how to write your case for support. So, we're going to just talk specifically about the annual fund. So some of the questions that you need to be able to answer is: why do I even want to support this organization? What good is my 50, 100, 1000 dollar gift going to do to the operation of something like a UC Davis, or the American Cancer Society, or the Red Cross? What will my small gift do to make any kind of an impact? The other thing to consider, when working on your case for support is, what impact will this gift have? And, finally, is how can my small gift that I'm giving to, let's say the American Red Cross, how is that going to change the world? Those are the things that you need to consider when writing your case for support. So, let's talk about the fundamentals of annual giving. There are lots of different channels to consider and lots of different ways to solicit your donors annually. First off, there's direct mail, we all know what that's like, we all get those things in the mail from the American Red Cross, from the Humane Society, from your institution that you attended. So, those are solicitations one-on-one to you asking for you to support. Email is another really important channel, this is growing in popularity, so email and online giving. While it's not taking over direct mail and its effectiveness, it is a really cost-effective way. We're going to talk a little bit more about that. The telephone, while I know that it seems to be one of the most annoying things because we tend to call during the dinner hour, it is the most effective way to reach and have a very personal conversation with a donor. We're going to, again, talk about each of these individually as we go. Personal visits, those are larger annual gifts, those are gifts of maybe, let's say, $1000 or more, and those are one-on-one with folks who've been maybe giving to your organization consistently, and maybe we're ready to step them up and start talking with them about a little larger annual gift. Events are a very necessary evil when it comes to annual giving. Those are your golf outings, and your galas, and auctions, and things like that. It's a great way to get visibility for your organization. And then finally, memberships. Memberships are also really important, some of us have member-driven organizations and so we need to solicit for those as well on an annual basis, we want to renew those members. The first thing we need to address in a direct mail solicitation is solving the problem that the organization has. So for example, flood relief. The second thing to address is how is the organization going to solve this problem, what are the issues that the organization can address? Let's say, it's a clothing drive, if it's the flood relief, if we go back to the first example of the problem. How can these annual gifts help solve the issue of this flood relief? The third thing is, how much does the organization need to raise to meet this need? Do we need $50,000? Do we need $20,000? What is it that we need to raise? This all should be addressed in your solicitation. The fourth thing is, how is their gift, the donors gift, going to help address this problem? Your gift of $100 will help us purchase blankets. Your gift of $1,000 will help us feed a family of four that have their home has been destroyed because of flood. The fifth thing is, why is it important for the donor to give today? So right now, there's an urgent thing we have people that don't have a home, people have been pushed out of their homes because of this flood, we have to help now. So, we have to give them an incentive to give today. The interesting thing about direct mail is that it's still doing really, really well. Some people think that it's dead, but honestly, it's still getting somewhere between five and 35 percent on renewals. So, it's really important to have a good solicitation. For acquisition, it doesn't work as well, it's an average of two percent for brand new donors or getting donors to give. So, direct mail is still an effective tool when it comes to the annual fund. The great thing about email or online giving, is it's fast and results come in immediately. You send the email out, you can start getting gifts in almost within the hour. That's a fun thing to see the money start coming in immediately so you know your message is good. It's also easily leveraged, an email directing people to web pages, to videos, to Facebook. You can use email in a way that you cannot do with direct mail, because they'd have to go online and do this, they're already online so it's very easy to use other social media. It's also great to be able to test new messages, even new designs or themes, try them out first and then, if they work, send it out in a direct mail. Direct mail is a little more expensive with the printing and the postage, so why not try it using email first. The interesting thing to note about email, is that more and more organizations are doing it. In 2014, 8.9 percent were using email as part of their direct mail or their annual fund solicitation. Higher education is as high as almost 17 percent. So, really interesting to know that this one is coming in and it's a really effective tool and a channel to be used for annual fund. The side note to that is, response rates are still pretty low. Some people think that you should put a lot of money into email, but just remember that response rates tend to be a little bit lower. We're going to cover a lot more about this in the second class. Using the telephone for soliciting donors annually is a really effective tool. The neat thing about telemarketing is that it's an immediate feedback, you get to connect directly with a person, you know if they're interested, if there's some loyalty or affinity, you get to actually engage in a conversation of some kind. So, while this is what's considered the best channel for getting donors to renew and also to acquire new donors, it is also the most expensive. So, the cool thing to know about the phone is response rates are the highest 20 to 25 percent. So if you can work in the telephone into your annual fund, while it is the most expensive tool to use, it also has the best response rate. So, let's talk about personal visits. We talked a little bit earlier about this. These are when we have our development officers who have been seen consistent giving by donors, maybe they were giving $50, then they've moved up to $100, then they move up to $250. They look like they're progressively giving more and more and obviously, they have some affinity to the organization. This is when it's a good time to put a development officer in front of this donor. We consider these larger annual gifts, let's say $1,000 or more. It's a really great way to sit down with donors, thank them for their consistent giving and start to talk to them about how to make a larger annual gift. Personal visits is another really great channel to use in your annual fund program. Some prospects to consider for larger annual gifts, again, we talked about long-term consistent donors, these are folks that obviously love your organization, so they are really great audience to go after. Other really good ones are maybe parents or first time donors that have shown great potential or maybe live in a wealthy zip code. Other groups that are really good to consider are folks who are already giving at a large level, maybe a major gift prospect, but maybe they just don't know that they could also be giving at an annual level as well. Also, if your organization has some highly rated donors or prospects, these are great people to put your annual giving development officers in front of. Get them to start giving on an annual basis and then go back to them and start talking with them about major gift.
