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Listen to the weekly podcast “Around with Randall” as he discusses, in just a few minutes, a topic surrounding non-profit philanthropy. Included each week are tactical suggestions listeners can use to immediately make their non-profit, and their job activities, more effective.

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Episode 199: What to Ask for in a Solicitation - Cost and General Requests Can't Compare to Impact

In this episode of Around with Randall, we explore a recent study on the best ways to ask for donations. We’ll chop up how the study reveals that donors respond most to requests framed around specific outcomes, such as the number of people their gift will help. At the end of the day, nonprofits need to rethink their fundraising strategies to maximize donor engagement and support.

Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

Thank you so much for taking a few minutes of your time to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall. This dissected one of the things that I think fundraisers have been fighting, hitting themselves against trying to figure out for years, and a fascinating study that recently came out in the management of science about how much and how do we ask people for gifts? And this has been something you hear anywhere in your career, whether you're a volunteer, long-time professional chief, phone officer, major gift officer, even into prospect research. How do we know how we should ask someone and how much money should we be asking for?

Really, it's the first one that's the most important because it's going to take us in a direction that I think is something I've always thought was the most important, but now we have some data, which I'm beyond a fan of, to guide us a little bit into what we're actually trying to do. So you're right there. You're ready to ask somebody for money and you're not quite sure how to do it. How do you put it? How do you make it worthwhile to them? How do you elevate the chances of getting that gift?

Before we answer that question, I want to go back and talk for just a minute about things that if you've listened to this podcast in particular, a couple of the different episodes where I took apart solicitations back in the 30s or recently where I kind of the big questions of asking and soliciting, I want to talk just a minute as a refresher, a minute and a half or two max. Number one is that I'm a huge believer in the soft ask that it helps prepare us in the right way. This is going to pivot right into where we're going here in a moment for the real details of how should we really put the language of the ask together.

That allows us to do several things when we use that soft ask. If there's an issue, it gets us more details as to what we're trying to accomplish. If we're working with someone, a content expert, a partner, it allows us to never put them in a position where they feel like this was a failure. When we make those asks and more importantly, the details, this should be in writing that we should respect, particularly above a gift level of five, 10, 15,000 dollars. We should be respectful of the fact that they're asking for things in return, recognition possibly, certainly a tax donation that they can use however they want. It could be how the gift is being paid, particularly if it gets more complicated. Things of that nature are all about details. We want to make sure we have those.

We want to keep the ask, the thing that we're doing, as short as possible. It's that old adage of the ask, and then you don't say anything—the first one that comments or says anything is the one who "loses." We want to keep this meeting short because if we've done all of the right things in the cultivation and soft ask, much of the details of what we need to know are actually right in front of us. The soft ask also gets us to the conversations, the thought processes of objections, and that we may have missed something. And the most logical objection that we hear is that it doesn't fit with what they want.

This is where I think this moves us into this conversation of interesting thoughts of how to ask for money and thus the study. The study came from the management of science. It was just released here in late June or mid-July, sometime in the summer. I found it as part of a, as I tend to do, try to read industry publications, and it's a study done out of Europe out of the University of Innsbruck. And what they did was they wanted to find out how should they be asking people to give.

Now, if you read the 17-page academic study, they're using terminology that we don't use in the United States or frankly, to be honest, I think they would have benefited themselves if they consulted someone who was in the fundraising business. They don't use this word, use this word, because it's pretty much common. But when you kind of dialed into it, what they did was an online survey with more than 8,000 participants, and they gave each one of the 8,000 participants $90. They were to choose how they would give that $90 to a UNICEF program that provided food paste. So this is about food insecurity and the ability for them to help provide food nutrition for people. I think it was targeted towards Africa, but there's a lot of food insecurity everywhere in the world.

This $90 was really up to the particular donors, and they split them into three groups. And this is the fascinating part. They asked each one of the three groups to give in different ways. One was just, would you give for this particular cause? It was open. They didn't get into what the particular details were. Would you give to this cause? The second was an ask specifically, same thing they're asking for, but a different way, based upon cost—that it costs us X number of dollars to do this. Would you consider a gift? The third way they asked, the third group was asked to provide impact. A gift of this would feed this many kids or provide this many meals.

So we have an open ask, we have a cost ask, and we have an impact ask. And the results, if you have been in the professional long enough, probably aren't all that surprising. But then the tactical piece is what we're going to do with this information. What they found was the open ask, "Would you just give?" came back at a much lower result, not only in the number of dollars but in the percentage of participants who would give to that. The ask group that was solicited based on cost—meaning it cost this much, would you give to help offset that—the percentage was higher in terms of comparison to the blank "Will you support us?" But the dollar levels were also lower than the averages than they anticipated.

It was the impact group that we need to pay the most attention to. "Would you give to feed this many kids or provide this many meals?" This brought in two important factors. Number one, the percentage of dollars—they were given $90 each—of the totality was the highest here. And number two, the percentage of people who gave to this particular cause was the highest here. Remember, there were more than 8,400 participants. So the end or the statistical significance of this is tremendous. There weren't just 10 people.

What's fascinating about this is that the outcomes of this might be best construed under an annual giving approach. We've talked a lot in this podcast and other places about the challenge of the generosity crisis, and we're seeing fewer people give, fewer households give over time. Maybe our annual fund giving pieces aren't asking the right questions. Will you support us? Well, if the study is true, and I tend to believe it is, then the way in which you ask people makes a difference. An open ask isn't going to get you the results. Or, "This is our problem," which is really what the cost request or solicitation is: "Our problem is this costs so much, will you help us?"

Impact: Can we cause our potential donors and our donors to feel the impact of that gift on what they're actually trying to accomplish? This gets us into the reasons why, and then we'll get into the tactical and give you kind of a similar situation at a much greater level in the major gift platform. I believe there are five reasons why this study has such validity beyond the statistical analysis. There are five things that I think our donors look for when they're making these decisions.

The first is purpose. What is my purpose in my own giving? What is my purpose in giving to you? Purpose is about connection. It’s about understanding. Giving money away is one thing and a great thing, but giving money away to something you believe in and understand elevates that purpose. What am I trying to accomplish? When we ask for something specific of impact, the purpose becomes much more illuminated.

Number two is trust. We live in an industry where trust is, I think, almost everything. When you ask for a gift that's about very specific impact—this amount of dollars for this particular outcome—you’re building trust because their gift is going to go to the purpose which I just talked about, of exactly what they're trying to do. And they know if it's done correctly and reported back, that trust builds very quickly.

Number three is that they want to understand the impact, understanding the impact of what that gift is going to do.

If you ask about cost or just have it blankly, it's not that impact isn't there. I just don't think it's very clear. But if you ask for impact, and you ask for $90 to feed 100 kids, man, the impact is direct and easy to understand.

Number four is that it provides a personal connection, which is what donors want. What is my gift doing to help someone else? They may not know the individual who's receiving the gift, but the more you connect them to a face or a group, the better off you are.

Think about this study and the $90 they provided, and the decisions on impacting the highest engagement and the highest amount of dollars. Would you consider feeding for a dollar a meal, which would equate to feeding 100 kids in a village in a particular country or city? Well, you may not know those particular kids, but it's not nebulous. It's not unheard of that you would know where that country is, or you could Google it. I know where that city is, or you could Google it. All of a sudden, you're getting down to specifics. That personal connection is important for donors.

Number five is that all of this makes it more meaningful. When you have that level of specificity, that level of connection, that level of knowledge that your gift or your giving is going to make a difference for a very specific cause—and you know the impact, you can understand its value, and you have a sense of connection—all of that leads to meaning for a donor.

So, the reason why the impact-giving pieces are so important, or impact asking, is really about purpose, trust, understanding impact, personal connection, and being meaningful.

What's the tactical here? Twofold. I started the tactical and kind of gave the first part already: in annual giving, our annual giving piece, based on this data, should be asking for something specific. This is going to make it harder because we may be trying to have a less-segmented mailing system. I don’t mean where it's going, but the different pieces. If you're in education, there are lots of parts of the university, but maybe the colleges should be asking for something specific. Would you do X?

I had a recent experience with the Dean of the Law School I attended. I was looking to have a meal with him, and he shared some of the stories about people who couldn’t study for the bar. And that’s why they were concerned about bar passage rates. It came back to one story about a woman who lost her daycare. She has a child, and so the law school was able to help her figure out what that looked like from a financial perspective. What was interesting wasn’t my reaction, but my wife’s, who was sitting to my left at this table at this wonderful restaurant. She goes, "I could get behind that." And I thought two things: number one, specific impact—your gift could do this; and number two, to my wife, I was thinking, "Please stop talking because you’ll end up giving money away that I’m not sure we’re ready for." But she was instant impact. He didn’t even ask her for it, but that was the connection.

Our annual giving program should be more designed towards that. We’re giving something specific for this. The problem is, what one person might want to give to might not be something somebody else does. So how do you balance generic versus specific? The more you're able to do that and create impact—meaning you’re asking for something about outcome—your gift of $100 will do this, your gift of $50 will do this. That is a better way of producing an annual giving program.

Going into healthcare, you might be more interested in research than you are in programs, or you might want to support oncology versus neurology. The segmentation process gets a lot more complicated, which may make it more expensive, but that’s a judgment call as to how we grow our pipelines, grow our donor bases—asking about impact. If you can find a way to ask for something that helps everyone, that’s great. It makes it more challenging with specific interests that other people might have.

So, the annual giving piece is about asking for something specific, a dollar amount, that’s going to impact this many things, this many items, this many people in a positive way.

On the major gift side, this is a change in terms of how we engage in solicitation. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re asking for $100,000, whether it’s cash today or pledged over four years—I’m not going to get into those nuances, I think either way is fine—but you're asking for a machine, or you’re asking not for the machine but because your organization says they need a machine. Pick the machine; it doesn’t make any difference—mammograms or CAT scans or whatever, it doesn’t make a difference. You’re going to ask someone to support it at the $100,000 level. Do you ask them and say, “Would you give $100,000?” Blankly? Do you say, “The cost of this machine is $100,000, can you help us with that?” Or do you say, “For $100,000, we can purchase this particular machine, and what’s going to happen is that every month 50 people will be tested for X. When we test that many people, we know we catch particular diseases or diagnoses at a much higher level, which has a direct effect on the treatment plans that we engage with them on.”

I think innately we’ve gotten—at least the best gift officers I’ve had the privilege of working with and learning from and teaching—would ask for the impact to affect those 50 patients. But all too often, we tend to just ask. This gets to be really important. So let’s juxtapose this about a program. We’re asking because the organization needs to do more population health-driven work. This has been part of a harder discussion: how do we ask for population health?

Ask for impact. If you're trying to get 1,000 women to get mammograms who normally don’t so that we can get ahead of the curve on testing, so we don’t have people in stage 3, 4, or 5 of cancer because they never got a mammogram. If we could get into those populations that are underserved, not heard, or non-insured, think about asking for the gift by saying, “We have identified 1,000 people that need mammograms. Your gift of $100,000 would pay for 250 of those women and allow us to ensure that their health and the plans for their health are laid out in a more effective way than not getting tested, particularly when it comes to breast cancer. Would you consider helping those 250 people?” That’s much easier to quantify and connect on than just saying, “We’ve got a lot of people who don’t get mammograms; do you want to help us?”

I think this study about impact and about getting us to the point where we are asking for support for specific things that are going to do specific things for people’s lives is incredibly important. You can classify it in annual giving, major gifts, or planned gifts. Those last three are all combined in many ways in this particular area of conversation, but this is where we’ve got to go. If we’re seeing fewer people give, I think much of the reason is because they don’t feel the impact. They don’t understand why they’re so important to what we’re trying to accomplish. Yes, our missions are powerful, but our missions are nebulous to most donors. What they want is specific. What is my money going to do to make a difference that your organization does in the community for people that I’m trying to help?

Ask for impact, not for cost and not generically, and you’ll find a greater connection in the philanthropy that people are trying to express.

Don’t forget to check out the blogs at hallettphilanthropy.com, two or three a week—just things I read, things I think are interesting, and they might be helpful to you. You can get those at hallettphilanthropy.com, get an RSS feed right to you. If you’d like, you can always reach out to me at podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com.

Think about the world and what we do if we could illuminate the impacts that we have more often. How many more people would there be that would want to be involved, and how much greater would we feel as board members, major gift officers, chief development officers, foundation staff, CEOs—whomever—if we knew we had more people supporting us?

Don’t forget my favorite all-time phrase or saying: “Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, and then there are those who wondered what happened.” Impact is about getting more people to realize that you or your organization wants to make things happen. And there are people who want to make things happen, and together, you help those who are wondering what happened.

That, as I do at the end of every podcast, is all about impact and using it to your advantage to get you and your organization where they’re doing more of that impact on the community you serve.

I look forward to seeing you next time, right back here, on the next edition of Around with Randall. And don’t forget—make it a great day.