[Peter Gulka]

Session Level: Intermediate
Speaker: Jim Bush, CFRE
Session Description: Stewardship is both an art and a science. Take advantage of the many tools in The Raiser’s Edge that can help you maintain strong relationships with your donors — from mailings and moves management to knowing your donors’ preferences and much more. You can leverage the tools to help you become better stewards of your donors. This session will show you the tools to use such as action tracks, addressees/salutations, mail preferences, reporting options, and more.

[Jo Ward]

I attended this session and understand why Jim Bush is rated so highly as a presenters. He makes the sessions both fun and informative! Thanks, Jim.

Some key things from the session:

Stewardship, by definition, means that what you said you would do is equal to what you do, AND you tell them that you did it. An organization can lose favor with its donors quickly for not being clear, concise, and quick in letting them know what they did with the money (American Red Cross).

It is also critical that your organization have a clear and board-approved gift acceptance policy. He used as an example, an organization that received and accepted a gift of property without such a policy in place. The property turned out to be a dump site, and the organization, by accepting the gift, assumed the responsibility of cleaning it up! By having a policy that is board-approved, you have someone to blame for not accepting a gift.

Begin your stewaredship program by defining stewardship groups for your organization. Do things to get your new donors involved. Longtime or lapsed donors and online donors are often forgotten or short-changed.

Everything fo significance about a donor (or a prospect) should be in RE, either as an action or a note. If the information is bigger than the action, use notes, otherwise, use Action Note. You should adopt a policy that if it isn't in RE, it did not happen! Also, if you get a really nice letter from a constituent, scan it in and add as an action.

If you use Prospect as Constituent Code, you can set a Business Rule to notify you when a gift has been made (on the next opening of the constituent).

Create queries to identify constituents who are missing attributes, constituent codes, or other information you want to track. Run them regularly to help with timely stewardship.

It is important to address people as they want to be addressed. Keep up with constituent deaths, divorces, marriages, etc. Cleanup your addr/sal table. Use Global Add or Global Change to help with this. You can add a line to you response card(s) asking: How would you like to be acknowledged (or recognized)?

In RE 7.81, there will be the ability to copy Home Pages. You can set up a folder on the Home Page for stewardship activities such as birthdays/anniversaries this month, etc.

Your stewardship plan should include knowing what you are going to do, evaluating yur efforts often, and refining the plan as necessary.

[Elaine Tucker]

Jo,

Thanks so much for posting this - excellent info and review!

Elaine

[PatFranklin]

Jo,

I appreciate your summary. It is going to prove very useful for us.

Thanks,
Pat