Personalized Cultivation—What’s That?

Think about a favorite cause that you give to. Perhaps you send in a small check each year or give online after a disaster or at holiday time. Maybe you give to your alumni association in response to a phone-a-thon or to your church’s annual stewardship program. Regardless of the size of your gifts, your name is undoubtedly on one or many donor lists. If they are doing their jobs well, good people in nonprofit organizations are thinking right now about how to cultivate you in the very best way, over time, to have you consider making a larger gift to their group.

If you are giving because you have an emotional connection to their work, not just because someone pressured you to give, you may be starting to realize how little those organizations would need to do to cultivate you to give more.

I have often told the story of the search and rescue group that rescued my sister and her husband in a remote mountain area many years ago. Though all they do is send me a letter and an envelope each year, the letter always includes a story of another death-defying search and rescue effort that ended happily. That one mailing a year is enough to inspire me to give, often at a higher level than the year before.

Then we have the story of my husband, who is a long-time donor to our (now grown-up) son’s Little League baseball team. Though they would never know it, other than by my husband’s modest annual (and totally unsolicited) donation to them every year, that team is very near and dear to his heart. They accepted our son onto the team because there was no official team in our neighborhood. Well beyond teaching baseball, they taught him the values of true sportsmanship, leadership, and teamwork that have served him immeasurably as he has grown up.

In both cases, my husband and I give because we truly believe in the work of these two organizations. Yet with just a little personal cultivation from these organizations, we could become far more involved and give even more.

In contrast, there are the groups that badger us, calling incessantly, sending us mailings too many times a year (or even right after we have made a larger gift). Would we regard these letters and calls as “cultivation”? Not in our model.

Think about how you like to be treated as a donor, with all your quirky and not so quirky preferences. Like me and my husband, your preferences may change as your life situation changes, depending on the organization and other things you may be involved with at the time.

The point of all this: there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all cultivation. It has to be tailored and customized to fit each donor. This is one more reason to get to know your donors personally and to listen as closely as you can to discern and then fulfill their particular preferences about how they want to be cultivated by your organization. This is the key to personal cultivation.