How to Create the Dream Team for Successful Donor Communications: 5 Essential Tips

Kerri M. Stancil

Published Monday, November 25, 2024

(Your prize if you read through this post - a unicorn gif!)

In today's competitive funding landscape, captivating funders goes beyond a great pitch. It requires the right communication tools and team to build strong relationships and effectively demonstrate your value. For nonprofits and businesses alike, choosing these tools and who manages them can mean the difference between securing funding and being overlooked. This post explores the top five tips to build out the dream team within your organization who will help you elevate your interactions with funders and maximize your chances for success through communications.

1. Identify Stakeholders & Audience

One of the first tasks an organization and its donor communications team should tackle with creating a communications piece is to identify stakeholders needed to make this effort successful and choose the audience the message will go to. This is my number one piece of advice for a reason, because often the stakeholders and the audience change with each communications piece and this step can determine the reach and level of engagement donors have with your message.

To ensure you garner group buy-in among stakeholders, evaluate key points of distribution within your organization, and decide who is on the "need to know" list and who is on the "needs to be aware" list.

Key points for distribution might be:

• The communications team,

• Campaign staff/frontline fundraisers, or

• C suite leadership

Those stakeholders on the "need to know" list are often:

• Frontline fundraisers,

• The coordinators and managers that provide support to these folks

Stakeholders on the "needs to be aware" list are:

• Managers who assist in organizational alignment for distribution of messages

• Events team

• Gatekeepers to leadership

most often times these managers have a handle on the overall communications in production across the organization, and a 500-foot view of all communications efforts in the works. It is okay if you have some repeated stakeholders in these different categories, it means one less person to invite to the table.

When identifying the audience for your message, look to the stakeholders around the table to understand who needs this communication most. Your audience could be defined as sustainers (giving at $1,000 or below), major donors (giving at $25K+), or even foundations. Each of these example audiences holds a different level of understanding of your work and has unique needs.

Once you have identified these folks, get them around a literal or proverbial table and hash out the details. More on that in the tips below.

2. Set the Goal & Highlight Key Points to Include in the Message

With your stakeholders in place and your audience identified, set up a meeting or communicate (via email/memo) what you would like to achieve with this message to donors, highlighting key points that will get the message across. Remember, that keeping funders updated on your programs and fundraising progress is crucial for maintaining their trust and support, your colleagues should be happy to help you succeed in this effort as it benefits everyone. When creating a goal for your communication piece - it is okay if it varies slightly for different audiences in what you choose to highlight. What should not vary are the key points and major facts that support the reason for the donor outreach. You want messaging to be succinct and the same in these aspects across all channels.

3. Discuss the Outreach Method & Ensure Group Understanding

This is a great time to get into the weeds a bit with your stakeholders and really make sure everyone is on the same page with what you've discussed thus far. If there are coordinators/managers around the table, folks who will be sending this communication out for you, ensure they understand when and how you would like them to distribute this message. In some organizations this means additional planning with a platform like Engaging Networks, or time to stuff envelopes, which means they need more lead time. If there are frontline fundraisers in attendance, be open to discussing specific funder needs, or smaller funder groups that may need special attention.

A warning - this could be the longest portion of your meeting because everyone in the organization has a special unicorn donor who needs something specific for this to be a successful effort. Do not fret, this is very common among nonprofits and means that you have very compassionate relationship managers who have the donors’ best interest at heart.

4. Create a Timeline for Production & Assign Roles

One item to mention at step 4...come to your stakeholder meeting with this timeline at least drafted, with reasons why you chose certain dates or benchmarks. In my experience, stakeholders have a lot of questions, some of them want to send out the message themselves, others want to know why we even have to send the message. Come prepared to answer some of these questions and have a backup of why you chose the date you did, what other communications are planned etc. Now back to the actual topic.

Create a timeline for when and how you distribute your message. I always chose a date with the supervisor (someone with a higher view than me) and worked back from there. The longer you are at an organization, the better your understanding will be around the length of time it takes to produce an item - one pager to a full impact report and the like. I enjoy a good chart; your production email can become the reference document for colleagues to work from. Below is an example of a table I might send in a production email, which outlines the timeline considering many of the points we've reviewed here.

Manager	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4
Kerri (project Lead)	Drafts message outline. Submit to Bob for review.	Second round of edits based on supervisor review.	Third round review. Send to org leadership for final approval.	Give stakeholders the "go ahead" to distribute.
Bob (manager)	Reviews Kerri's draft & passes to Jo for additions.	Second review. Passes to programs team for approval & sends back to Kerri.
Jo ("leadership" usually C-suite)	Jo signs off on copy pending incorporation of edits.		Jo gives final approval and Kerri the instruction to send out.

You will see some very minimal roles included, but this can be more/less defined as needed. Sometimes the timeline will include other people from your internal stakeholder group, and at other times external partners. The main thing to take from this example is how to create a timeline without a fancy tool and understand that it is up to you to decide how in-depth it needs to be.

5. Identify Your Next Three Action Items & Set the Plan in Motion

One strategy which can be extremely helpful is to identify the next three steps in the production timeline and outline them at the end of the stakeholder meeting. It will come as no surprise that the donor relations team (aka you) will be leading the charge here. An example of this wrap up would be something like this –

“Okay, thank you for your time today, I'm glad we are able to get this project under way. This week I will be sending out the planning email with the timeline and project brief we discussed here today, I will reach out to Cindy in communications to make sure our content team is aware of this communication piece and there are no conflicts, and I will confirm with Bill that our donor segments are set in the CRM to the audiences we've identified.”

After this, it is a matter of creating the message and sticking to your timeline, and as the lead, making sure everyone else sticks to it too.

Engaging Funders for the Long Haul

Effectively engaging funders requires a strategic approach supported by various communication tools, an aligned internal team, and a well laid engagement and communications plan with a bit of cushion for hiccups. If you create a process that is communications focused both internally and externally, stewarding the donors and your colleagues, you will be successful in accurately communicating with donors about your organization’s work. Additionally, you will begin to create trusting relationships and transparency among both your colleagues and donors alike.

Caveats to consider

This is the strategy one of the organization's I worked with implemented when we stood up a full-fledged donor relations & stewardship team within the organization, charged by the board of directors to make sure our donors were getting access to adequate communications and engagement opportunities. This is not always the case at every organization, we still fought for a seat at the right tables, and this "charge" changed over time, and so did our strategy. My hope is that there are pieces you can pull from this reflection to take back to your shop, to make your job a bit easier and keep the last portion of your sanity you have left intact.

If you would like to chat more about this topic or any other strategies, shoot LP an email at info@luminarypointcreative.com

More Helpful Insights from the Field:

• "Crafting a Campaign Communications Plan" - Allison Tait, Associate Director of Development for Campaign Communications and Donor Relations, Yale School of Management, Yale University - Credit: Association of Donor Relations Professionals (ADRP).

  
  

• "Do You Know Your Audiences?" - Credit: Emily Weisgrau, Weiswood Strategies, Ltd., Published November 12, 2024.

  
  

• "Common Myths About Nonprofit Communications" - Credit: Morgan Roth, Leading from the intersection of strategic communication and philanthropy | CMO at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, published April 7, 2024.