Building relationships with donors

Introduction

The starting point for this session is the very simple proposition that the vast majority of people become donors only when they are asked. You have to turn people into donors by providing them with suitable opportunities to contribute. It is your request and your approach that lay the foundations for each individual donor relationship; it is your subsequent actions that will sustain – or otherwise – the nature and amount of any further donations and support from that donor.

So our aim in this unit is to provide you with an overview: of approaches you can adopt and issues you are likely to face in providing the right sorts of opportunities for people to become donors and contributors to your organisation.

You will look at what is involved in asking for donations on an individual face-to-face basis and also look at the process of asking numbers of people for support, and at how to extend the involvement of your donors and supporters once you have established contact. You will also look more closely at how to tackle the business of securing major individual contributions. We finish with a brief overview of legacy fundraising – the culmination for many donors of a lifetime's generosity.

This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course Winning resources and support (B625). [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]