I just returned from the NCEA (Catholic Educators) conference in New Orleans, which brought together a large group (over 6,000) of dedicated professionals. Several presentations were about advancement and fundraising, and a lot of the focus was on major gift giving and cultivation of these donors. I thought I’d share some of the key insights I picked up.

- Call it Advancement, not Development. The role of the fundraising professional is to advance the mission of the organization. This is a much broader responsibility than simply raising money, which is just a means to an end. There needs to be a strategic plan that lays out what the organization will accomplish and what it will take to accomplish that mission. Then seek contributors to join on the path to deliver that mission.

- Similarly, seek investments, not donations. We’re not begging for money, we’re asking people to invest in the mission, to join us.

- All donors aren’t equal. We don’t want to dismiss any of our donors, of course, but the truth is that a very large percentage of gifts come from a few people. One speaker said the old 80/20 rule has become more like 95/5 … 95 percent of contributions will come from 5 percent of donors. Every community has contributors with big potential to give. There are 9 million Americans with over $1 million “in the bank” (not including real estate).

- Techniques that will get small investments are direct mail, phonathons, events, online donations. Large investments always rely on personal meetings. Ideally the advancement director and the head of the organization meet in person with the donor individually (or with their spouse, whichever they prefer). Think about the proper setting and spend a lot of time cultivating that relationship before making the ask. Narrow your list of major donor prospects to just 10-15 people for the entire year.

- Get out there. One speaker said he heard this long ago and still does it … put an index card on your desk that says, “if you can read this, you’re not doing your job,” meaning you need to be out meeting with people. At schools it’s very easy to get caught up doing all the smaller things (like running events). Don’t let the principal (or executive director) suck you into managing events, etc. because then you’ll never be out developing those personal relationships that will result in the major gifts. Tell the principal what you are doing and how you prioritize your work.

- Build personal relationships with your constituents. Building a relationship is reciprocal (give and take), just like building personal relationships with friends. Consider the people in your own life. You might have a large group that you interact with through annual holiday cards. That’s a great way to reach a lot of people. But if your only interaction with them ever is sending Christmas cards, then pretty soon that’s all you’ll get back in return. Nobody would call you to go and see a movie (let alone other activities and commitments indicative of a growing relationship). You need to develop that personal connection by meeting in small groups and one-on-one and by giving the person something of value to them.

- State a good case for your cause. You can start with the logical fact-based case (such as “We are short $800 per student so we need donations”), but you have to make an emotional connection with your donors. “The world needs people like those who come out of this school” goes much further to get at the benefit, and “you can help make this happen” ties it back to the donor’s actions. It’s also critical to inspire action, and often recognition can do this. For really large gifts, it’s putting a name on a new classroom or lab.

- Make the ask. One presenter said he wants the head of the school to be the one making the ask. The advancement director helps lay the groundwork and moves the relationship along, but the ultimate ask should come from the ultimate authority at the school (at least for the biggest gifts). Holy Cross has also come up with a “rule of 7,” meaning there should be seven touches and “thank you’s” to the contributor before asking them for money again.

- Look to your most loyal contributors for planned giving (bequests in a will). People who give consistently year in and year out are likely to be good prospects to make legacy gifts in their wills. Stories abound of the faithful contributor who gave consistently but in low amounts, who surprised the organization with a large gift in his or her will. Go meet with these loyal contributors. Ask why they give. Cultivate that relationship. In line with recognition, create a legacy society of some sort in which you honor those who have made that ultimate gift.

- Sign your letters by hand. Hand signing letters is critical in direct mail campaigns. Personal P.S. notes are even better. Use real postage, not indicia.

Primary contributors to these pearls of wisdom include:

- Larry Furey, Partners in Mission (www.partnersinmission.com)
- Schuyler Lehman, Mission Advancement Partners (missionadvancement.com)
- Michael Guillot, Gadd Guillot (www.gaddguillot.com)

Like any good donor database should, LGL makes it easy to keep tabs on your LYBUNTs. The first step, of course, is to identify the constituents that fall into this group. From there you can build a list to use in other areas of LGL.

This tutorial walks you through the following:

• Search for LYBUNTs in Constituents and add them to a dynamic, auto-updating list
• Use the list in Fundraising and pull reports for LYBUNTs

These concepts can be applied to many other kinds of list building and reporting in LGL.

1. Navigate to the Constituents tab and clear the list history (so you don’t include anyone you might have already selected today if you were working on something else).

2. Search for constituents who gave a hard credit (Gift) last year, and add them all to the working list by clicking the “Select 723″ button.

3. Now search for constituents who have given anything this year. We are including soft credits, matching gifts, and pledges in this one to ensure we don’t flag anyone as a LYBUNT who has given in another way. Then we can “Deselect 521 results” to bring the total number of selected constituents down to 444. Note that this number is not simply the difference between the 723 donors who gave last year and the 521 who have given this year, because some of this year’s donors did not give last year.

4. Save the list and set it to auto-update as new gifts come in, removing anyone from the list who is no longer a LYBUNT.

5. Now that we have this list we can do a lot with it, including taking a look at the detailed giving history for these donors. To do that, we will navigate over to the Fundraising tab and run an advanced search:

6. Then we can set the search criteria to search by the list that we just built.

We will also want to add some dates (say for the last 5 years):

Now we can see the full list of gifts for our 2010-2011 LYBUNTS, going back 5 years. From here, it is possible to view the data in several different ways and then export it for review and analysis in Excel or another program:

We recognize there are a lot of foundations out there and each have their own guidelines and procedures for applying for a grant. As one program officer said to me, “when you’ve met one foundation you’ve met one foundation.” We won’t try to tell you how you can succeed in your actual proposals but we will show you how you can manage and track deadlines in LGL.

Let’s assume you are looking through some other organization’s wonderful Annual Report (we all do it). In that amazing $100,000+ category you see the X Foundation and you know it is about time to apply for your organization. You research a bit and confirm that it will be a great fit, plus the deadline for the Letter of Intent is more than a month away – a lifetime!

You log in to LGL and make sure X Foundation has a record and the contact information is up to date. You put some of your research into the record so your colleague doesn’t have to search in ten places for it to believe you that it is worth applying for. Since you’re feeling bold you set up a goal for $100,000 and line up the initial tasks, with deadlines, for you and your team (if you have one). It would look something like this in LGL:

Goal for X Foundation

We’ll then presume success so here is the high level view of the relevant deadlines for the X Foundation:

• Oct 1st – Letter of Intent. When that is done and sent off – easy of course – mark it done and upload it into LGL for future reference. Record the confirmations and other information.
• On Nov 1st – Success, you’ve been invited to submit a full proposal.
• Dec 1st – Full Proposal. Written, submitted to foundation and uploaded in LGL.

Once you've actually submitted the proposal it is easy to see it, together with others, in a list of "pending" proposals.

• Jan 25th – Congratulations! The Board of X Foundation approved a grant of $100,000 for your organization! Enter the pledge in LGL.
• Feb 3rd – Agree to the terms of the grant, return the paperwork and set up the key tasks you need to meet the terms (interim report in 6 months, final report in 12 months).
• Feb 24th – Foundation sends check and you enter the gift against the pledge.

When the actual check arrives you can apply it against the installment you set up previously, set acknowledgment options, establish follow-up tasks, and attach files

• Jun 25th – interim report done and uploaded into LGL.
• Jan 25th following year – final report submitted and uploaded into LGL

Along the way all phone calls, emails, notes from site visits and other communications needed to cultivate and steward the grant are tracked and recorded in LGL. Internal deadlines and documents needed can be tracked as well – if your program and finance colleagues need to do certain things by certain dates you can manage those deadlines in there and upload their internal documents too.

At the end of 16 months you not only secured $100,000 for your mission, you created a comprehensive track record of how you did it in a web-based system you or your successors can reference anywhere anytime. Plus, putting each of those tasks and documents in LGL takes less time than reading this blog post!

Happy 4th of July weekend! To celebrate our nation’s independence, we’ll be rolling out some new updates to Little Green Light (LGL) on Monday, July 5th. Here’s quick overview of the major changes, with more details to follow below:

• Volunteering: Track volunteering commitments and time for any constituent. Volunteering information will appear as Activity, and will also be summarized on individual constituent records, where applicable.
• Lists on the go: Harness the power of lists from any constituent search, selecting constituents in bulk or individually. Then you can save them into a permanent list, or just do something like update the categories or add a task to them all.
• Relative date searches: Instead of typing in or selecting an exact date for search purposes (i.e., looking up constituents by Gift dates), relative dates like “1 week ago” or “5 years ago” or “today” or “5 days hence” are accepted. When used with a list that auto-updates, this can be a great way to keep tabs on lapsed donors, for example.
• Document updates: Assign customizable categories to documents (so it’s easier to see a Report or Proposal), and make particular documents “sticky,” so they’ll always be at the top of your list.
• Dashboard activity: On the dashboard, under the calendar (now compressed to save space), you can see the list of your activity by day. The default setting is for the current week, but you can filter by other date criteria as well.
• Activity sharing: Sometimes it makes sense to display certain activities (tasks, contact reports, and notes) on more than one record. For instance, if you are having a meeting with one representative of the bank, you might want the main bank record to note that this is happening, but it would be a drag to enter the same task twice. With activity sharing, you can display any task on multiple related constituent records.

Volunteering

Basic volunteer commitment and time tracking is now a standard part of LGL, for all accounts, so you can add volunteering information to any constituent in the Related activity section, like so:

Commitments

If it makes sense to track someone’s volunteer commitment, you can add a new commitment and time entries at the same time:

Volunteer time

Or, if you just need to add some volunteer time, you can do that as well. Commitments are not required:

Volunteering summary

All volunteering activity is listed in the Related activity section, and on the top-level Activity tab, but it is also summarized directly below the giving summary on the constituent details page:

Lists on the go

List building capabilities are now integrated with the standard search on the Constituents tab. This is handy for cases when you want to select a few constituents and update their categories, or add a task to them all in bulk, but you don’t need to keep the list around for a long time. It’s also a much more convenient way to start building any list of constituents.

If you want to save a list from this point, click on the Save list button. If you want to clear the list, you can do so from within the More actions menu, or from the History menu.

Relative date searches

Relative dates like “1 year ago”, “18 months ago”, or “2 weeks hence” can now be used in all of the date range searches. For example, if you want to have a current list of all donors who have not given for more than two years from today, that could be set up as follows:

1. Search for donors who haven’t given in the last two years

2. Select them

3. Save the list

Since this list will auto-update every day, it will always be current, and can be used as the basis for other lists. You can also use the following handy shortcuts for dealing with relative fiscal year dates:

• This fiscal start: The start of the current fiscal year
• This fiscal end: The end of the current fiscal year
• Last fiscal start: The start of the previous fiscal year
• Last fiscal end: The end of the previous fiscal year

These would be useful for setting up LYBUNT (donors who gave last year but not this one) and SYBUNT (some year but not this) lists that stay automatically up to date.

Document updates

We made several changes to the Documents tab, and also to documents in general.

Document categories

First and foremost, you can assign customizable categories to documents, and then filter by them. This allows for better organization of your documents. Categories can be edited on the Settings page, under Menu Items.

Sticky documents

Sometimes it is helpful if a document remains always at the top of your Documents list. This might be best practice notes or general coding guidelines that you’d like to have easy access to all the time. Now you can easily make particular documents “sticky,” which means they’ll always be at the top of the list.

You can make this change while editing or uploading a document:

You can also make the change while viewing the Documents list by clicking the star icon:

Dashboard activity

A listing of the current week’s activity, grouped by day, is now available on the dashboard, underneath the calendar.

You can filter the results by date range, and also by user. By default it shows the current week, and all users.

Entries for each day can be collapsed and expanded.

Activity sharing

To help better track communications with families and organizations, where relationships are key, you can now share an activity with one or more related constituents.

For example, when we add or edit a task for our contact at the fictional Accessible Arts Foundation, we can share that task if it is relevant:

Then it will display on the Accessible Arts Foundation Related Activity list, as follows:

That way another member of your team who looks at either record will see the most relevant recent activity. Additionally, if Marcy Boroughs leaves Accessible Arts to work somewhere else, the record of this task will remain. Shared activity will display with a highlighted background, and show the constituent that it is directly connected to.

June release overview

• Smarter lists. Lists now have an option to get updated automatically, which should save everyone some time. You can also view the history of each addition to or removal from the list, so it’s easier to see how a list was created. Finally, if you do want a static list that never changes until you change it, that option is still available.
• Constituent categories. Groups and tags are cool, but many have asked for the ability to track more specific information, so we have added a way for you to create as many different categories as you want or need to segment your constituents appropriately.
• Gift categories. Gift categories cannot have multiple dimensions like constituent categories can, but they provide an additional way to track where a gift came from. By default the values will be Individual Gift, Corporate Gift, Foundation Grant, Public Grant, and Bequest. Values are customizable in the Settings area.
• Member/membership tracking. For membership organizations we have added the ability to track membership levels and dates, and then search/browse by both sets of criteria. If you need this set up or turned on for your subscription, let us know.
• Seasonal addresses. To help increase the accuracy of mailings, you can now set a specific month/day date range for a given address, and LGL will automatically use the correct address based on when you’re exporting your list or the due date for your mailing.

Smarter lists

With LGL’s new list functionality, it’s a whole lot easier to create living lists that can serve as the basis for most of your common queries and reports.  Instead of needing to re-build the list from scratch each time, you have the option to use the list creation history to automatically update the constituents on the list every day (or whenever you edit/update the list).

A fairly simple example might be to create an always-current list of lapsed donors who have given more than $1000 total, which you can build in the following way:

1. Navigate to the constituents tab and click the “Build a list” button

Note the new Auto-update option, which is selected by default.  If you don’t want the list to remain automatically updated, then you can deselect this at any time and the list will freeze.

1. Use the “Gift amount” option in the advanced search to find constituents who have given more than $1000.

1. Then restrict this further by constituents with a “Lapsed Donor” giving status.

1. Lastly, remove any organizations, for good measure, resulting in something that looks like the following.

1. If you are happy with the list, click “Save” and from this point forward you can always use this as the basis for other searches, mailings or exports.
2. You can clear the entire history of the list and all constituents by clicking the “Clear list history” button.

Note If you add or remove individual constituents to/from the list, then these will take precedence over any bulk additions or removals.  Also, lists are updated automatically on a daily basis, or whenever you edit and save them.

Constituent categories

Everyone has four constituent categories by default (groups, tags, capacity, and interest) but it can be handy to add more if you have some specific information you might like to track. Custom categories are nice because they let you split things up in a way that makes them easier to read and you can also browse through your constituent results that way.  For example, here is a setup with custom categories for Status, Program Interest and Volunteer Interest:

You can edit a category independently by clicking on the “Edit” or “Add” links next to each category (visible when you mouse over the category) or you can edit all categories at once by clicking on the Edit all categories button.

Full constituent editing

Previously when adding a new constituent or editing an existing one, you only had the ability to change name and contact information.  Now you can edit everything about a constituent from a single form.  This form is admittedly quite a big one, but you can make it a bit less intimidating by closing any sections that you don’t care to edit at the moment:

Gift categories

Gift categories provide an additional dimension to gift tracking, so you can more easily track where gifts are coming from.  The default categories are Individual Gift, Corporate Gift, Foundation Grant, Public Grant, and Bequest, but these are fully customizable in the Menu Items section of the Settings area.

Member/membership tracking

With member/membership tracking turned on (it is off by default) you can track a constituent’s membership levels and dates, and also easily search for constituents by level and expiration date.  Assuming you have membership turned on, you can:

1. Add/edit membership information from the constituent details page by clicking the “Edit Membership” button, or you can

1. Add/edit membership information from the constituent Edit form

1. Browse constituents by membership level and status

1. Search constituents by membership level and end dates

All of these tools combined make it fairly easy to do things like generate a monthly mailing to members who are up for renewal.

Seasonal addresses

As in the above example, it’s now possible to set dates that relate to a particular address.  By default, all addresses are considered to be “Year ‘round”, but in the case where people spend the year in different locations, different dates can be set.

LGL automatically figures out the best address to use based on the date.  In most cases, the date used is the current date, but in the case of a mailing, the due date is used (if available) to ensure that the correct address information is used.

Miscellaneous changes

Along with these big changes, we changed a number of other small things.

Constituent lookup

In gift, goal, and task forms, and everywhere else that you need to look up and set a constituent, the process has changed a bit to make it easier to see who’s who.

1. Click on the Set Constituent button. Hitting the “Enter” key should also work in most browsers.

1. Search for a constituent or click the “add a new constituent” link if you need to create a new constituent for this record

1. Click the “Select” button to set the constituent and close the window

Constituent details page updates

The location of contact information on the constituent details page has shifted over to the right, to make way for categories in the middle, and also to allow for more vertical space to display all contact information on the main page

Update all categories on a list

The ability to update groups and tags for a whole list of constituents has been replaced by the ability to update all categories on a list.  You can do this by clicking on the “Update categories” button from any list details page.

You can add/remove any category to or from all constituents on a particular list.

Edit all menu items

The menu items page now allows you to edit every kind of customizable type or menu, including all of the categories, task types, note types, and more.

1. To get there, click on the “Setting link” in the upper right hand corner of any page

1. Click on the “Menu items” link in the sub-navigation

1. Add, update, delete, or reorder the values for any menu

Some organizations choose to enter each donation twice, once in their donor management system and again in their accounting system, as a way to provide checks and balances in their system. The upside is increased protection against errors while the downside is increased time by both development and finance to reconcile their records on a regular (usually monthly) basis. Little Green Light always allowed for the basic export of all the gift information you’d need for this kind of reconciliation, but we recently got a request from a customer to help her make the whole process a bit easier and more efficient.

Instead of the usual export in CSV format (that required extra cleanup and formatting in Excel), Megan Farkas, the development coordinator at the Sant Bani School, wanted to be able to pull a particular month’s deposits in a format she could just print or email without alteration. On the surface, those extra steps might not seem like a big deal, but they fly in the face of our belief that Little Green Light should give you the information that you want in the format you need without requiring you to jump through hoops. To that end, we worked with Megan to create a custom PDF export format that provides her with exactly the information she needs. Here’s what the new workflow looks like when she wants to grab the previous month’s deposit report from Little Green Light:

1. Go to the Fundraising Tab and select “deposit date” on the date filter, then choose “Last month” from the dropdown
2. Click the “Export results” button and select the “Deposits” export type; save the export
3. Download/print the results

Just like that, in about 30 seconds flat she has a nice-looking PDF with all of the information she needs in a format that she doesn’t have to re-create every month. Here’s what it looks like with some test data:

The only thing that’s missing now is automating the process so Little Green Light will email her the report at the beginning of every month. That’s a feature we have in the works, and it should be ready (along with a slew of other reporting updates) within the next month or two. We’d like to thank Megan for working with us to provide her with a better report. We encourage all of our customers to do the same, so please don’t hesitate to let us know when you’d like to do so.

We came, we saw, and we met a lot of great people! One thing that stands out in the nonprofit market is how amazing all of the people and organizations are. Take, for example, the Ragdale Foundation, and Leslie Brown, its Director of Communications and Programs, who stopped by the booth to chat about Little Green Light and donor management systems, and ended up winning our Flip HD camera giveaway. Here’s a picture of Chris and Leslie at the conference:

We couldn’t be happier that Leslie won. She can put the camera to good use capturing how wonderful the Ragdale Foundation really is (by all accounts, it is an awesome place–it’s an artist’s retreat just outside Chicago).

We also have a less exciting picture of us standing in front of our booth (that’s me, Nick, on the left and brother Chris on the right):

Donor management was a big point of interest this year; one guy said to us, “Man, donor management is where it’s at this year!” He was a cool guy too, so it must be true. We were happy to reap the benefits of being one of the simplest, and the most affordable, donor management systems on the market and at the conference.

A big thank you to the folks at NTEN for putting on such a great event, and to all the attendees who stopped by to talk to us and helped make the conference such a huge success for us.

A cornerstone of successful fundraising is stewardship. It’s been said many times before, and it’s true. Good stewardship leads to increased support from your donor base.

Stewardship can open up an untapped reservoir of potential funds, but it is an art that is often forgotten or neglected because nonprofit organizations doing fundraising either don’t have a systematized way to track their donors, or they have a system or database that is inaccessible to all but one or a few expert users. No system, or a system to which a few have access, means little visibility into who’s being contacted, when that contact is being made, and what the current status of the relationship is.

Say your data is stored in a database or in a handful of customized spreadsheets. Either way, it is probably managed by one or two people who are trained in handling or know the ins and outs of these tools. When that information needs to reach members of your staff, board, and volunteer base, it has to go through these people, and its flow tends to become bottlenecked. Your organization’s best advocates are now waiting rather than accomplishing tasks and asks on your behalf.

A big advantage to using a system like little green light™ (LGL) is that it has expertise and intelligence built in to help you with stewardship. For example, LGL automatically identifies and tags your top 100 donors, lapsed donors, and active donors. This means you can get quickly get a view into the status of your relationships with existing donors with one or two clicks. You might find some low-hanging fruit in your top 100 lapsed donors who haven’t given for the past eighteen months.

If you do a good job of keeping your key supporters engaged, they’ll increase their level of support. That whole effort can then build on itself, encouraging a groundswell of support because the benefits will be seen and felt by your constituents, your staff, your board members, and your volunteers.

People used to primarily gather in empty classrooms or meeting rooms in houses of worship to strategize about raising money. This still happens, but with today’s busy schedules, this close collaboration can be more challenging to achieve. This is part of why we decided to build little green light™, among other reasons, namely:

• Lots of nonprofits are out there doing fantastic things for society;
• They all need to raise money;
• The best way to raise money over the long term is to build relationships with individuals.

That last item harkens back to a fundraising method some may find old-fashioned, but in fact it far outperforms the others. Despite all the Twitters and Facebooks and e-mails and flyers and events and mailers and memberships, it still holds that the number one thing you can do to fundraise is gather a group of people committed to your mission and allow them to build relationships with individuals on behalf of your organization.

This is hard work, but it’s not out of reach for the people that little green light™ was designed and built to assist. Anyone can accomplish it. You don’t need to know a secret handshake. You don’t need to send out an internet blast using just the right wording. You can simply invite people dedicated to your mission to join together and do what they can do best for you, which is to feel genuinely passionate about your cause and to talk to others who are also passionate about it. little green light™ makes it easy to do all those things—engage, share, and expand the number of folks who are doing that fantastic and important work.

Because little green light™ is shared across the internet, it in effect is the modern equivalent of gathering in the basement of a church or synagogue or mosque or in an empty classroom. Given life’s current fast pace, it enables you and your board and team to get together more frequently and stay on the same page more easily using the same method that’s been successful across history.

Last night we rolled out a new version of little green light™ (LGL) with basic time tracking, so you can easily keep tabs on how much time your team spends on fundraising and donor management for budgeting and reporting purposes. One of our customers requested this feature, and we think it could be useful to everyone, so we built it. Here’s a quick look at how it can work.

Track time as you work

Click the clock icon to add hours to any activity (activities encompass any unit of work, including tasks, documents, notes, gifts, and goals) on the list.

Filter activities to get the list you want

Look at activities by any combination of date range, team member, list, type, constituent group, or constituent tags (key words). 

Export the results as a report

Export the full result set for any activity search into a spreadsheet to view hours, team member, and role information for each activity. 

Honorable mention

Other noteworthy features and updates in this release include: 

• Campaigns and funds list – view all of your campaigns and funds in one unified list, with financial progress information for each
• Better reminders – now all of your task reminders (anything due within the next 48 hours) are bundled in one e-mail sent to you once a day
• Dashboard calendar – overdue tasks and contact reports now stand out from the rest of the items on your calendar