Welcome to Giving Societies. Are they worth it? We are so pleased that you joined us today. My name is Melanie Hoffman. I am the director of Advancement at Ransom Everglades School in Miami, Florida. I'm starting my fourth year here as part of my 30 year career in fundraising, which I spent primarily in independent schools, museums and cultural organizations in Florida, New York, New Jersey, Vermont, and Washington, D.C.. I'm here with my colleague Melissa Belafonte, who will now introduce herself. Thank you, Melanie. I'm so happy to be doing this with you today. I am the director of the Fund for Ransom Everglades, and I've been with the school for 13 years, originally as director of communications, which at the time was part of the Advancement Office but soon moved into annual giving prior to Ransom Everglades. I worked in the nonprofit sector for almost ten years with child health and education organizations in South Florida. First, a few words about our school. Ransom Everglades is located on two campuses in sunny Coconut Grove, Florida. We are the number one day school in Florida for grades six through 12 with just over 1100 students. It is truly a beautiful place to work and study. The objectives of this webinar are designed to help you decide if a giving society can yield results for your program. We recommend the following. First, define your giving levels and benefits and be prepared to revisit those over time. Then identify your prospects. This is an evergreen activity throughout the year, each and every year. Empower your volunteers. Determine who can best help you in what capacity to ensure their success and that of your program. And last, but certainly not least, focus your staff time just as you determine the best use of your volunteer time. Do the same for your staff and define their roles. This is my favorite fundraising cartoon by The New Yorker. It's always tough to get those appointments and hopefully this doesn't apply to you. Next, we wanted to walk you through a roadmap to developing the Giving Society that works for you. First, we will discuss the purpose of giving societies, followed by where we began with our own and where we are now. And where and how we found success. We will finally answer the question Are they worth it? And if you have any questions after this, please do not hesitate to reach out. The first step is to remind ourselves what is the purpose of giving societies? Our reasons may differ slightly from school to school, but overall we all want to first increase giving. Of course, we want to inspire our donors to give at a higher level, step by step. Second is recognition. People want to be with each other and with like minded donors, and most enjoy the recognition of their support through tailored stewardship and benefits. Speaking of stewardship, we want to provide benefits for giving at certain levels that donors would otherwise not be able to receive. They are looking for access and recognition with these objectives in mind. Melissa will walk you through how we began. Today, we'll focus primarily on our growth over the past ten years. But I'd like to provide a bit of context around some significant changes we've made in our approach to leadership giving leading up to the 20 1314 fiscal year. As you can see in this chart, our entry level leadership gift was 1500 dollars and our highest level was $20,000 in the 2009 ten fiscal year. Those donors contributed 74% of the funds raised. Up until that time, there was a small committee of volunteers who helped solicit leadership annual gifts. They hand-picked their assignments from the pool of prospects and personally solicited about 20% of all of them. The rest were left to staff or to be assigned to parent and alumni volunteers who were soliciting participation and gifts. This created a big disparity in how leadership prospects were treated and was something we knew had to change. The benefits included one evening reception at the home of one of the donors at the highest level for all leadership donors. The head of school personally called those who gave $10,000 or more, and those who gave 20,000 or more were invited to breakfast or lunch with the head of school. The only benefit that was included in materials was the evening reception. We had been raising about $1 million annually for several years. So going into the 2010 11 year, the Board of Trustees set a goal to reach $2 million over the next five years. A first step in the process was to raise the entry level leadership gift to $3,000 that year. This won over fairly well. Many existing donors increased and new prospects were receptive, so much so that we increased it again to $5,000 in 20 1314 and met our $2 million goal a year earlier than projected. As you can see in this chart, our total number of leadership donors dipped a bit each time we increased the level, but their dollar contribution to the total remained over 60% and gradually moved back up to more than 70%. At this time, we welcomed a new lead volunteer with a larger committee who were assigned to all leadership prospects, sometimes paired with a staff member. But everyone targeted for a leadership gift was treated the same way, cultivated, solicited and stewarded by a leading member of our community. This was the beginning of creating a group of like minded donors to help foster a culture of philanthropy. In 20 1314, we added giving levels for $30,000 and $40,000 based on the previous year, when we had a handful of donors giving $30,000 or more, as we learned with the earlier entry level increases. Our community responds to name recognition. So this helped make the case when asking those top tier donors to increase. We continued the private reception for all leadership donors and the threshold for a meeting with the head of school went up to $30,000. As this chart shows, over the next six years, we had more changes in our leadership giving levels for two main reasons. The first is that we were entering the quiet phase of a comprehensive campaign and again, we wanted to get donors in that mid range to increase. To do so, we consolidated the giving levels into $5,000, $10,000, $25,000, and added a new top level at 50,000. The volunteer committee was downsized and only included trustees. This elevated the feeling of being part of something special among lead donors and prospects and allowed us to better control the messaging around the campaign. We continued our reception for all leadership donors and began hosting small cultivation events for donors at the top levels, as well as new prospects to talk about the new campaign. Trustee hosts were assigned to the prospects, invited to their events. Staff were assigned based on prospect status. Those who are considered campaign major gift prospects were mostly assigned to the directors of advancement and major gifts, with exceptions for alumni who had existing relationships with the Director of Alumni Engagement. That takes us to where we are now. Our total number of leadership donors has grown steadily, but more importantly, their total giving has increased tremendously due to the growth at the top. We have expanded the benefits offered at each level and include a detailed chart in our printed materials. Now to talk about that growth. I'll turn it back to Melanie. Thank you, Melissa. Services just learned from Melissa. We have learned a lot over the last ten years since we first started our Giving Society. In fact, so much so that we can say that we've grown our leadership giving by 222% in just ten years. That's pretty incredible. One of the keys to our success is our volunteers. Here you'll see our volunteer leadership structure. The way we've organized them is by level and priority. For example, we've identified donors in our top two giving levels. So the $50,000 level and the 25 to $49000 level to essentially chair those levels within the framework of the 1903 society, those folks are responsible for signing tailored letters and emails to prospects in those giving levels, meeting with prospects and hosting a special event for them as incentive. The lower giving levels 5000 to 24 nine are then covered by Advancement Committee members and fund volunteers who also do personal outreach. To expand on that concept. We want to share with you all three primary factors that have helped us increase our giving by over 200%. First volunteers, which we just discussed. We've leveraged those folks to maximize results through personal outreach involvement and their own social influence and willingness to solicit their peers. Next, our staff. We try to work smarter by focusing each of us on specific levels and tasks, deploying our resources as efficiently as possible. We treat the top giving levels as their own major gift campaigns, assigning a staff person to the lead volunteer for that level to identify, solicit and steward those prospects and donors. We also utilize a volunteer management platform at the lower levels, especially to help our grade teams and class agents access information quickly and in real time. And finally, we pay close attention to the benefits we offer to our donors. People seek access and information and want to be with like minded donors at their level. We don't want to overpromise, so we look for ways to deliver recognition, access and information and while not overstretching our capabilities, Melissa will now talk about the importance of people and data throughout the process. In summary, we have been able to use giving societies to leverage people and data to increase giving by strategically focusing staff and volunteers on our top prospects and evaluating our target ask amounts every year to ensure we are acquiring new donors at each level and moving existing donors up the levels from their use the rest of your resources to secure participation and the remainder of your fundraising goal. As you can see in this pie chart, our top leadership level donors contribute approximately 50% of the total amount raised each year. Our entry to mid-level leadership donors contribute approximately 30% of the total, and that leaves the remaining 20%, which comes from the rest of our donors. They make the biggest impact on participation rates and get us over the finish line. The higher levels have a much greater impact on funds raised, so more intentional human resources are needed for a personal touch. We then utilize technology and a large network of volunteers for peer to peer engagement of the remaining prospects. So here's the punch line. Do we think giving societies are worth it? Yes, we sure do. The numbers speak for themselves. If you leverage your data and people to achieve your best results, you can move the needle pretty significantly on your annual fund through your giving society. National statistics show that less people are giving more, and honestly, giving societies can help you maximize those results. We promise you'll see great results. Finally, if you have any questions or would like to chat with us, please don't hesitate to contact us. We'd love to hear from you. Thank you for joining us today. It's been our pleasure.

Melanie Hoffman

Advancement

Ransom Everglades School

giving societies

fundraising