Making the case for volunteer managers and fundraisers to journey together.

By Robert Rosenthal

As the Blackbaud Supporter Journey Tour makes its way across the country, jokes about Journey the band will definitely make less sense than they did yesterday in San Francisco. Steve Perry and company are actually from here, and so tunes like “Don’t Stop Believin’” are part of the official soundtrack of life here—and, something not easily translated.

Yet if there was one takeaway from the Blackbaud event, it was to not stop believin’ the day will come when volunteer and donor engagement operations will truly be integrated at all nonprofits—and, where leading tech services like Blackbaud and VolunteerMatch could work together to make life easier for nonprofit folks.

I want to be there…

A Dream of Integration

Instead, I’m here, reflecting on the ideas I had and folks I met at the event.

S.F. was the second stop on the six-city tour, organized by tech tools provider Blackbaud to contribute thought leadership, bring new ideas to the forefront and make it easier for fundraisers to manage the cycle of donor engagement. After S.F. the tour headed up to Seattle and will reconvene the tour this fall for events in Toronto, New York and D.C.

When I say “donor engagement,” I mean just that and not volunteer engagement, with some sadness. That’s because there is so much untapped potential in bringing together the operations and systems of donor engagement and volunteer engagement.

As Blackbaud’s Suzanne Wordock described at the opening of the event, fundraisers are eternally reliant on technology to help them properly manage the cycle of donor engagement: we need those tools to analyze campaigns, to educate and communicate with prospects, to engage and cultivate donors and to manage programs to appreciate and retain them.

If all that sounds familiar, it’s because this is essentially the same cycle of engagement (and similar tech needs) that volunteer coordinators deal with. And yet all too often, that’s where the similarities end. At most organizations, fundraisers and volunteer coordinators use different systems and have vastly different budgets. They’re often on different sides of the board room, too. Development staff sit comfortably inside with their financial reports from sophisticated systems, while volunteer coordinators are back at their desks, updating an Excel file with sign-ups for the big service day next weekend.

These organizations aren’t taking advantage of the time-money relationship.

The Changing Donor Profile Is a Lot Like the Changing Volunteer Profile

To help nonprofits tackle the challenges of managing their engagement cycle, the sessions at Blackbaud Supporter Journey were focused on tactics and strategies to align organizational work with the new realities of fundraising.

Traditional donor engagement is dead now that the donor pool is both shrinking and growing older and younger at opposite ends. At the same time, how and why people give to a cause has changed. Today nonprofits need to be able to demonstrate the meaning created by support for their mission. Finally, supporters now expect truly personalized experiences. Unless they feel a message, request or event is a personal experience, they may not come back again.

Volunteer coordinators who are reading are probably nodding. Sounds familiar, right? There is just so much opportunity for volunteer managers and fundraisers to work together to further their work.

Indeed, at many forward thinking organizations this is already happened. Those are the organizations that know volunteers give more money than non-volunteers, so for them volunteering is viewed as an entry point to a deep and lasting relationship.

Their volunteer and donor engagement staff share ideas and data on what’s working and what’s not. The volunteer opportunities are designed with an eye to donor acquisition, and staff are unafraid to ask volunteers to dig deeper and give money… because, in the end, volunteers and donors share the same basic interest in your mission.

But this group of nonprofits is still quite small.

Diamonds in Donor Analytics

The line-up at Blackbaud’s Supporter Journey event in S.F. was great. My morning started with Keith Heller (Heller Consulting) talking about how to find diamonds in donor analytics. Heller is a consultant who used to manage fundraising operations at The Exploratorium. He has an engaging, funny and realistic take about how fundraising, and fundraisers, really work.

I won’t go too much into his learning because he makes a lot of his team’s know-how available for free on his website. I loved that he touched on the strong correlation between volunteers and donations. Primarily though, his focus was on how to take the data that’s publically available (like credit history, vehicle info, ZIP, employment, etc.) about donor prospects and build campaigns around it.

Afterward Keith and I commiserated on how there wasn’t a single source out there where a nonprofit could gain access to the profiles of prospective volunteers. While the US Bureau of Labor has the most wide-ranging data on volunteering, the only place I can think of where you can find out where a person has volunteered in the past is on his/her LinkedIn profile, and that’s if it’s listed. At present LinkedIn is reworking its LinkedIn for Good program, but hopefully there will be more tools there for nonprofits to ID and recruit great volunteers.

Secrets to Creating an “Engaging” Website

Next I heard from lead Blackbaud designer Raheel Gauba, who has helped produce more than 400 sites for nonprofits clients. That’s a lot of nonprofit sites, and a lot of arguments about what should go where and for what purpose! While Gauba shared some cool new trends in design, he also shared fundamentals that no nonprofit should ignore: mainly, those were to put your audience’s needs first and not let internal tastes dictate design or functionality.

In the last 10 minutes, Gauba workshopped sites from the audience. I was struck by how much attention is usually given to the donation buttons on home pages of nonprofit sites. Volunteer buttons? Meh, we get hard-to-spot tabs. And yet the conversion rate for new donors is around 1%, but more than 50% for previous donors. For volunteers I’m betting it’s also close to 50%. What if we used home pages to solicit time and skills as much as money? Yes, we would need to create lots of volunteer opportunities first that are accessible and doable by people of all levels of skill and availability. But that would ensure an ever-full pipeline of donor prospects, right?

e-Marketing Campaigns for Emails

Pamela Snyder from the Zuri Group shared her thoughts on how to do successful e-marketing. In the donor world, e-marketing often has the goal of acquiring email addresses and other personal info that can be used to turn fans into donors. The need for smart thinking here has gotten more important as social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn bring more supporters into your organization’s orbit – but often without giving your fundraisers access to their email addresses.

The woman seated next to me shared this challenge, too, and we brainstormed solutions that involved volunteer activities. For example, she could invite her group’s Facebook audience to take part in a local community park clean up/picnic and ask them to register somewhere where the email addresses would be made available. Big smiles!

Peer-to-Peer Fundraising

The final session I went to was the one that got closest to my dream. Ian Gruber works on Blackbaud’s Friends Asking Friends product, and his talk shared what they’ve learned from clients on what works in online peer-to-peer donations.

Finally, volunteer engagement! I liked Ian’s talk a lot, especially his advice about making sure you’re helping supporters tell their own stories and not your organization’s. As Gruber put it, fundraisers need to remember that “peer to peer fundraising certainly can be about your organization, but it MUST be about your supporters and their relationship to the cause first.” Agreed.

But something didn’t stick for me: where were the volunteer coordinators in all this? Gruber didn’t mention the phrase even once. I get it, this was a fundraisers’ conference – and it’s not like Blackbaud doesn’t have volunteer management module options for some of its most popular tools. They do, and I heard plenty of folks praise them.

But the brass ring here is still a missing link:

• A system to help organizations know what kinds of volunteer opportunities to create and where to distribute them.

• A system that integrates volunteer prospects and volunteers into your overall CRM.

• A system that combines volunteering and donor history to give a full and complete perspective on a single supporter.

Is there a system out there that does all this? Not that I know of. At least not yet. So for now I’ll keep hoping my hopes and dreaming my dreams, of course, but it’s amazing how siloed the two worlds really are.

If your organization is integrating donor and volunteer engagement, I’d love to hear about it.

Note: This post first appeared on the Engaging Volunteers website.

About Robert Rosenthal

Robert Rosenthal is the Director of Communications for VolunteerMatch. He strengthens communities by directing outreach and editorial activities for the Web’s most popular volunteer network. As communications lead, he is responsible for the membership communications, public relations, social networking campaigns and overall management of the Webby-award winning VolunteerMatch brand. A frequent public speaker on subjects of nonprofits, service and technology, Robert is a native of Tucson, Ariz.

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