Welcome to Creative Australia’s Knowledge Series, a free series of webinars produced by Creative Australia covering essential fundraising topics by leading Australian and international experts. This webinar is entitled The Gratitude Shift, and the presenter is Lisa Sargent, who is based in New Hampshire in the USA. 

My name is James Boyd, and I am the State Manager of Development and Partnerships based in Perth, Western Australia, for Creative Australia. Creative Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of the land on which we live, work and learn. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present and to our shared future. 

A few webinar details before we begin. Auslan interpreters are in the session, and I welcome them and thank Erin and Jod. There will be a Q&A at the end of the presentation, so please type questions during the webinar into the Q&A box. For any technical issues, please send a message using the Q&A box to Crystal, and she will help you out. We are recording today’s session. 

Now to our speaker. Lisa Sargent is the top-selling author of Thanology, the new book for not-for-profits on the power of gratitude. Today, Lisa is going to turn us all into thankologists. And don’t worry, Lisa assures me this isn’t going to hurt. Quite the opposite, in fact. 

Thanking people for their support should be the easiest part of fundraising, but research suggests we are pretty good at falling short of our donors’ expectations. Lisa says appropriately responding to generous supporters is the key to a lasting and meaningful support relationship. A quote I frequently use says that 80% of donors say they would be motivated to make a second donation if the charity thanked them properly. 

Lisa is here to tell us what properly means. She specialises in this area of the fundraising cycle. Lisa is a fundraising storyteller to her bones, a next-level nerd about deepening human connection through fundraising stories well told, and holds a certificate with distinction in philanthropic psychology from the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy. She has written books and contributed to others such as Change for Better, and her free donor thank you letter clinics were named one of the world’s top 10 gifts for fundraisers by the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration. 

Lisa Sargent, let the transformation into thankologists begin. Over to you. 

Thank you so much, James. I want to thank Matt and everyone at Creative Australia. First and foremost, thank you to everyone joining today for taking the time to learn about thanking with us, and for your belief in the power of gratitude, because it truly is magic. 

There is a Q&A at the end. We will try to leave about 30 minutes. If your question does not get answered, please feel free to connect with me. Feel free to connect with me anyway on LinkedIn or on my website. Both details are there. 

The other thing I wanted to share is that we have a lot of information to cover. It might feel like I am giving you an avalanche of information, but I want you to be exposed to as many parts of thanking, and as many places where you can thank, as I possibly can today. 

We are going to begin right away. I have a question for everyone. What if your thank yous were not a formality, an awkward obligation, or the end of a gift transaction? What if, instead, they were the start of lasting and deeply meaningful supporter relationships? 

The truth is, gratitude done right can become exactly this for you. It all starts when you make what I like to call a gratitude shift. 

To show you how that can feel, I want to share a true story. It comes from my book, Thanology, but you will see a link at the bottom of the page where you can also read the story. I try to do this throughout the presentation because you may not have the resources, or you may not want to purchase the whole book. I hope you will, but if you do not, I try to give you links to everything I talk about. 

At the beginning of the year, not this year, but some year, Food for the Poor in California sent a simple thank you card to 25,000 of its highest donors. The card was sent in an envelope. There was no ask, no reply piece and no reply envelope. If you have ever seen thank you letters, many of you know that often a thank you also includes an ask for more money. You are not going to do that, and Food for the Poor did not do that either. 

By the end of the year, both groups of major givers, those who had received the card and those who had not, had given nearly the same number of gifts. So you might say to yourself, “Lisa, why are you sharing this story with me if they both gave the same number of gifts?” The group that received the thank you card gave almost $680,000 Australian dollars more, or $450,000 US, all from that thank you card. 

What does this mean for you? It means that gratitude is magic when you get it right. When you learn how to make this gratitude shift, when you become a thankologist for your charity, you are going to follow about three steps. 

The first step to the gratitude shift is to know your gratitude science. I want to show you the gratitude science behind why thanking is so effective because, at many organisations, it can be an uphill battle to elevate thanking to the powerful tool that it is. Once you know this gratitude science, and once you understand that thanking properly is literally DNA deep, you can make your case for better thanking to anyone, and you will understand how powerful it is. 

Because it is so powerful and so magical, I want to show you how to start thanking better right now. This is where I am going to share a lot of examples. It will be helpful to expose you to those examples so you can see that gratitude can be applied in so many more places than thank yous, and you can start today before you even end your workday. 

Step three is to show you how to be grateful across all your communications consistently, because that is the secret to those lasting relationships we talked about. 

We are going to dig right in with gratitude shift step one: know your gratitude science. 

The first thing I want to share about gratitude science is that proper gratitude is so much more than just a receipt for a donation. When you get it right, gratitude grows retention and value. We know this from the work of Professor Adrian Sargeant from the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy in the UK and US. He did research called Managing Donor Defection. 

What Dr Sargeant found is that 21% of donors stop giving because they were either never thanked or never informed on how their gifts were used. What does that mean? In a thank you letter, if you get your thank you letters right, they always thank, and they always show the donor how their gifts were used. So 21% of people who stop giving can be helped, right there, in a proper thank you letter. That is two donors out of 10. 

He also found that an increase in donor retention by 10%, if you can keep just one extra donor out of every 10, can yield up to a 200% increase in the lifetime value of your donor database. You already know that two donors out of every 10 stop giving because they were never thanked or not informed how their gifts were used. All you have to do is keep one extra donor in 10 to get that increase of up to 200% in lifetime value. That is pretty remarkable, and we know thank you has a hand in that. 

You might then say, “At my organisation, a lot of people say that it is just an awkward obligation. It is just a receipt. No one really wants to be thanked. It makes people feel awkward.” I hear this quite frequently. “No one really wants to be thanked, and people do not feel like that here at our organisation.” 

What we know from researchers Nicholas Epley and Amit Kumar at the University of Chicago is that they conducted a series of studies, reported in Undervaluing Gratitude. They had a group of senders compose warm gratitude letters that would be sent to a series of recipients. Before the senders sent out those letters, they had them do two things. They had them predict how awkward their gratitude letters would make the recipients feel, and they had them predict how much it would mean to receive those letters. 

The senders were wrong on both counts. First, the senders consistently overestimated how awkward the letters would make people feel. In other words, the letters made the recipients feel really good, not awkward. Second, they underestimated the positive meaning. They consistently underestimated how much those thank you letters would mean. Feels good, means more. This is the key to better thanking. You will notice that I use the word warm because one of the key ingredients for these letters being so effective was the warmth of the letter. 

You might say, “This is great. Everybody is sending out thank you letters, aren’t they?” No, they are not. Bill Jacobs in the United States and Kathy Truong from the Institute of Community Directors Australia both conducted mystery shopping tests, where they sent out a series of donations. In Bill Jacobs’ case, it was 55 gifts. In Kathy Truong’s case, it was 133 gifts. They found that more than 70% of organisations still are not sending thank you letters. They still are not thanking their donors. 

Kathy’s was, I believe, three months out, and she also found that many organisations did not thank very well. They were perfunctory letters. Remember that warm piece of it. This is the opportunity for you. You know it can keep more donors and reduce attrition, and you know that a lot of charities are still not sending those thank you letters. So where do we go from there? 

We also know that it is more than a transaction’s end. You are now starting to get a feel for this. Gratitude is so magical that it is DNA deep. It actually sows the seeds of legacy. It sows the seeds of all the things you want in fundraising, those everlasting gifts. 

The way it does this is that it sparks neurotransmitters and neuropeptides, and it lights up areas of your brain in this wonderful cocktail that joins up with dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, which many of you already know as those feel-good chemicals, the happiness chemicals. It also lights up a couple of regions of your brain that sit right behind your eyebrows: the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. 

All of these are very fancy technical terms to show you that, when you have warm gratitude and you spark these areas of the brain and increase these chemicals in the brain, they activate emotion, trust and memory centres. They reduce attrition and turnover, boost generosity, increase goodwill and wellbeing, and also increase a sense of self-worth. 

They increase average gift and speed to second gift. They increase understanding of others, something called pro-social behaviour, which we know is directly connected to gratitude. They move people to act for the common good, which is also known as theory of mind. 

If you think about it, if you are trying to change people, you are trying to create a movement in the arts and culture, gratitude opens the door to all of that. If you want somebody to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, gratitude helps open the door to that. If you want to build trust and activate emotion, gratitude does that. 

I am going to introduce you to four words that we will repeat throughout this webinar: warm, prompt, authentic and human. You already know your letters need to be warm, authentic and human. We will get to the prompt part in a minute. 

The reason it is so important to know that you want to reinforce gratitude more than once, and more than for that first gift, is because gratitude builds loyalty, and loyalty builds income. We know this from the work of a UK consultancy called About Loyalty. 

They did research with 50,000 donors across more than 30 charities. They found that a one-point increase in loyalty over three years can lead to 20% more income. That is pretty remarkable. 

You might ask, “How do I know that this connects to gratitude? How does loyalty connect to gratitude?” It connects through the key ingredients of loyalty: trust that your charity does what it promises, satisfaction with your charity’s communications, and commitment. Your donors want to stay with you. They have an affinity for your mission and cause. 

Let’s talk about warm gratitude. You send me this beautiful thank you letter, and you tell me how my gift is working. I trust that your charity is doing what it promises. You make me feel happy. You increase my sense of self-worth. You activate emotion, trust and memory centres. 

Am I going to be satisfied with your communications? It is probably a pretty good step towards that. If you make me feel good and I trust you, will I build affinity for your cause? You bet I will. Gratitude builds loyalty, and loyalty builds income. You can start with your next thank you. 

Gratitude shift step two: thank better, starting now. You already know all these magical things that gratitude can do, starting with your actual brain science. If you can start now, starting today, that gets you one step further and one step faster to better thanking. 

We are going to cover a lot of information in this section. I am sharing a PDF checklist with Creative Australia that you can download and keep with you every time you start to work on thank you letters. We are going to start first with the reason prompt is so important. 

What we know from research on new donors from Marcus B and Fundraising and Philanthropy Magazine is that acquiring new donors is five times more expensive than retaining an existing one. If your donors are thanked within the first 90 days, they are up to two times more likely to give again. If you can be warm and prompt, that kind of gratitude is magic. Two times more likely to give again. The second gift is really where it is at. 

What we know is warm and prompt. If you cannot thank promptly, this is part of what happens. Bill Jacobs at Analytical Ones in the United States did some work on the five-year value of a donor based on how quickly the donor is inspired to give again. These are in US dollars, but you do not need to know the currency to understand what is happening here. Single givers, $47. Zero to three months, $511 five-year value of a donor. You can watch it go down as the time stretches out. 

When you thank faster, people are more likely to give again, and that increases the five-year value of a donor. I also want to show you the far end: 37-plus months, and 25 to 36 months. If you say to me, “Lisa, we have not been great at thanking,” this is why I say start thanking better now. Even if you are late, 13 to 18 months or 19 to 24 months, as the chart moves out, it is still not too late for you. Please, for me, do not despair. Start thanking better right now, and even thank some of your donors who may not have been thanked as well as they should have been. 

I want you to start before you write. This is important because a lot of organisations do not do this. If you have ever received a thank you that is generic, has existed since pre-COVID times, or makes no sense to you, this is why. Maybe somebody is thanking you for something you did not exactly do, or maybe it could not possibly have happened yet. These three questions were not asked before the person started to write. 

What is prompting this thanks? Is it a Save Local Artists campaign? Is it a monthly giver campaign? Is it your holiday campaign or year-end campaign? You need to know what you are thanking the supporter for. What prompted that gift? 

Who are you writing to? At the very basic level, are they a first-time giver, second-time giver or monthly giver? You need to know who you are writing to. You need to know the deeper story you are hoping to connect people to. What kind of thank you story do you need to tell? 

Those three questions before you write are almost like a mini creative brief for your thank you. After you have those three questions, you are going to build using six thank you blocks. Remember: warm, prompt, authentic, human. This will help you tick all the boxes. 

First, you are going to thank the donor and let them know their gift was received. Conveniently, these spell thank you: T, H, A, N, K, U. I put them in blocks because I want you to understand that you can almost plug and play these into different parts of your thank you letter, or whatever you are using to thank people. You can combine them in any way, so the variety of your thank you letters is almost endless. 

T: thank the donor and let them know their gift was received. We know from the research of Adrian Sargeant that most people are never thanked, and that this is one of the reasons why 21% of donors leave. Thank them. Let them know their gift was received. 

H: help them see what their gift is doing. Let them know how their gift is working. A: ask the donor for something other than money if you can. Do not ask for money in a thank you. But you might have a special artist night, a poetry reading, a tour of your facility, or something else. You can invite them to something that makes them feel part of your community. 

N: notify them in your letter how they can reach you with questions. Do not give them a generic contact. Connect them to somebody who can really help them. K: kindle good feelings. You want to remember the warm part of the letter. You want to infuse the letter with emotion. This piece is huge, as you already know. Kindle good feelings by showing them how their gift is helping or will help. U: update them on when they will next hear from you, so you can create a sense of expectation. 

How does that look in real life? This is a letter from Merchants Quay Ireland. They help people who are homeless and who struggle with addiction. This is an actual thank you letter they sent out, which contains all six blocks in different order, as you can see. It has everything that a thank you letter needs to do. 

“He cast one look over his shoulder at MQI as he walked away, and he smiled at us. ‘Thanks a million,’ he said.” Do you see how this letter already does not start with “on behalf of”? It is not dry. It starts with a story. “His body and clothes were clean, his hunger and thirst quenched. And on his freshly tended and bandaged feet, he wore new socks and sturdy shoes.” Already you can start to feel that warmth and gratitude. 

Then you can see the actual thank piece: “There is no way I can ever sufficiently thank you for your kind summertime donation.” This was in response to a summer appeal, and the amount is listed. You know your gift was received. You know it is the correct amount. 

As you continue down the letter, you can see kindle: “No way I can ever express what it means to be able to write to you for urgent help and know that you will come through. Forever cherished within our Merchants Quay family.” They are already part of a community. You can see update: “If you have chosen to receive it, your Key Times donor newsletter will continue to reach you via post.” You can see notify: “You are very welcome to call us with any queries you might have.” You might say, “Where is the phone number?” We will get to that in a second. That is down below. 

Then ask. In this case, Merchants Quay would give tours of their homeless centre when it was closed. We would invite donors to that. Emma was the contact person, and we gave the phone number and the dates. All of those blocks are there, and you can do that for your organisation as well. 

The six thank you blocks can also look something like this. This is an email. If you think about it, there is a bit of a delay. These came in immediately after the donor gave a gift, so you cannot actually say, remember who you are writing to and what it is for. You have to think about the logistics of it. In an email, if that is going to come out right away, maybe they have not had time to put the gift to work. 

In this case, this was for survivors of the earthquakes in Myanmar. “This is how your compassion will soon feel to earthquake survivors in Myanmar.” You can see how you can do that if you are thanking by email. If it has not actually gone to work yet, you can say that it will. You can see help in there, so they can see how their gift is working: temporary shelters, clean life-saving water, emergency food, hygiene kits and medical supplies. 

Then you can see the thank elements come into play: “The warmth of your generous donation of…” and there is the amount. They have confidence that you have received the gift and that you are a good custodian of it. You can see the update in the postscript. We do not actually know, and this is important if you do not have a newsletter or if there is no way that you can update them yet. “The full extent of the destruction in Myanmar may not be known for weeks, and I will update you as I can.” You create an expectation that the person will update them when they can. 

There is a call to action. In this case, because some of them would be new supporters, ask them to sign up for the newsletter. You can see how the thank you blocks come into play and how they create warmth just by using those six blocks. 

Kindle versus help is important because I want to help you get your thank yous to the next level. Remember the three questions we talked about before you start writing: what is prompting this thanks, who am I writing to, and what is the deeper story I hope to connect them to? 

If you think about the blocks kindle versus help, help is about saying thank you for the thing that you gave to us for. For example, the shelter, the clean water, the supplies for art, the sponsorships. You can help them see the specific tangibility of their gift. Kindle is about helping them feel good about who they are, who they are as a person, and who they are when they give. 

These are the things that can take your thank you to a whole other level. What is the deeper story that you hope to connect them to? The generous person they are. These are the questions they are thinking about: Who am I when I give? Who am I as part of your work? Who am I as someone who supports you? Who am I as part of humankind? 

You might say this is crazy, but you already know that thanking is not an awkward obligation. You know that it is important to people. If you can help introduce these ideas and affirmations to people, so they can see just how special they are when they give, you will take your gratitude to a whole other level. In other words, thank the giver, not just the gift. 

How do you do that? You can think about the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, which has a whole chart of identities that you can start to thank people for. To the right, you can see qualities donors have reported in surveys that they feel when they give. They feel kind, caring, compassionate, helpful, friendly, fair, hard-working and generous. 

We have conducted surveys with other organisations, and supporters come back with these beautiful words. We ask them, “How do you feel as a person when you make a gift to this organisation?” I am going to turn my head away from the screen for a minute because I want to read you another organisation’s qualities that donors reported back personally about how they feel. The words are compassionate, caring, love, justice, help, sharing, empathy, kindness, hope, generosity and support. 

Those are beautiful words. If you can begin to bring those words back to donors, you will reinforce identities and kindle all those gorgeous feelings, neurotransmitters and neuropeptides that we talked about. 

You can also tap into various other levels of identity that people feel. Their personal identity, as we just talked about. Relational identity: mother, father, sister, brother, uncle, aunt, cousin. Group identity, if they have a special group. Organisational identity. Remember we said, “You are a cherished member of our family.” You can help them feel like part of your community. 

There is also religious identity, if you have an organisation that is associated with that; social identity; local, national and international identity; and even global identity, if you want. These are things that you can kindle in people when you write your thank you letters. 

What does that look like? Who are they when they give? It is not awkward. You can use phrases like this: “Thank you for being the kind of person who…” “Because of your kindness and compassion for the arts, for culture…” “Because you are someone who believes in standing up for the arts…” “You answered the call when we asked you to save local artists.” “You answered the call.” “Thank you for being exactly who you are.” 

“You never turn away.” “You protector of Australian arts and culture.” “Champion of artists and creators.” “Believer in beauty and the power of community.” This is how you can elevate a person’s gift because all of these things are true. This is who they are when they give to your organisation. If you can bring those affirmations back to them, you will totally transform your relationship with your supporters. 

This is a sample of a letter. It is actually an appeal letter shared by Derek Patton and Tom Ahern on SOFII, the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration that James mentioned. It is all free resources online that you can access. I want to share it because I want to show you how you can elevate a gift beyond a simple transaction for, “Thanks for giving to our annual fund.” These are people who believe they are more than arts patrons. They are true believers. 

Picture this. You support a generation of young people whose interests are encouraged and honoured. Neighbourhoods made beautiful through public art. Small non-traditional businesses that grow and succeed. An economy made invincible by a steady level of investment in local creative vision. Obviously, you are not going to take someone else’s words, but words like these give you a feel for how you can elevate those thank you letters with the kindle piece of your thank you. 

So it is more than a gift. When someone gives to you, they are the lifeblood of everything you do. This is the Vail Valley Foundation. This is their newsletter that we did for them in Vail, Colorado. Obviously, there is lots of skiing out there, but this is a basic thank you letter that we wrote for them. You can see how you want to put the donor right in the middle of the action. 

The letter does not start with anything dry. It starts with the roar of a concert, fans cheering in the background, the shush of skis speeding towards a jump, the quiet tap tap tap of fingers on keyboards. Then you can pick out the thank you blocks because you know them already. Here is help and thank: “Everyone here at the Vail Valley Foundation owes you a heartfelt thank you for your kind gift. Only through your generous support can this good work continue.” 

But there it is, the beautiful phrase that taps into their identity, even if it is one they did not know they were before: “You are the lifeblood of Vail Valley Foundation. The dancers can dance only because of you. The athletes can compete only because of you.” You can see how this elevates it beyond the simple one-time transaction. 

This is what I want you to get into the habit of doing every time, because it makes a huge difference. It feels so much better than this: “On behalf of our board of directors, trustees…” Nobody wants to read that, and it does not make people feel anything. 

Instead, you can try this: “His words were simple, but from the heart.” A physician says, “When we got Danielle back, I was almost in tears. Thank you for taking the time to give.” You can thank people for their time, which is also precious. “Thank you for being part of this beautiful community. We believe great health care is worth protecting. You believe it, too.” Think about this letter translated for the arts. You could do something so similar to this, and it would be hugely powerful. “We believe that art belongs here at home, and you believe it. In giving, you have shown that you believe it, too.” 

How many of you have given online and been bounced back to a page that looks something like this? Sometimes it looks just like the donation form, only it has this little thing at the top that says, “Your donation has been processed.” That is a bit of a bummer, honestly. It makes people feel sad in their souls for this beautiful gift they have just given. 

Instead, you could create a redirect page that, after the person gives, immediately transports them to something like this: “Your donation has just changed the life of a child with sight loss and other complex disabilities in Ireland.” It starts not dry. It starts with the feeling of grass beneath your feet and the warmth of sunshine on your face. Can you put people into the moment when you thank them? This is the instant after they gave. It is an instant hit: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin. You are starting to build trust right there. Even if they never read your thank you letter, they will understand what they just did. 

There is also a way to connect with people by phone if they have any questions. You can see the paragraph near the bottom right: “Shortly via email, we will send an official record of your incredibly kind donation.” You are already starting to build trust from the instant they give online. You have already set up an expectation for that email. 

Do not panic, because if you look at the top left of the screen grab, you will see there is a Better Online and Email Thanking PDF that I also shared as part of this webinar. It is a small checklist, just a couple of pages, that will help you make sure you do your online thanking properly as well. 

This last section of this short tutorial on how to thank better with your thank you letter, starting now, is not about a letter, online copy or design. It is about a phone call. Phone calls change everything. 

If you have not thanked donors for a long time, pick up the phone and call donors. It does not matter if they answer the phone. There is a script in my book, but you do not have to get too fancy. You just have to say thank you and use some of the tools that we used for the thank you letters. “Hi, this is Jane calling. I am on the all-volunteer board of XYZ charity, and I just wanted to call and say thank you. It has been a while, and we wanted to update you on XYZ.” Or you might want to invite them to something: “We have a beautiful Christmas carol event coming up, and we would love to have you as part of it.” Leave a message. Make it very simple. 

There is an article on Creative Australia written by Matt Morse. It is superb, and it applies to donors who are not just mid-level either. Research from Bloomerang on 1.95 million donors showed that new donors who get a thank you call within the first 90 days are retained 41% of the time. Without a call, only 33% are retained. 

Thank you calls have also been shown to increase the average of the second gift by double, and decrease the time to the second gift, which is hugely important, by 50 days, from 261 to 217 days. You already know that promptness matters. If you can thank within a week, that would be really good. You will decrease the time even further. If you follow it up with a phone call, that will be even better. 

Gratitude shift step three. You know about thanking better now. You know about thanking online. You know how important it is to make a phone call. Gratitude shift step three is about showing you how to be consistent with your grateful communications. You want to do it across multiple channels. 

Remember the loyalty ingredients: trust, satisfaction and commitment. Remember that it means a 20% increase in income. This is why you do not want to just thank in only thank yous. You want to thank in more places than just your thank yous, because you want to keep reinforcing that trust that your charity does what it promises. Keep people satisfied with your communications. If you thank them again and again and provide good quality communications, they will be satisfied with your communications. It will increase commitment. It will build the reasons they want to stay with you through thick and thin. These are the ingredients of loyalty. 

The way you can do that is with a very simple strategy created by, or made famous by, Steven Screen in the United States from the Better Fundraising Company: ask, thank, report, repeat. 

On my website, I have a free PDF download. It is about 37 pages long and has the whole story of Merchants Quay Ireland and what happened when we took ask, thank, report, repeat and infused it with gratitude. Their retention went up by nine percentage points. I think they started with 2,000 donors, and I believe they are over 50,000 now. That was in a little over a decade. 

When you do this, it really works in practice. We have done it many times across many organisations, and it can work for you. You ask with your appeal. You follow it up with a thank you, using exactly the things we just talked about. You include an invitation to something if you can, either in the letter itself or, as we used to do here, by putting little homespun invitations in. 

Then you report back, whether you have a newsletter, and I hope you will have a print newsletter and an email newsletter, but find some way to report back to your donors. That is important. You want to make sure you thank and report back before you ask again. If you do not show someone what their gift accomplished and you do not thank them for it, how can you ask again, unless some emergency comes up? 

You want to put your thank yous across everything as part of that ask, thank and report. You want to be warm, authentic, consistent and human. This is actually in an appeal letter. I wanted to show you how you can thank in appeal letters and why it is so important. This is to people who have never given to the organisation before. 

One thing I like to do is sit and ask myself: what thing can I actually thank people for that is true? What is true is, “Thank you for taking the time to read my letter.” I do not know if they are going to give. I cannot thank them for past support, but I can thank them for taking the time to read the letter. I can thank them for caring, because if they are reading the letter, then we can say, “Thank you so much for caring.” 

You can thank them even on a reply slip. We send out a full-size reply slip for this organisation. Whether or not they give, they see that thank you. It is like an affirmation to them. 

You can also put them on outer envelopes. This is huge. This is on the back of a newsletter outer envelope. You can see here why we are constantly reporting back to people and consistently thanking them warmly: “8,000 people were able to sustainably grow more food with the help of your support, and through seed recovery programs like the kind you will read about inside, you are reaching people around the world. Thank you.” That is on the back of an envelope. You can put the thanks everywhere. 

This is on the front of a reply envelope. If you have people who give through the mail, everybody sends a reply envelope. Sometimes at your events, you might have remittance envelopes where people can tear off the flap and send in a gift. You can put a thank you on the outside of the envelope. 

Here, I like to use rhyme because rhyme lights up the brain. Texture words, rhyme and poetry. Poetry is like music for the brain. If you can make your writing beautiful in this way, then you can touch even deeper emotion centres in people. “For the joy, new memories and laughter this spring, thank you. Thank you for everything. Your love is magic to us here.” Arts organisations can definitely do things like this rhyming. 

Here is a newsletter. You could put this online. Let’s say you do not yet have a print newsletter, and you want to put something online. “Thank you for a thousand warm welcomes.” You can report back to them on things over the course of the year that they are helping make possible. In this case: 148 pairs of weary feet given care and relief through MQI chiropody, 25,000 lunches, and 19,000 sleeping mats. The more true you can get, the more authentic you can be. 

“Thank you for a thousand warm welcomes.” You can say this even through your organisation. You have symphony musicians, cultural programs, artists painting, and creative people designing. You have things like that all over the place that you can use as a report back. “These were some of the wonders worked by kind support like yours.” This is in a newsletter. “How are your donations working? Let us count the ways.” 

You can see if they make a gift, they get a thank you and then get these report backs constantly. You are reinforcing their generosity as a wonderful, warm, kind-hearted, compassionate person and, in your cases, a person who believes in arts and culture in Australia. 

This is the front of a newsletter where we start thanking and affirming right from the start: “Read how your compassion is helping people build new tomorrows.” Remember how we looked at the Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy and those identities that we want to bring in? “Who am I when I give? Who am I as part of your organisation? Who am I as part of humankind?” Your compassion, generosity, justice, love, caring and kindness. All those words are part of supporters’ key identities. You can keep reinforcing them in beautiful ways. 

In this case, on the inside of a newsletter: “Thank you for helping us be here when we are needed most.” It does not always have to be flowery. It does not always have to be poetic. If you want to keep it more matter-of-fact in some cases, “Thank you for helping us be here when we are needed most.” It is true. You are saying the bravest, truest thing you can by thanking them. 

Again, this is on a newsletter cover letter. We always send a letter included with our newsletter. “Thank you for your visionary support. You make it possible, and each of us here is forever grateful.” You can reinforce that again and again. You already know that you almost cannot thank often enough. You almost cannot thank warmly enough. People love it. 

Online and email are the same thing. When we write for an organisation called Barretstown, we create direct mail letters. They take those letters and put them online. It exists as a long-form web page, and this is a block of the letter. We do not know if these people have given to Barretstown before, but when they go to that page online it says: “I know that this works because generosity and kindness like yours made that same trip to Barretstown possible for my family.” You can see how, even there, you can start to thank supporters all over the place, and supporters-to-be, we hope. 

Email. This is an example of an email that I wrote for Trócaire, the organisation in Ireland. This is the actual copy of the draft that I submit. It looks like this. It is not in email format. You can look at the subject lines: “The wonderful gift you gave,” “For your generosity and love,” “For the hope you gave. Thank you.” You continue to reinforce thanking and emotion. 

It works exactly the same for email as it does for thank you letters. You can see how those same blocks are woven in. You can see how the identity is there: “The light of your compassion,” “the light that you are,” “what matters is you have not turned away.” Everything reinforces the person’s generosity, shows how they helped, and talks about the amount of their gift, so they understand you are a good custodian of their gift. It just keeps reinforcing and reinforcing. 

This is an actual donation redirect page. In other words, someone gives online, and this is the very next thing they see. They do not see, “Your donation has been processed.” They see, “What a gift you are,” and there is their name because we know it from the previous field. “What a beautiful gift you have chosen to give, and what a true gift you are.” You take the time to work identity in there and bring everything up to the next level. 

Every single piece of this reinforces those six blocks. In this case, we will not put the amount of the gift in because they will get that in an email. But you can see all six blocks in there: the thanking, the helping, the asking and notifying. Kindle is there too: “What a beautiful gift you are.” They are all there. 

If you begin to thank properly, and I talked at the beginning about legacy, I want to show you how, when you are responding to things like will planning requests, even that can elevate the thanking. 

This is a legacy guide that we created for an organisation in Ireland. To the right is a basic thank you letter, but it is much deeper than that if you pay attention to it. When you build these, you can reflect shared values. One of the great ways to do that is if you share a really nice quote. Be careful who you attribute it to. Just make sure it is not someone who is going to invite bad feelings or anything. 

In this case, it is Pericles. “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” Already, you take a simple request for a legacy planner and elevate it to the next level. You elevate the actions. You thank the giver, not just the gift. “You are today and always the heart of our Trócaire family.” They are already part of a community. 

You tell grateful stories. In this case, the gratitude story is the story they can tell when they leave a gift to charity in their will. We actually say, “You might leave it to us or to any other charity.” That shows a bit of fellowship and humanity, so they understand that everyone is elevated when a charitable donation is given like that. You include affirmations: “Keep safe and well this summer, and God bless.” They are religious, so we say that. You can see how this simple letter begins to elevate it, and you can thank in so many more places, including in-memory giving. 

What I mean by in-memory giving is, and it is a trend that is growing, when someone passes away and they do not want flowers at their funeral. In lieu of flowers, they want the people who attend their funeral, or who want to leave a gift, to leave a gift in memory of them to a charity they believed in. 

There is now also hard evidence to show that an in-memory relationship with a charity may lay the foundation for a legacy gift. This comes from a consultancy in the UK called Legacy Foresight. It is an incredible report, and it shows that people who have left in-memory gifts in the right circumstances have a higher tendency to leave a bequest in their will to a charity. 

Knowing this, and if you think about the way in-memory thanking happens at most organisations, I can tell you that often in-memory thanking is lacking. What happens is you receive a thank you back that might make no sense to what you did. It does not really feel like an act of love and remembrance, that you gave a gift for someone who had passed away in honour of their memory. You can do much better, especially now that you know, first, how powerful thanking is, and second, that there is a connection between in-memory giving and legacy. 

On SOFII, in my book Thanology, and also on SOFII, I have a whole section on how to write lively memorial donation thank you letters. I originally started to do this as one of the first things I did on SOFII. 

I will take a minute and share this with you because I gave an in-memory gift to a hospice organisation in the United States that cared for my mother in the last hours of her life. They were wonderful. They did a great job. 

About a year later, after the first gift I gave, I received this card. They thanked me for the gift I gave, but then proceeded to get my mother’s name wrong. Not just a little wrong, completely other-galaxy wrong. What happened in that moment was that my heart was crushed, and they lost me as a donor because they did not even remember my mother’s name. 

I had thought, as you do, that your mum is special to you. I had thought she was special to them, and they did not get her name right. It was just a database thing, and I should know better than anybody else that it was just a database thing. But this is what I want you to understand. In addition to meaning a lot to donors, in addition to making in-memory giving count, and in addition to maybe sparking legacy gifts, there are also human beings behind it. You want to take great care. 

You will find that workshop online. If you think about thanking as a thankologist, you want to be thanking properly at every stage in the game. This is where you cannot get those three questions wrong. You need to know who you are writing to, why you are writing to them, and what you need to say. 

Instead of sending some perfunctory “on behalf of” letter, you can send something that does not have to be fancy, but can say something like: “Because of you, the memory of the person you love will live on in the smile of each child we help at Boys and Girls Aid. Thank you for your heartfelt donation, which we received on…” All that information is up front, and already you know that the person's memory will live on. In honouring another, you make a lasting investment in the lives of children who are homeless across Oregon. 

The letter goes on. There is a contact. There is tax language because, in this case, we had to put it in there. We just put it in the postscript. If it is a warm letter, you do not have to worry about it. I know in some places you need receipts, but if the letter is warm, the receipt is fine at the bottom. 

Please, for me, in your journey as a thankologist and in your journey to make thanking warm, do not forget in-memory thanking. Elevate that to the highest level you possibly can. 

In these three steps, the gratitude shift, you have learned about the brain science. We talked about some mechanical pieces of how you can take your thank you letters, starting now, how you can use phone calls, and how you can sprinkle great thanking across every communication you have and every channel, including social media. 

You now know that gratitude is not an awkward obligation. It is a superpower for everyone, and I really mean everyone. 

Research from Gallup and Workhuman found that one thank you once a week was enough to cut disengagement and burnout in half. In the same study, less than 40% of people felt adequately recognised for their contributions. This goes a long way to helping us talk about how we can stem the tide of attrition in the fundraising sector. Great people are leaving fundraising every day, and part of that tide can be turned by simply acknowledging the amazing people who work beside you every day. Great leaders share gratitude. Co-workers share gratitude. Great teams share gratitude. 

What happens when we get it right? What I like to call gratitude and generosity everlasting. This is a quote from a real-life donor. But before I share it with you, I want you to look to your left at the thank yous, the little picture of the thank yous. 

What has happened at every single organisation I have worked with, and every organisation I have not worked with that gets gratitude right, is that they start to get fan mail. People will email me and say, “I started to write my thank you letters better, and we started getting letters back for our CEO, our executive director, or the leader of our organisation.” Fan mail from supporters who are so stunned that someone took the time to see their secret heart, to see how generous they were, that they send back fan mail saying, “Thank you for your amazing thank you.” 

I leave you with the words of Clara. “You are always thanking donors, but as a donor, without your hard work and dedication, my money is worth nothing. It is only money. You translate it into love.” A real-life donor wrote this, and she has confirmed a legacy pledge in her will. That is what happens when you become a thankologist. You translate money into love. Thank you so much. I think we can take questions now. 

Terrific presentation. If you are interested in asking questions, we have half an hour or so. Please put them in the Q&A chat box, and I will facilitate that. You would think saying thank you was easy, wouldn’t you? But you have gone into great depth and explained the science behind it, with terrific research and evidence of the impact of really stepping up and doing thank you and gratitude on a new level, which is incredibly valuable. 

I am reminded of a situation where I worked with a foundation and an arts company, and I brokered a small grant of about $15,000. It was the first grant they had received from a foundation, so I suggested to the arts company that perhaps their chair could ring the foundation and thank them for the donation. They did, which was terrific. But then I got an email from the manager of the philanthropic foundation saying that was the first time they had received a phone call from a grant recipient in 10 years in the job. That stayed with me. It demonstrated just how we do tend to fall short in regard to our gratitude to our supporters. 

That brings me to one of the questions that has come in. How do you balance a letter versus a phone call, particularly keeping in mind that most of the organisations we work with are small to medium arts companies? They have limited resources. We do not often have dedicated development managers who have teams of people. What would you say to them in regard to when you use a letter, when you use an email, whether it is okay to use an email, and when you use a phone call? 

In a perfect world, I would try to use all three. I would use all three if the person made their gift online and if you had permission to mail them. A lot of times when people give online, they can opt out of direct mail or post. If they have done that, then obviously you would not send them a hard thank you by post. 

If possible, what happens is this. Let’s say they give online. They get the beautiful thank you redirect page that we talked about, and then it says that you will send an email. So they get an email back that thanks them. Often, what we will say to people who give online, if we have permission to mail them, is that the CEO will send their own note soon, and it will come by post. That is like the icing on the cake for people because they get it through multiple channels. What we know is that if you can cross channels, it tends to keep people longer and they tend to give more. 

If you have to divide it up, I would definitely get your screen done so that, when someone gives online, that thank you redirect is really warm. Make sure you send a beautiful warm email, and if you can, follow it up at some time in the next three months. It does not have to be immediate. If they are new supporters, I would prioritise a phone call as part of an email and a phone call. 

There is an article, and I think it might have been on the page I shared that includes Kathy Truong from the Institute of Community Directors Australia. She was talking about how she gave, I believe by email, but then they thanked her through a completely different channel. You want to be sure first that you follow the channel they gave through. If I give to you through the mail, thank me through the mail. If I give to you online, thank me online. If you cannot send by post because you are small, try to send a hard copy thank you perhaps every quarter, every six months or every year. Try to make it special if you are very strapped, and definitely try to prioritise a phone call, even if all you do is leave a voicemail. 

Would you feel, in regard to phone calls, and Georgina has asked this question, we are now in a situation where people do not pick up the phone if they do not recognise where the call is coming from. They literally just ignore the call. How long do you persist with trying to make that personal call? 

You can leave a voicemail, which is what I would do. I do not know if you have these, but we have things now where we can do ringless messages, so it goes straight to voicemail. If you can do that, you could try that. I read an article today on how that can help reduce monthly giving attrition. If a person is a monthly giver, they tend to stop around, I believe, month nine. The research suggested that ringless voicemail messages at months three, six and nine can reduce monthly giving dropout by about 40%, which is huge. 

If you cannot speak to people directly on the phone, just leave a message, because a message still makes a difference. You can leave your phone number and say, “If you have any questions, call me back. We would love to hear from you.” People are used to receiving poor-quality voicemail messages. To have someone send a beautiful warm thank you, such as, “We are just calling to say thank you. You are amazing. Give us a shout if you have any questions. We would love to hear from you, and we are here for you any time,” is really nice. You could even include an invitation, such as, “We are doing a Christmas carol event on 23 December, and we would love to have you there.” Something like that would be beautiful. 

I am not sure whether we have that message-only facility here. We probably do, but that is a great suggestion. 

Another question has come in about whether the cost of mailing hard copy gets any negative reaction. Is there any research on that? 

It does sometimes. Jeff Brooks in the United States says that if you are not getting complaints, then you are not doing enough. Sometimes complaints are a useful sign. The way I would respond to that is, if your communications by post are valuable, you will not get too many people who feel that way. They are often surprised to receive post, and when the post is meaningful, it matters. 

We had a supporter save all our newsletters in a shoebox, and she would bring them out and read them from time to time. People who do not want to receive post, you always respect their preferences, and you always give them a chance with everything you send to opt out. If they do not want to hear from you again by post, they can tick a box or whatever system you use. 

For newsletters, because we send print and digital newsletters frequently, I need to step aside for one second. What we know about print is that print leaves a deeper footprint in your brain, because of the tangible aspect of it. We know that if you can get people to also receive post from you, they tend to stay longer and give more. Print is hugely valuable. 

If you send out a newsletter that is high quality, donor-focused and donor-centred, and that shows people how their gift is working without taking away dignity from the people you are helping, if that is the case, then print can work well. You have to be careful with that. What we have found is that the return on investment for newsletters can be anywhere from two to one, up to six or seven to one. Every dollar they spend can return six dollars in donations, which is extraordinary for a newsletter. 

That is my little pitch on print. From time to time, on the back of print newsletters, we will talk about that. We might say, “Did you know that print leaves a deeper footprint in your brain and a lasting memory? This newsletter is so important to our organisation that for every dollar we invest in printing, up to two dollars are returned to us.” I think it is important to do that, and we have reinforced that on the back of an envelope. 

If it comes down to return on investment, why would you not do it? 

Another question that has come in is particularly related to the nature of arts organisations that have multiple projects happening over different times of the year, and using funds from different appeals and campaigns. This person asks, how many updates or thank you messages would you say is too many? 

What I like to think about is the ask, thank, report, repeat cycle. If you were starting really small, if I was starting tomorrow and I wanted to do it right, the best results I have seen have been with four appeals and four newsletters in a year. Then, in between, you would have thank you letters to people who gave. 

That is a great strategy, but it is also a lot of work for a small organisation. Even if you send two or three appeals a year and try to do two newsletters, we have started with that as well, as long as you can thank and update people from time to time. It does not always have to be a newsletter that comes back. It could be that every October you turn it into a thank you month, where you send a thank you card to everyone. Create little traditions within your organisation that make it manageable for you. 

I would try to at least, if people give to you, get them a really good, high-quality thank you letter, if that is all you can do, or email, or even a text message if that is what you send. Try to sprinkle that thanks across multiple channels. Then do not ask for more money, unless you have an emergency, until you actually thank them for what they have given. 

If, for example, their donation is to unrestricted funds, it might cover the whole work of the organisation. You can send a broader thank you for that. You can actually say, “Your wonderful donation supports multiple programs here that deliver immense value to the community.” Do not be afraid to say that. People like that realism and truth. 

I love the little model, ask, thank, report, repeat. It is super simple but brilliant. However, I have heard in the past that the best time to ask for a donation is when someone has just donated. Do you disagree with that? Would you stick with ask, thank and report? 

I would stick with it. I have had this conversation with a lot of organisations. There is a story in the book from an organisation I work with in the United States. They always put a hard ask for more money in their thank you letters, and they believed in it. It raised, for a big organisation, in US dollars, about a quarter of a million dollars a year from these thank you letters. 

I suggested to them, “Why do you not just try a nice thank you? Do not put an ask for more money in it, because research shows…” Then I went into my little pitch. They said, “No, we cannot possibly do that.” I said, “Just test it with a few donors. You have that beautiful example from the start, a plain thank you letter with no ask and what it can do for people.” They would not test it. 

Their retention rate was that they were only keeping 20% of their new donors. That, for me, is the answer to beat all answers. If you really want to grow retention, you cannot be asking all the time, because people need to be thanked first. That is how it works. That is how we know it is effective. You might get income in the short term, but you might not keep those donors. You are not going to build the loyalty and affinity that we want to. Gratitude builds loyalty. Loyalty builds income. 

On 23 October here in Australia, we have our inaugural national giving day to the arts, which has been titled AusArt Day. It is one day of the year, 23 October, and arts organisations have been invited to register with Creative Australia to take part in AusArt Day. Have you got any specific tips on how best to handle the thank you for people participating in one-day campaigns? 

By that, do you mean what would be the best way to thank people to stand out? 

One would assume and hope that you would have plenty of donations coming in very quickly over a short period of time. It may not be easy to follow up with phone calls. I think everything you have said helps, but are there any specific further tips on how to handle that gratitude part of a giving day? 

A couple of things that I do when I work on projects like that. When I do my appeal, whether it is email or direct mail, I write the thank you at the same time. You can set all these things in place before the giving day, especially with automated systems. I am assuming a lot of that takes place online. 

If most of it is online, then you can have a beautiful thank you redirect page set up. It does not have to be fancy. It can be like the sample I showed: “Thank you, you have just helped save the life of a child.” They make the donation, they get this beautiful redirect page, and then they receive your thank you email, which would be automated. You could automate it so that it includes their name, the date and the amount, or the receipt. 

If you cannot include that information, figure out a way to get them the thank you first and say, “We will follow up with a receipt.” That creates the update. “We will follow up with a receipt within the next two to three weeks, but we are a really small organisation. We love you. We are so grateful to you for supporting the arts. We are grateful for who you are. We will get a receipt to you as soon as we can within the next couple of weeks.” That is okay because they have been thanked. They feel loved, and they are prepared to wait. 

You could even send a little video update if you are able to do that. You could send it to all your supporters with everyone there, holding the phone out, and just say, “Thank you. We love you.” Very simple things. Think in your head: how can I be as warm as possible and thank as many people as possible, then set the expectation that within the next couple of weeks you will get them a proper receipt. They have been thanked. It feels good. It is warm and prompt. They are okay to wait a couple of weeks because you have done what you need to do. 

The other thing is to really give careful thought to that donor experience. Even make a donation yourself before the day to make sure you know exactly the experience your donor is having when they make a donation on the day. 

That is a huge thing. I am glad you thought of that because one of the first things I always do when I work with organisations is see what it looks like. What is a donor experiencing when they give? Make your own mystery donation and see what happens, and see what the follow-up is. They could even stage a series of emails that would come in afterwards, such as, “It has been a month since your gift.” You could set that up as well, and you can test that. 

Just as a final reminder on AusArt Day, to those participating in the webinar today, please register on Creative Australia’s website for that opportunity. Registration is not compulsory, but it does give you access to a number of assets that will help you run the day. 

Final opportunity for questions. Otherwise, we will wrap up. Lisa, any final remarks from your perspective? 

My perspective is this. Since you are talking about organisations that are small or mid-sized and just growing, remember that often small is its own kind of superpower, and ultra-local is its own kind of superpower. It means you can do things that do not necessarily scale. 

If you have supporters, you can invite people to your organisation or send out little homespun cards. You might say, “We are going to send out two cards a week,” or “We are going to make two calls a week.” Start small, but just start. Do not get too hung up on thinking, “I did not have the ‘you’ in my letter,” or “I did not ask people to something. I have done it all wrong.” The fact that you are starting to thank more warmly and more promptly is, in itself, magical. You will get there. Do not panic that you have to do everything tomorrow, but start thanking now. 

Welcome everyone. I am the Victorian and Tasmanian State Manager for Creative Partnerships Australia, and I will be convening today’s session with the wonderful Tammy Zonker. Before we kick off, we would like to acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land from which we are webcasting today, and we pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging. Tammy is joining us from Detroit, where it is about 8.30 pm, so thank you, Tammy, for making the effort to stay up a little bit later. A little bit of housekeeping. We would like everyone to stay on mute, but we do encourage all your questions to go into the chat function. We will set aside some time towards the end of the session for questions and responses from Tammy. 

The other thing I would also like to mention is that my wonderful colleague Katherine, who has set all this up, will put a link in the chat function for those of you who have not signed up for our National Development Collective database. This is a function where we can arrange networking meetings and professional development opportunities for those of you working as professionals in fundraising and development. There it is. It has just popped up in the chat. If you have not signed up for that, we would certainly encourage you to do that. Today’s session is Securing the Major Donor Visit and Getting to Yes. To take us through this journey is the wonderful Tammy Zonker. 

Tammy is an international expert on fundraising and has raised more than half a billion dollars, including one incredible major gift of $27 million. She truly is an expert. Before we came live today, we were talking about the nuances in attitudes towards money in Australia. I know myself and my colleagues come across all sorts of emotional responses when people ask for money. I think it is part of the Australian character not to want to beg for money, not to be mendicant when it comes to money, and to really want to be self-reliant and in charge of the money question. But money is not necessarily just an unemotional issue. There is certainly an emotional dimension to asking for major gifts. On that note, I might hand you over to Tammy. 

Tammy has a wonderful presentation that we are going to go through, but as I said, we will have time for questions at the end. Thank you, Tammy. Over to you. 

Thank you, Stephen, and thank you everyone for making time this morning on the eve of, for many of you, freedom day, coming out of lockdown. I am so happy for you. Let’s get started because I have a lot of information to share. As Stephen said, we are going to be talking about securing the major donor visit, which can be so elusive, and getting to a yes. 

I want to start with a question because it is baffling to me. Why don’t donors want to meet with us? Why is it so hard to get a face-to-face or video-to-video visit with our major donors? Drop it in the chat. It baffles me because obviously we are charming. I can see from your faces that you are a charming lot. You are brilliant and very good-looking. Who would not want to meet with us and spend some time? Drop it in the chat. What are some of the reasons why you think donors do not want to meet with us? 

They are too busy. They hate to say no. They want to keep some professional distance. Australians are very polite, so you do not want to say no or to be put in a position. Zoom fatigue is a reality. They do not care to be hit up for money. Too many requests. I remember, in my youth, in my very first fundraising job, I met with a major donor. His name was John. I was so wide-eyed and innocent. I said, “John, this must be so amazing for you, to be able to make such a difference, to give away money and make such a difference for so many organisations in our community.” He truly was one of the community’s largest philanthropists. He peered over his reader glasses and said, “Tammy, it is harder than you think. I have to say no more than I ever get to say yes. I have to say no to really amazing projects.” 

All of the reasons that you stated could be right, depending on the donor. Here is what the surveys say. They are busy people, and some of you said that in the chat. Some of them do not see the value of meeting with us, and that hurts. But if we are just there thanking them and asking questions about them, not necessarily enriching their life, not necessarily bringing them joy or sharing the impact of how their gift is changing lives, they do not necessarily feel the value emotionally or otherwise after a visit. 

Some of them are uncomfortable in those one-on-one conversations. They are afraid of awkward silences. They know you are coming to ask them for money, which could be an indicator that maybe we have not done enough stewardship. If we only ask for money whenever we see them, or if that is their perception, it is understandable that they may be cautious. They are also concerned, in these times of pandemic, about meeting with us. Some are uncomfortable using Zoom or other video conferencing. 

Those are some of the reasons, along with the reasons you shared in the chat. There is a saying from Alexander the Great: “I have met the enemy and it is I.” Sometimes we set ourselves up not to succeed. When we request a meeting and say, “I just want to meet with you to thank you,” they have already received the gift acknowledgement letter. It is not always that interesting to them to spend their precious time being thanked. We need to rethink that as a strategy because we will get more noes when we say we are just calling to thank them. 

Sometimes we call and say, “I would like to schedule an appointment with you,” rather than scheduling a visit. The business of fundraising is a relationship business. You would not call your grandmother and say, “I would like an appointment with you.” You would want to visit with her. That is what we want to do with our donors. We want to visit with them. We have an appointment with the dentist. 

Another issue is over-asking and under-reporting on impact. If the only time donors see us is when we are asking for money, it is no wonder they want to avoid us a bit. If we have a history of not adding value during visits, not reporting impact, not giving inside information, and not leaving them with the joy of the impact their gifts have made, those are reasons donors do not want to meet with us. 

Another oversight is not inviting a board member, executive director, CEO, or peer whom the donor deeply respects, already knows, and who is also a giver, to join that visit and report on the favourite program the donor has invested in. Including a board member, another leadership volunteer, your CEO, or your creative director is one way to get more yeses to those visits, especially if you are bringing someone who makes it interesting. 

Another issue is not communicating in the donor’s preferred channel. If you are always asking for meetings on the phone and this donor does not like to talk on the phone, they are not calling you back. If this donor despises email and you are asking to meet via email, you are already annoying them. You want to invite them to meet with you for a visit through their preferred communication channel. It is okay to say, “How do you prefer that I reach out to you?” You will be surprised how many will say, “Just call me,” or, “Text me.” Sometimes we are apprehensive and think texting is too intrusive, but a lot of donors want to be texted. I have some data on that for you later in this session. 

Jerry Panas was an international fundraising legend who raised billions of dollars around the world. Sadly, he passed away in 2018 at the age of 92. He said, “When you get the visit, you are 85% on your way to getting the gift.” I think that is true. The visit is the hardest part. If you have done the cultivation, and you understand their interest, capacity and passion, the ask is quite simple. In most cases, it is nothing more than nudging the inevitable. But getting the visit, when time is so precious, is the hardest part. That is why we are going to talk about that before we talk about how to ask for the gift. 

What can we do differently to successfully secure our donor visits? The first thing is that we have to do our homework. We have to invest time understanding the donor, their passion points, their past giving behaviours, and where they have made investments before we request a visit, because that request has to be very specific to their interests. We need to prepare ourselves for calling or emailing the donor to request that visit. We need to ask for permission to ask for the visit. We need to be clear about the purpose of the visit and the amount of time we are requesting. We also need to give donors options for when and how we are going to visit with them. We are going to unpack each of those. 

The first one, as I said, is investing time to really know your donor. What is their giving behaviour and giving history? What are they most passionate about? What has happened? What has changed? What difference was made because of the last gift they gave? Have we reported that to them? Could we thank them again for that specific impact? 

Perhaps we can prepare to give them an update on that favourite exhibit, performance or program bringing arts into schools. Especially coming out of the pandemic and shutdown, they want to know what happened to their favourite program during this time. Now that we are opening up, what does the future hold? What is happening? When will it happen? How are we scaling? How will it all work? You have an amazing opportunity to get face time with your donors now because they want to know, and in many cases, they want to have a voice in it. Get that update. Be prepared to talk with them. 

Do a little research online. What other causes could this supporter be giving to now, and at what gift levels? It is always useful to take a landscape analysis with your donors. In the US, the average major donor, before the pandemic, supported about seven different causes, and I imagine it is very similar in Australia. Think about what industry they are in. Are they a business owner? Are they an executive in a company? If they are in health services or drop-ship consumer goods, they are probably doing very well right now, during a pandemic time when people could not pick up items at the shopping centre. If they are in tourism, it might have been a little rough over the last year and a half. 

Get in their world. What is going on with their employer or the business they own, and how might that affect their giving? How might that affect how well their life is going right now? We know our donors are more than just a source of contributions. They are people. They are people who share a passion for this cause, and we want to treat them accordingly. 

Ask board members for insights about specific donors. You might come to a board meeting and say, “Here are 10 donors, or five donors, that we would like to schedule a visit with. Who knows whom? What can you tell me about them? What is going on in their life right now? What else do they support?” You want to have those confidential conversations in a very honouring way. We are going to talk about mindset as well. 

To the degree that you can, based on their past communication behaviours, try to discern their preferred communication style. Do they always return phone calls and rarely respond to email, or vice versa? 

We are preparing for the donor’s experience. Now we need to think about our mindset. Your mindset is key to securing that visit. You need to be crystal clear. This is not just a visit because you have not seen them in a year and a half and it is time to see them. You need to be clear about your objectives. What do you want the donor to know, feel or do as a result of the visit? What more do you want to know about the donor, their passions and their intentions because of the visit? Be clear about your intentions for the visit. 

Define the outcomes. What are the next steps? What do you want to accomplish as a result of this conversation with the donor? Create some talking points or bullets. Do not use a script. This is a conversation. You do not read scripts with grandma, and you are not going to read scripts with your major donors. Create some bullet points so that when you call them on the phone or send that email, you can be clear about the purpose of the meeting, the time you are requesting, and the outcomes of that meeting or visit. 

Because you are calling or emailing them, you will want to have some dates and times available. It makes sense. If you have a donor on the phone and they say, “I would love to visit with you. It has been so long,” you do not want to respond by fumbling through your phone looking for open times. You want to have some times ready to offer. 

When you call the donor to ask for the visit, stand up. I am standing now because I know my voice sounds different when I am standing. It is clearer. I am projecting. There is more intonation and more emotion than when I am sitting and my diaphragm is contracted. Many of you work in the arts. You are singers, and you know how this works. Stand and smile. It makes all the difference in the world. People want to meet with people who have energy, who are projecting, and who are interesting. Remember, this is a visit, not an appointment. 

Often, you will get voicemail. Be prepared to leave a compelling, intentional and clear voicemail. “This is Tammy with the Detroit Opera Theatre, and I am calling because I would love to visit with you. We have a lot of updates. We are opening up. A lot of things are changing with your favourite program, the children’s youth choir, and I want to share that with you. I want to tell you how we are reopening and get some of your input on plans for the future. I only need 30 minutes. Please give me a call back and let me know what might work for you.” 

There is no doubt when they hear that voicemail. They are not wondering, “Is she going to be asking for a gift? Is she calling to hit me up for money?” No. She wants to give me an update on my favourite program. I would be delighted. Is this making sense? Many of you are probably doing this, but we have not had a lot of donor visits in the last year and a half. Very likely, there have been many fewer than you are accustomed to. It is time to refresh our approach and be more intentional so we can be more successful. 

Here is a simple fill-in-the-blank script. You are not going to read a script, but this gets you going: “Hi, Margaret. This is Tammy with the art museum. Do you have two minutes?” If they say, “I really don’t. The plumber just walked in. The dog is barking,” you can say, “No worries. I understand. When would be a better time to call back?” Assuming they say they have two minutes, you might say, “We have some exciting opportunities emerging. We see some challenges emerging. There are some major changes occurring in the program that is their favourite, and I want to talk about that with you. That is why I am calling. Are you willing to schedule a 30-minute visit with me?” 

“However you want to do it. If you want to visit face to face, that would be delightful. If you would prefer a conference call or a Zoom call, I totally respect that. Whatever works for you. I have a couple of dates and times. Do you have your calendar handy?” That is how purposeful and prepared you need to be. “Thank you so much. I cannot wait to connect.” 

You could do the same invitation through a letter. There is an emerging approach called asking for permission to ask them for a visit. You can do this when you encounter them at the grocery store, the hair salon or the barber shop, now that we can get out a bit more. You can also send a handwritten note or a letter. 

Here is how it could read as a letter: “Dear Margaret, thank you for the love and compassion you have for our youth theatre. You and your family are such an inspiration and bring so much joy to the lives of so many in our community. COVID-19 has had a massive impact on our ability to gather and perform, which has been heartbreaking for community members like you, as well as volunteers and staff. But we are beginning to open up, and that is why I am writing to you today. I will be calling you in the next week or so to schedule a visit. I am asking for 30 minutes of your time to discuss our reopening and recovery strategy. I would love your perspective. I would love your feedback on those plans for the future. I look forward to talking with you soon.” 

It sets the tone: “I am going to be calling you, and this is why.” Are they more likely to answer when they see your number show up on their phone? They know what you want. Nowhere in it does it say, “I am going to ask you for money.” You can also do it as a handwritten note. 

You can also ask for permission to ask them for a visit by email. Maybe you are corresponding on a completely different topic and you say, “By the way, would you be willing to talk with me sometime? Would you be willing to visit?” Or, “I recall your interest in Sydney Nolan. Could we talk more about the possibility of bringing an exhibit of his work to our museum? We are trying to do that, and I would love your feedback.” Again, you are letting them know, whetting their appetite and igniting their imagination around the programs and the work they love most out of all the things you do. 

“May we schedule a 20-minute visit?” You are not asking for lots of time. I have done this many times. When you say 20 minutes, they often say, “Let’s just have tea. I have about 45 minutes. We could schedule that.” Rarely do they keep you to 20 minutes. 

Asking for permission to ask for a visit can also happen by text. I would like to see a show of hands. Do you text your donors? Do you feel that you have permission to do that? I see some hands going up. Some of you do. A lot of you do not. I suspect it is because you do not feel you have quite enough permission. I encourage you to talk with your donors and have a conversation. You could say, “I know so many people are texting these days, and it is such an efficient way to stay in touch. How do you feel about us texting on occasion?” 

Not as though I am going to be blowing up your phone every Friday or Saturday night, but, “How do you feel about us exchanging text messages on occasion when we have an important update, or maybe there is a little story or video I would love to share with you? Would that be okay?” That is enticing. That has value to them. A little story or video is something they may enjoy. 

Texting is growing in popularity across all age demographics. First, it is the number one feature used on a smartphone. You might think a smartphone would be used mostly for telephone calls, but it is not. It is mostly used for texting. Texting open rates are 98%. Do you think 98% of your emails are opened? Probably not. You are nearly nine times more likely to get a text response than to get a response from a voicemail or email. Ninety-five per cent of text messages are opened in five minutes or less. Do you get return phone calls in five minutes or less? I do not. 

Here is a stereotype-busting fact. Ninety-four per cent of seniors, so people over 70 years old, text daily, sending an average of 11 text messages. It makes sense, especially in our pandemic world, or hopefully post-pandemic or semi-post-pandemic world, because this was one great way to stay in touch with the young people in our lives, such as grandchildren, nieces and nephews, who are obsessed with texting. My son has texted me from upstairs. 

Here is one caveat I want to reinforce. Texting is great for relationship building, for sharing exciting news, and for sharing little video snippets of a rehearsal or a piece of a child’s art. It is wonderful for contributing and sharing information. It is not the appropriate tool for making an ask. That is probably stating the obvious, but I wanted to state it clearly. 

The fourth strategy in making certain that donors agree to visit with you is to have an agenda. Rather than saying, “I am calling to have a visit so I can thank you,” which does not sound that interesting because they may feel they have already been thanked, you could say, “I really want to visit with you to talk about your giving priorities for the coming year. There is a trend that a lot of supporters are changing their giving habits in the post-pandemic economy, and I wanted to talk about where you are in that.” 

That is an effective conversation with someone you have already built a lot of trust and a strong relationship with. It is not a getting-to-know-you, first-date or second-date question. Asking for feedback, input or their perspective on something can be a very effective way to have a visit. There is an old saying: “If you want someone’s opinion, ask them for money. If you want someone’s money, ask them for their opinion.” We really do want their feedback. We really do want their opinions. 

I try not to ask for advice, because there is something about the word advice that implies we want to follow it, or that we are going to follow it. Sometimes supporters can get upset if we do not take their advice, but we absolutely want their feedback, input, perspective and point of view. 

You could say, “I would love to sit down with you and talk about a few names of people who have shown interest in our organisation, but we do not know them well. I think you may know a few of them. Could we have a confidential conversation about who they are and how we might build a stronger relationship with them?” I have had amazing supporters who are willing to have those conversations, including billionaire kinds of supporters. 

Whoever is influential in your community and giving to you has a lot of relationships and would likely be helpful. Not gossip. They are not going to provide gossip. That is inappropriate. But information about relationships, circles of influence, what clubs people may be members of, and what their philanthropic interests are can be useful. 

Maybe you want to meet with them to share the impact of their past giving or announce an exciting new program or initiative. As we begin to open up, donors want to know what we are doing now. How are we going to scale back up? How are your cash reserves? Have you dipped into your endowment? These are the things they want to know, and they will be willing to visit with you to learn about that. 

You might also share insider information. If you have a fundraising challenge or an organisational challenge, they have points of view. Many of them are brilliant strategists in the business world, and their input can be invaluable. If you think a donor is upset with you, or you have heard that they have a concern, you would want to address that with them. 

You might say, “This is Tammy with the museum, and I am calling because I would love to catch up with you. I know there has been a little bit of tension around how that program was handled during the pandemic, and some hurt feelings. I want to get your opinion on it and clear the air.” People appreciate candour. You would have those kinds of conversations with people you love if there was an elephant in the room or tension. Healthy relationships have conversations about conflict and tension, and this should be a relationship just like that. 

The fifth thing you want to do when asking for that visit is to be clear about the agenda and the amount of time requested. You have seen that in some of the examples I have given. Time is precious for so many supporters. It is often more precious than money. They know they can make more money, but no one can make more time. You have to be respectful of their time. 

First, be on time for the visit. Everyone intends to be on time, but people can be late. Maybe it is the first time you are coming to their office or home, and you get turned around. When I am visiting a donor at their home or office and I do not know where I am going, I will drive by on the Saturday before or during the week, just so I can say, “That is where I am going. I have got it. I am confident. I am crossing three railroad tracks, so I had better go early.” If you get there early, park down the block. Do not knock on the door early. 

If you said, “I would love to visit with you for 30 minutes,” and they said, “Thirty minutes it is. I will see you on Tuesday,” then about 20 or 25 minutes in, you can say, “I want to be respectful of your time. We have about 10 minutes, or five minutes, and I want to be sure to get your point of view on this.” Nine times out of 10, the supporter will say, “I have a little bit more time.” I encourage you to block out more time, even though you booked a 30-minute visit, because the donor will likely give you more time. Do not count on it. Count it as a blessing or a cherry-on-top surprise if they do. 

You have to have an agenda that can fit in the timeframe you promised. Always thank them for their time. Thank them for their point of view. Even if you disagree with their point of view, it is their point of view and it has value. Recap any agreed actions. If you said, “I am going to follow up with you on this and I will send you that thing by email tomorrow,” recap that. If they said they were going to make an email introduction between you and a person of influence, recap that too. 

Schedule the next visit while you are there. “I would love to follow up with you in two weeks,” or, “What timeframe works for you? Would it be okay if we meet again?” Ask for permission to meet again, and then get it scheduled. You want them saying yes to something, or to multiple things, in that visit, even though you did not ask for money. There is a psychology to saying yes. There are endorphins created when we are affirming and engaged. You want that good feeling, whether it is yes to the next visit or yes to an email introduction. You want the donor to be in the habit of saying yes to you. No one feels good about saying no, so you want them to say yes to things that are easy for them to say yes to. Scheduling is the hardest part. 

Sometimes, when you are asking for a visit, there are objections. Someone might say, “I am too busy right now. It is crazy. We are reopening and trying to get everyone back in the office.” You can say, “I understand, and I promise we can meet for just 20 minutes. I am happy to come to your home or office, or even set up a Zoom, whatever is easiest for you.” Give it another try. If they say no, say, “I understand and respect that. When do you think you will be settled into the office? Could I follow up with you in two weeks? Could I follow up with you at the beginning of next month?” 

Maybe the donor says, “I already gave.” You can say, “I know, and we are so grateful for your generosity. I am not looking to make an ask during this visit. I want to share the impact of your last gift and run a few ideas by you. I will not be asking for money during this visit, so please take that off the table.” They may then say, “In that case, let’s schedule it.” 

If they say, “We give to other causes that are a higher priority for us,” you can say, “I respect that, and I would really like your advice anyway. Would you be willing to give me 20 minutes?” If they say, “Now is just not a good time,” you can say, “I understand completely. May I follow up with you in two weeks?” You want to be prepared for the most common objections so that you are ready, positive and a little tenacious. They will respect that. 

You want to offer a couple of options for when and how you will visit. We are beginning to open up, and some people are excited to see others in person, even if it is masked or within whatever rules are in place. They want real human interaction. They want to go for a walk with you, meet you for coffee, or have you over. It is becoming spring where you are; they might love to sit in the backyard or on the front porch and have a lovely visit. 

Others may feel high anxiety about opening up. Both responses are valid, and so is everything in between. You need to know and respect what they want, and adhere to that. It also has to work for you. Work out together what in person looks like, or whether Zoom continues to be their preferred way to meet. Consider the time of day, the day of the week, and whether the visit should include your executive director, a board member or another leadership volunteer. 

Be prepared to offer what is most engaging for the donor. If the donor loves the youth dance program, maybe bring along the program director for that group. If the donor loves a particular program, you could bring along the creative director. If this is a high-potential donor and those programs are the reason they will accept the visit, do what you can to leverage those resources. They are busy too, so this is not for every visit. It is for the most critical, high-potential visits. 

Donor visits are not just for major donors. Some of you are managing major donor portfolios. Some of you are managing monthly donor or middle donor portfolios. These same kinds of face-to-face visits or small group visits can be very meaningful. You can use the same strategies and tools to get visits with those supporters as well. Some of you may have alumni, students, or parents of students you want to visit with, and you can use these same strategies. 

Some people will need a warm-up. They are not ready to meet with you one on one. Maybe it is a pandemic issue, or maybe they just do not know you well enough. You do not have a strong enough relationship yet, and they are nervous. Some people are concerned about awkward silences. One on one feels like too much pressure for them. They may wonder what they are going to say or what you are going to talk about. For them, you may want to do some pre-warmup engagement. 

I am working with a youth theatre in Detroit, and what they have been doing through the pandemic is having a Zoom once a quarter with 10 or 12 top supporters. They give an update on how the kids are doing. In addition to arts enrichment, the kids are getting character and leadership development through those programs. How are the kids doing in a hybrid school setting and trying to engage in arts programs that have limited capacity, density requirements and masking requirements? It is like a state of the union or a from-the-stage conversation. These small group sessions, whether they are in person, socially distanced or online, are a great way to get people re-engaged in a more comfortable format or setting. 

That can warm them up so they are willing to meet with you one on one a little later, a couple of weeks later or a month later, especially if they had a chance to engage with you and hear you speak. They might think, “Sylvia is not so scary after all. I think I could have a wonderful conversation with Sylvia.” Think about how you could do some small group things to warm up your supporters and let them stick their toe in the water, rather than jumping in all at once as we open up and can make face-to-face visits. 

Another strategy is dropping off a pre-visit token of appreciation or a post-visit token of appreciation. I work with a literacy group, and some of the things they have done include dropping off little literacy packages. Maybe it is some children’s books with a little box of cookies. They package them up in a basket and drop them off on the front porches of some of their top donors because they know those donors are reading to their grandchildren. Maybe these are tokens of appreciation that you mail. Maybe it is a simple sticker with your logo on it, children’s art from the art program, or photographs of some of the installations. You might say, “I know you have not been able to come to the museum recently, but I wanted to send you this picture to remind you that we are here with this beautiful art.” These should be modest, mission-focused and inexpensive. 

We do not want donors thinking we are spending their hard-earned donations and contributions on things. These should be more organic, mission-focused, grassroots tokens of appreciation. 

After you get the major donor visit, communication afterwards is critically important. You did all the work to get the visit. If you drop the ball afterwards, it is all for naught. The trust built in that visit might be broken. The donor might think the conversation did not go as well from your view as they thought it did, because you are not following up. They are not hearing from you, even though you recapped what you were going to do. 

The basics need to be covered after a donor visit. First, update their record. Whatever donor management system you are using, you need to put your notes and action items, with ticklers, in the database. I know that is often unpopular. It can feel like drudgery for fundraisers who love human interaction, but you owe it to your donor to do this. 

Add a follow-up tickler on your calendar for that next touchpoint, appointment or visit. If they said, “Please do follow up at the beginning of next month,” mark your calendar. Call Margaret. Send a follow-up email, or even better, a handwritten note. “Thank you so much for the lovely visit. I learned so much. You ignited my imagination. You helped me see another perspective.” Whatever is authentically true, put that in a handwritten note thanking them. Time is precious. 

You also want to convey any key learnings to your CEO or board members. Maybe you learned that one of your supporters lost a loved one, lost a spouse, or is struggling with their own health considerations. You want to make certain to put that on the radar of others so that you can extend kindness, encouragement and check in on them. 

Assess how what you learned may influence your donor development plan. Maybe you had three future actions planned with this donor, but you learned something that will modify those actions. Document that so you do not forget. 

Reflect on any emerging trends in these donor conversations. If you have had four visits and three out of the four have mentioned a concern about something, then you may need to send out a proactive communication about that issue. If three out of four visits brought it up, chances are a lot more people are thinking about it as well. 

That is how we get the major donor visit. We invest the time at the front end to understand the donor, what they care about, how they like to be communicated with, and what might be going on in their world that we are not aware of during this time of pandemic or as a result of the pandemic. We prepare ourselves, our mindset, our energy and our intentions. What do we want out of this visit? How much time are we asking for? 

We want to get permission to ask them for a visit. When I have asked for permission for a visit, I have never received a no. I am not special. All you are saying to someone is, “Would it be okay if we talk sometime?” They say, “Of course.” Who is going to say, “No, I do not ever want to talk to you”? Then a week or two later, when you call, you can say, “This is Tammy with the Detroit Opera, and it was such a delightful conversation when we bumped into each other, or when we had that email exchange a couple of weeks ago. I am so grateful you were willing to visit with me, so I am calling to schedule that visit.” They will remember that they agreed, and they will follow through. 

Be clear about the purpose of the visit and the amount of time you are requesting. Donors will be much more likely to say yes if they know what the visit is about and can be prepared. Give your donor options for when you will visit, what dates and times are available, and whether you will meet face to face, on the phone or by Zoom. Work around and accommodate their calendar. 

Follow up on the agreed actions. Recap the actions and do your follow-up. That is how you successfully get the visit and make the visit valuable for them. That is the recap of how to get the visit. I would like to spend the rest of the time talking about how to make the ask. That is always something on our minds. Am I doing this right? Maybe I have not done this in a while and would like some new tools or strategies for how to ask. Let’s do that now. 

What is the number one reason that people do not give? Drop it in the chat. They were not asked. That is exactly right. Brilliant. Of course, they were not asked. So let’s ask, but let’s ask well. Let’s ask with honour and respect. Let’s ask for things that bring our donors so much joy. That is the intention of philanthropy. The Greek meaning is rooted in love of humankind. That is the approach we take to fundraising, especially major gifts. 

What holds us back? What holds us back as fundraising professionals, and certainly board members or other volunteers who might be helping us fundraise? Basically, we are afraid. We are afraid of rejection and failure. We are afraid of embarrassing ourselves or saying the wrong thing. We are afraid that if we ask for money, especially our volunteers, then that donor may ask them to support their cause. There is a whole expectation of reciprocity. Everyone is fearful that they do not have the knowledge, confidence or lived experience to be successful in asking for money. 

Talking about money is also taboo. Were we not all raised with messages like, “Do not talk about money,” or, “Do not be rude”? I know I was. There are sayings such as, “Money does not grow on trees,” or, “We are not made of money.” We all have that baggage. Whether we were born to modest means or born with significant resources, there is a lot of baggage and taboo about money. 

Here is what I want to emphasise. When you look at the major donor development cycle, there are five steps. Discovery is where we do as much homework as we possibly can to understand the donor, their passions, capacity, inclination and connection to us as an organisation. Once we have done as much discovery as we can, we never have all the information we need, but we cannot get stuck in discovery. We cannot have analysis paralysis. At some point, we need to move into cultivation. 

Cultivation is having a visit, or two or three, and getting to know the donor. It is talking about programs, community needs, the dreams and vision for the organisation, and how we get from here to there. It is also seeing what sparks for them. Eventually, we must make the ask or solicitation. Then we recognise that gift, when they say yes, in a way that is appropriate to the donor’s interests and sensibilities, and appropriate to the gift value. Then we steward that gift. We report back on how the gift is making a difference. We thank them, and then we begin again. 

Discovery is roughly 20% of the process. Cultivation and stewardship are a combined 70% of the process. Recognition and asking, together, are 10% of the process. When we think about asking for major gifts, we often think, “It is so intimidating. It is so scary.” The truth is that this is relationship building, and the tiniest part is asking. Asking is about 5%. 

If you build relationships, and if you are authentically connecting people and their passion to your organisation, you are the conduit. You are not manipulating people. You are creating a pathway for what they want to do anyway, to help their passion and their dreams for your organisation and the community come to life. Then it is not scary at all. It is just like any other great relationship, where we are meeting one another’s needs. 

Here is the high-level process. We schedule the visit, and you are now masters in scheduling those visits. Look out. Your calendar is going to be full. We are going to meet at their location and on their terms: the coffee shop on Monday morning, their home on Thursday afternoon, the office on Wednesday, or whatever they want. 

We are going to identify talking points, especially if you are going with a board member or your executive director. If there are more than two of you, be clear about the purpose of the meeting, the outcomes, the talking points, and who is covering what. Reassure the volunteer that if they miss something, you will fill in the blank. You will just flow with it and work together, but you need to rehearse in order to find your flow together. 

You do want to have the ask documented. Not that you are going to pull out the proposal and put it in front of them, especially if it is a simple gift without a lot of restrictions or complexities, but you would have it available as a leave-behind. Connect that offer or ask to impact. Asking is never about the money. It is about what the money will do for the community and for those you serve. 

Negotiate the gift details. If you say, “I am asking you for $100,000,” they may say, “All at once?” I would respond, “What would work for you?” That is what I mean by negotiating the details or terms. Propose some recognition and get the donor’s feedback on that. Gain commitments to next steps. Those are the high-level steps following discovery and cultivation, where we reach solicitation and recognition. Stewardship is the follow-on after the gift. How did it change lives? 

Let’s talk about preparing for the ask. How many of you ask for money face to face in normal times? Is your job to ask for money, or is it at least part of your job? I am seeing hands. When we talk about asking for money as fundraisers and professionals, I think it is so important that we bring integrity and honour to those conversations. I really believe that fundraising is sacred work. We are connecting generous people with giving hearts to causes that bring joy, enrichment, culture and quality of life to children, families, seniors and communities. We are the conduit, and we need to hold the bar for integrity and honouring our donors. 

I had a practice when I would come to a board meeting, a development committee meeting, or even a team meeting with my development staff at the Children’s Center, when I was chief philanthropy officer there. I had an 8.5 by 11 piece of paper, and I had printed the word donor on it in the biggest font that would fit. I put it in a clear plastic sleeve with a safety pin at the top, and I would stick it in a chair next to me because I wanted us to be in the practice of talking about donors as if they were in the room, honouring their generosity, spirit and passions. 

I never said, “We are going to hit him up,” or, “He is low-hanging fruit.” Our donors are not fruit. We should not talk about them like that. Donors do not have special pants with deep pockets, and we do not put the squeeze on people. There is such scarcity-based and dishonouring language that can creep into major gift work. We have to be the ones to say, “That is not how we talk about our donors.” We, as professionals, are not begging for money. We are creating a pathway between what people want to do and what the community needs from our organisation. We are like sherpas. We are clearing paths. We are not begging. I am proud to be a fundraiser, and I hope you are too. 

When we are in a group with board members, leadership volunteers or other donors in the inner circle of our organisation, and we use dishonouring language or allow others to use that language, they may be sitting there thinking, “I bet they talk about me this way too.” Then we turn to them and ask, “Who do you know?” They may think, “I do not know anyone, because I am not going to have you hit up my neighbour or put the squeeze on my mum.” We have to set the bar and operate in the space that this is honouring, sacred work. 

When I am getting ready to make an ask, there are four components to it. This is how I do it. It is probably similar to at least some components of how you do it too. The first thing is when I sit down with a supporter and we are having this visit, they know it is an ask. We have gone through the cultivation process. They are saying things like, “How can I help? What can we do? What is next?” When they start shifting from, “What are you going to do with your project?” to, “What are we going to do with our project? How do we make this happen?” they have shifted from being an observer to being in. 

Listen carefully to their behaviours and language. We are sitting down. They know it is an ask. I start with a gratitude statement and acknowledgement. When preparing for this, I will close my eyes and think about how generous these people are. What are the attributes? What are the things they do that make them unique? How grateful am I? What have they done for us and our community through their giving and leadership? 

I start with gratitude and acknowledgement. Then I ask a question related to their experience with us. I make the ask, then I am quiet and listen. Then I respond accordingly and prepare a follow-up plan. After that, we finalise the details. 

Let’s unpack this. The first is the gratitude and acknowledgement statement. I might sit down after our warm-up conversation, once we have our tea, and say, “Margaret, I was getting ready for today’s visit and I was so excited. I was thinking about all the incredible things you have made possible these past several years. Do you remember when you rented that big bus so we could take all of those kids out to the event? Do you remember how amazing that was? And then remember that other thing?” 

If I have done my cultivation well, during the cultivation process I probably asked them, “What are your proudest moments with us?” or, “What is the most meaningful gift you have ever given?” I am using what they told me and feeding it back to them as, “I heard you. I see you. You are incredible.” And they are. You did this great thing, you did that great thing, and you did this great thing. That is the acknowledgement and gratitude component. 

Then I move on to asking a question, because you do not want your ask to be one huge monologue. You do not want to take one big deep breath and say, “Margaret, you have been such an incredible supporter. We are really trying to bring this new exhibit to the museum, and I was wondering if you might consider giving $100,000. If that is too much, it could be less. It could be over time.” No. You want to have a dialogue. You want to have a conversation about this, not one big monologue that you have been thinking about for months and need to get out. 

We do the gratitude and acknowledgement, and then we ask a question such as, “You have been involved for 20 years, isn’t that right?” Or I may ask, “What has been your most meaningful experience in all those 20 years?” Not only did you give to that and the other things you mentioned, but you also introduced us to John and Diane, and then they did amazing things. That would never have happened without that introduction. It is remarkable. I call this my memory lane. Let’s walk down memory lane of how amazing you are and how you are changing lives. It is authentic. It is true. They are amazing. 

Then I say, “That has been incredible. You have met so many needs, and the needs keep coming. As we discussed in our last visit, we are trying to bring this particular program further into the region. We want to continue doing it in the city centre, but also take it into more rural areas.” Whatever the ask is, I talk about the need, the impact and what it will cost. “This is a $500,000 project, and I am asking you to consider a gift of $100,000. I have some recognition ideas we can discuss, but first I want to hear from you. What do you think?” 

Ask for a specific dollar amount to have a specific impact. Let them know you have recognition in mind, but do not jump too quickly into the recognition details. It is like saying, “Will you marry me? What colour will our bridesmaids’ dresses be?” First, you need to know how they feel about the amount before you talk through all the recognition opportunities. It creates more of a dialogue. 

Then we negotiate the terms. Maybe they say, “I really need to think about this.” You can say, “I respect that you need to think about it, and I understand. Should I follow up with you next week? What can I provide to help you make the best decision possible?” Make the ask, listen and respond appropriately. Ask for a specific amount. Be prepared to offer a multi-year option. If you give the example of $100,000 and they ask, “Do you mean all at once?” you can say, “What would work for you?” 

They might say, “I could transfer some stock,” or, “We could do $50,000 now and $50,000 at the end of the year.” Do not jump to say it could be over five years. Let them problem-solve. Another approach is to say, “Would you consider making a gift between this amount and that amount?” For example, between $100,000 and $150,000, or between $10,000 and $30,000. The lower gift amount is often what anchors in their mind, so I do not like the gift range approach, but it is something many fundraisers do. 

The other tool is using a gift range chart. This is mostly what I like using in a capital campaign feasibility study, where we say, “Here are the gifts that are needed for the project. Where do you see yourself?” Here is an example of a gift range chart from a major gifts campaign that I did at the Children’s Center. The goal was a million dollars, and we figured out how many gifts we would need, at what levels, and how many prospects. I might say, “Where would you see yourself? Can you see yourself in these top two levels?” 

What I really prefer is that you have done the cultivation thoroughly enough that you have a strong idea, so you can ask for a specific gift amount and have an impact statement for that gift amount. It is hard to have a gift impact statement for a range. 

There are common objections to a major gift ask. For those of you who are practised in making major gift asks, you probably hear some of these. Someone may say, “That is a lot of money.” My response is, “It is a lot of money, and it is going to change a lot of lives.” Then I am quiet. 

They may say, “Business is really bad right now.” You can respond, “I am sorry to hear that.” You should have known that from discovery and from those conversations. If they are in tourism, of course business may be bad right now. But if you are surprised and they say business is bad, you can say, “I am so sorry to hear that. What timeframe do you anticipate for a turnaround?” You keep the conversation going. 

They may say, “I am just not as excited about this project.” If we have done the cultivation well, we know the offer we are making is tied to a project they love. But if they say, “I am just not that excited about this project,” I would say, “Forgive me. I must have misunderstood. What would you be excited about?” Then the conversation can keep moving. 

They may say, “I need to talk with my wife,” or, “I need to talk with my financial advisor.” You can say, “Wonderful. This is something I really do want you to think about. What information can I provide to help you make the best decision possible? Would you like me to come back another time when your wife is available and we can all talk about it together?” During cultivation, I would probably have asked whether they and their spouse usually make giving decisions together, or whether they have their own causes. If you have done thorough cultivation, you will not get as many surprises. 

There is also the indecisive response: “Let me think about it.” You can say, “Wonderful. Can I follow up with you in a week or two weeks? What works for you?” You also need to be prepared for what happens if they say yes, and what happens if they say no. 

If they say yes, then what? If they say no, thank them. Thank them for everything they have done and for being an amazing partner. You might say, “I totally understand this is not the right time for you. Can I check in with you in a month or so?” Or you might ask, “Do you know anyone else who might be interested in this project?” If they say they might be able to do it, you can say, “Wonderful. What more do you need to be comfortable with us moving forward?” Whatever it is, stay positive. There is a next step and a possibility. 

Finalise the details. You want to get that gift agreement signed. You want to make certain that the gift and the recognition are in compliance with your gift recognition and gift acceptance policies. But you also want to make certain this does not turn from relationship into transaction. They have just said yes to $100,000. Their heart is full for all the children, youth or seniors, and for everything that will be possible because of this expansion to the museum or ballet program. You do not want to move straight into, “Sign here.” 

You have to manage that gracefully. You could say, “Wonderful. We are so delighted. We would love to button up the paperwork for your commitment so we can move forward with the recognition and keep the project moving forward. Do you want to do that now, or should we set up a time for me to come back again?” You do not want to squash the joy in that moment. But if it is later, get a date and time. Document the gift agreement. Get the confirmation. Celebrate. 

I want to get into some Q&A, but first I want to tell you a short story. I love this quote: “People give to the magic of an idea.” That is also a Jerry Panas quote. The follow-on was, “People give to the magic of an idea to save lives and change lives.” I think that is true. 

I will tell you a story about a fundraiser who had his go-to donors. I hope you all have your go-to donors, meaning the people who always bridge a gap. Let’s say you are $10,000 shy of a project goal, and they say, “I can give $10,000 more. I have got you. You can count on me.” Or there is a special appeal or special need, and you go to them first because they are with you on the mission, they have the capacity, and they always write that cheque and make it happen. 

This fundraiser had a tradition. He would go into the office, open the paper, and read it first thing in the morning with his coffee before 8.00 am. He saw a picture of his donor with the headline, “Jim Jones gives a million dollars to feed the hungry.” The fundraiser was upset and hurt. He wondered how that could have happened. He paced around the office for a few minutes. By mid-afternoon, he worked up the courage to call the donor. 

He called and said, “John, I saw the paper this morning. Congratulations. How nice for you and them. But I have to ask you. I know you are so passionate about our organisation. You always meet a need. You always step up. You are one of our biggest champions. Why them? Why did you give them a million dollars and not us?” The donor said, “Very simple reason. You never brought me a million-dollar idea.” 

That speaks to the need for us to be bold and brave enough to cast a vision and put opportunities in front of people who have the capacity, the inclination, the connection and a demonstrated behaviour of loving our causes. Why not bring them the million-dollar idea, the $100,000 idea, the $500,000 idea, or the $27.1 million idea? Sometimes our money baggage, shame, or our own point of view about money gets in the way. We think, “I could never give that much money,” or, “I could never ask them for that much money.” We have to set all of that aside. We have to be the conduit and say, “This donor can make this happen. That would bring them incredible joy, and it would bring this community transformation through the arts.” 

I ask you to think big, to be brave, to be bold, to be honouring, and to bring integrity and passion to your major gifts program and to building and strengthening your donor relationships. Then you will get the visits. You will put forward the magical ideas that people will find joy in. That is what we want to do, and you can do it. I am going to stop sharing my screen and take some questions. 

Tammy, thank you so much. That was incredible. So much to unpack. I am sure I speak on behalf of everyone present to say well done. Thank you so much. There was so much in there for me about sacred work, authenticity, and being our most honest and vulnerable selves when we approach donors. I think that is incredibly effective. It put my mind to many occasions where donors, after a gift or after a project has been realised, have come up and thanked me for the opportunity to be part of something they find meaningful and want to belong to. That idea of meaningful belonging, and what we offer in terms of people being able to connect, is incredibly important. 

It is beautiful. What you described is beautiful. 

While we wait for a few questions to come through the chat, I wanted to ask you about one of the techniques, for want of a better term, that I see working well. In fact, it is what we base one of our leverage funding programs on. It is the idea that we are building a community around donors. When we speak with a donor or seek a gift, often a useful conversation is around pledges. If you can pledge an amount that we can then get matched by another cohort or community of donors, that is often an effective way to build that community and a selection of donors. Often donors do not want to be the first adopters. They want to see who is in the pool before they jump in, so to speak. I am wondering about your thoughts on leveraging pledges towards securing donors. 

I think it is an incredibly powerful and effective strategy, especially for major donors who fit that investor persona. They may be executives or entrepreneurs, and they love the idea of leveraged money. Their gift can be a multiplier or an incentive. It can also demonstrate their leadership. If there is a pooled challenge or matched gift where they are with a small group, they can feel honoured to be part of that group or among their peers. I think that is an incredible and effective strategy. 

That seems to work incredibly well in our particular context. 

I would like to invite our group to put some questions into the chat if they have any. Maybe your presentation has been so comprehensive that there are no questions left unanswered. I do not know. We do not have too many questions coming through the chat. I should remind everyone that the slides will be distributed to you after this presentation, so please sit tight for that. I should also let you know that at the conclusion of this presentation, when you sign off, there will be a short questionnaire that we would love you to fill in. It will only take a couple of minutes, but we would really love your feedback. We are on a journey of continuous improvement here at CPA, so we do want to get better at things. If you have two or three minutes to complete that questionnaire, that would be terrific. 

We have one question. How would you express a request for an ask visit? 

Because we gave examples like, “This visit is not about asking. This visit is to give you an update.” When you have done the cultivation well, the donor is saying, “What is next? How can I help?” Even the $27 million gift that Stephen referenced, which we talked about in one of the earlier Knowledge Series sessions, ultimately came from the donor saying, “What would it take to turn around five more schools?” That is the big buying signal. They are ready. 

That is when we can say, “I would be delighted to put together a proposal for what I think would be next, in alignment with the things we have talked about and what you are most passionate about. Maybe we set up a time to visit about what is next and how you might help.” I am very straightforward. It is never a surprise when I make an ask because we have been talking about it. 

Another example might be, “Margaret, it is Tammy with the Detroit Opera House, and I am calling today because we have talked about the passion project you have given us so much feedback on. We are ready to launch. We have prepared this, and I want to come to you first. When might we visit and talk about how we can partner on this project?” It can be that straightforward, because it is something they want to do. It is something they would be honoured to do. 

I have made those asks, and I am sure many of you have, where you ask for the gift, they say yes, and then everyone bursts into tears. It is true. I had one situation where I was meeting with a couple in a restaurant. This was early in my career, and I was asking for $25,000. It was the biggest gift I had ever asked for. I remember walking around the house just trying to say it so it would roll off my tongue: “$25,000. $25,000. $25,000.” 

We got to the restaurant. I said, “I would like you to invest in this project.” Right away they said, “How much?” I said, “$25,000.” Before they could even respond, I burst into tears. They said, “Is that not enough?” They thought I was crying because it was not enough money. All that to say, it is joyful, and that is how we set up the visit to make the ask. 

I think this whole area invites us to live with a sense of abundance. It reminds me of an analogy. Has anyone really been offended by you overestimating their wealth? Generally, I think no one is really offended if you aim high and put out a number, provided you are confident and that is the real number. No one really gets offended by having their wealth overestimated. 

I have heard that as well. Just do the homework to get as close as possible, but if you are going to err one way or the other, err on the side of generosity. 

We have a few questions in the chat. One is around an awkward mindset, being nervous, and how you might overcome that. 

Even when I am getting ready to present at a conference, or make an ask, anytime I am nervous in life, I reframe nervousness as excitement. It is not, “I am nervous.” It is, “I am excited to talk to you tonight. I am excited to talk about this project.” I shift it. It is not nervousness. It is excitement. 

Another question is, how long should we wait with no reply before a cordial follow-up? 

If I have called for a visit and they have not responded, my general rule of thumb is that I will leave a voicemail. If they do not respond, I will leave another voicemail about a week later. I might ask around: “Are they on holiday?” If they are around and just not responding, I will make a call the next week and send a follow-up email. 

If that does not work, then I will either leverage a peer, or my executive director or CEO. I might leave one more message with a little more enticement, such as, “Lisa and I would love to have a visit with you. We were talking about you the other day, and I told her I had reached out. She said she would love to join us. I am following up to see if the three of us can get together.” Of course, Lisa wants to be there, and I will be as charming and endearing as I can be in that meeting, so Lisa will follow up with me later. 

Probably the last question is around further advice to follow up with a prospect who may have said no outright. I always think no is never no. No is just not yet. What would be your advice around the best way to pick up a conversation once you have received a really firm no? 

I would ask a few probing questions. “I totally respect no. Just help me understand, does that mean no right now, or no to this project? Tell me a little bit about your no.” They might say, “I am really not interested in that project at all. I am more interested in this.” Then I will help them pursue that. 

Or they might say, “We set a goal for how much we give annually, and we have exhausted that.” You can say, “Wonderful. Might we follow up and be part of your consideration for next year’s philanthropic budget or philanthropic goals?” I try to find another way or another time that honours them, their time and their pace, and keeps the conversation going. 

We have come to the end. On behalf of everyone here, thank you so much for an incredible presentation, such a dense and wonderful presentation. We look forward to connecting with you again in the near future. To everyone who participated, thank you so much for your time and energy. The next webinar in the Knowledge Series is not too far away, so please join us for that. 

Until then, from Creative Partnerships Australia, thank you so much. Please do take two or three minutes to fill in our quick questionnaire. Thank you all very much. Thank you everyone. 

Welcome everyone to Creative Partnerships Australia’s Knowledge Series webinar, Transforming Your Fundraising Through Decision Science. I am James Boyd, the West Australian State Manager for Creative Partnerships. This is the sixth in a series of eight professional development webinars for development managers working in the arts and cultural sector. I welcome you all here this morning. May I first make an acknowledgement of Country. Creative Partnerships Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the traditional custodians of the lands on which we live, work and learn. We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and to our shared future together. 

Today, we have guest speakers from the UK and the National Arts Fundraising School, Bernard Ross and Dana Seagull. Let me introduce today’s presenters. Bernard Ross is the director of the UK’s National Fundraising School. He has advised major arts institutions in the UK, including the Tate Gallery and the Science Museum. He has written six award-winning books on strategy, fundraising, and social change, including Change for Good: Using Behavioural Economics for a Better World. He has just had a new book come out, Making the Ask: The Artful Science of High Value Fundraising. I’ll give you a bit more detail on that later. Dana is the deputy director of the National Arts Fundraising School. She is a leading expert in the cultural and creative industries in the UK and has helped a wide range of cultural institutions with sustainability, including the South Bank Centre and the Charles Dickens Museum. 

They are a terrific team and we’re delighted to have them live from the UK this morning, where it’s terribly early. I’ll hand over to Bernard and Dana for their presentation. 

It’s so nice to be here. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m going to run the first part of the session. Dana, do you want to give people an idea of the shape of the session? 

We’re going to do the session in three parts. First, we’ll talk you through the science of decision science. What do we mean when we use this term? What are things you might have heard before, like behavioural economics or terms like heuristics? We’ll talk you through those and demystify some of the language. 

In the second part of the webinar, I’m going to present some of our fundraising experiments. We conducted these with 11 arts and cultural organisations here in the UK. It is the largest cultural fundraising experiment in the world to date. In the third section, we’re going to see what you’ve learned. 

We’re going to present you with some ideas and give you the opportunity to say, if I was using decision science techniques here, what would I do? It will be a chance for you to apply that knowledge and practise straight away. It should be an interesting and hopefully interactive session. 

I also want to say a special hello. I think Melinda is here from Linden New Art. We’ve done an interesting experiment with her, so I hope if you’re with us, you’ll let us know in the chat. We’re going to share some examples of things we know work in Australia. 

I’m interested to see in the chat how many of you have heard of behavioural economics, decision science, or behavioural science. How many people were just looking for something to do this afternoon, and there was nothing on TV, so you thought you’d tune into a webinar? 

I can see from a few of you that this is brand new. For others, I acknowledge that you probably know quite a bit of this already. Stay with us as we try to give everyone some insights. 

Let me tell you how I got into decision science, behavioural science, and behavioural economics. The story begins 12 years ago in New York. I was working with a group of what are called face-to-face fundraisers. I think you probably call them the same in Australia. They are mostly young people who stop you in the street and say, would you mind handing over your credit card? 

I have always found that an amazing thing that people do. Normally, I don’t hand over my credit card and speak to anyone who doesn’t have a gun or a knife, at the very least. But there are people who do that. It is a powerful and effective way for many mainstream charities to raise money, just by stopping people in the street and asking them to do that. 

I have some expertise in the psychology of fundraising. I was teaching people in the street how to do this in New York. This is a photo of me 12 years ago, looking younger, but still good. As part of a week-long course I was running, I was working with quite a big team of people who were raising money for Save the Children. 

I thought, I have to do this myself. I can’t just teach people this. I have to go and do it myself, although I may not be the right person to do it. So I was doing it and teaching it. Then I noticed that while the teams I was teaching were doing rather well, one team seemed to be doing very well, despite the fact I hadn’t taught them to do anything. 

That team was based at 23rd Street. I thought, I’ll go down and watch 23rd Street and see what they are doing that is so clever and seems to be working without me, because that is quite embarrassing as a consultant. I went down and watched them, and then I did some of the work myself. 

The picture on the right is of me standing and raising money for Save the Children at 23rd Street. What I discovered was that the most important thing people were doing was standing beside the 23rd Street station sign. 

What I discovered by doing it myself is that if I mentioned 23rd Street, if I mentioned the name of where we were, and said to people, thank you so much for stopping, we’re at 23rd Street station, this must be a philanthropic place, the average gift changed. At that time, people were normally giving between US$15 and US$17 as a monthly gift to Save the Children. People then started giving US$18, US$19, or US$20. 

There was about a US$3 movement simply by standing next to a sign that said the number 23. I thought that was strange. I didn’t understand why it worked, but it seemed to work, so I put it into my body of things that work. 

Then I read a fantastic book. I’ve written quite a good book called Change for Good, but this is an even better book called Thinking, Fast and Slow, which some of you might have read, by Daniel Kahneman. Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. He explained to me why that worked. It is a technique some of you might know about. Natalie, it is unconscious bias, or more technically, anchoring. 

About 18 months ago, I went back to New York and did a big experiment with about 40 people across the city, including myself. There is no point telling people about these things if you don’t do them yourself. There I am, standing in the pouring rain outside one of the big railway stations. It was very wet. This time we had moved on from clipboards. I had an iPad and was raising money for Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, as it is called in the United States. 

What I discovered was that the average had gone up over the 10 or 12 years to US$32 a month. By standing next to a sign saying 43rd Street, I was able to drive the average amount from US$37 to US$40. I now understood that we were using a technique called anchoring. 

We’re going to talk about that a bit later. Very simply, anchoring means that if you introduce a number, and it can be almost a random number, to someone’s subconscious, they will be influenced by that number. People were making bigger gifts simply because there was a number in the background. 

One implication for fundraising is that Dana and I do a lot of work in the UK with charities that say, give what you can, donate what you can, or pay what you can for the ticket. One of the things we know from science is that by doing that, by not giving people a cue about the amount of money that might be helpful, or even a random amount or number, they will tend to give much less. 

What we’re trying to do is talk about science. It is important to stress the scientific basis of what we’re doing here. One of the things we see holding fundraising back, certainly in the UK, Ireland, the US, and Singapore, where we’ve done a lot of this work, is a whole lot of anecdote about what works. We’re not interested in anecdote. We’re interested in science. Is that true, Dana? More or less. I think that’s true. 

Let’s talk a bit more about the science and some key ideas underpinning decision science. First, let’s check if you’re normal, because you might be an exceptional group of people. Let’s see if you’ve ever done any of these things. 

Have any of you ever paid up front for a gym membership and not gone? The rest of you are lying. Apart from you. Have you ever gone to the doctor or the chemist, got some medication, and then not followed the instructions as prescribed? That is a very common thing to do. 

Have any of you ever received your credit card bill, had money in the bank to pay it, and then forgotten to pay it, so you end up paying interest? Have any of you ever been at a party, if you remember parties, and drunk too much alcohol when you know you shouldn’t, or been on a diet and eaten the wrong kind of food because you were in a social situation? 

Annie, yes to all of the above. The only honest woman in the room, I think. Have any of you ever bought an electronic product? I have an iPhone 8. I can basically text on it, look things up, and occasionally send an email, but it will do things that, as far as I know, I don’t understand. My 12-year-old niece can show me things, and she is always embarrassed with me. 

These are not all bad things. Have any of you ever done something completely irrational, such as donated blood to someone you don’t know, or made a donation to a charity with no personal connection? Maybe you made a gift to Yemen, or to a disease you don’t know personally. That is not rational. 

Or maybe you helped someone in the street, helped somebody carry their bags up the stairs in a railway station, or gave someone a gift. I’m glad to see that, because Dana and I believe the fundamental basis of good fundraising is to be philanthropic yourself. The best way to learn about getting money is by giving it away. 

These things are all predictably irrational, and people are predictably irrational. That is the title of a brilliant book by Dan Ariely. He talks about how, when we make choices, and Dan Ariely and Daniel Kahneman are two of the great thinkers in this field, they reckon we make between 27,000 and 40,000 choices a day. 

Some of those are big choices, such as should I stay in this job, should I leave my relationship, should I buy a house, or should I rent a house? Some are small, such as should I wear blue socks or red socks, or do I dare to eat a peach? There are big ones and small ones, and we don’t have time to think about them all rationally. 

There is Dan Ariely’s book, if you’re looking for something to read, called Predictably Irrational. That word is important. We are irrational, not random. Random would mean we couldn’t predict what would happen. Irrational means that we can predict how people will behave, but it is not rational in the same way. 

We can now predict that if you stand next to a sign and give people a number cue, they will behave in a specific way. We know a number of things now that Dana and I have been able to apply to fundraising. 

So, are you rational or not? We sent you a little questionnaire and, in a way, we lied about it. We said it was about health and wellbeing. It was not about health and wellbeing. It was about how rational you are. 

One of the questions we asked was this. You booked a ticket for the cinema and lost your online ticket, so you would have to buy another ticket. In one circumstance, you lost the ticket. In another, you lost $20 on the way to the cinema. In both cases, the ticket cost $20. 

We asked, if you had lost your ticket, would you buy another ticket for $20? Seventy per cent of you said yes, but 30 per cent said no. Then we asked the same group, if you lost money on the way to the cinema, would you buy another ticket? In that case, 92 per cent of you said yes. 

That is not rational, because in both cases you have lost $20. But in one case, because you think you have lost the ticket, you respond differently. It is an example of irrationality. The two things are exactly the same, but you responded differently because of the different sense of loss. 

Let’s look at another example. Here are two packets of cereal. They happen to be Italian cereal, but that does not really matter. Which of these do you think sounds like the more attractive deal, one or two? Everyone is choosing two. 

This is exactly the same deal. Anyone who can do basic maths can work out that 33 per cent off and 50 per cent more free are the same proposition. Yet people prefer more. There is a lot of psychology going on here. In a commercial sense, there was a 73 per cent increase in sales by putting that different proposition up. I see many arts organisations saying they are discounting tickets, yet we know that saying more free can work better, even when it is the same offer. 

Now read this sign. Most of you probably read the top right line. Some of you may have noticed that the letters in two of the words are reversed. What most of you did automatically was reverse those words. One interesting thing about these automatic responses is that we do not necessarily read or study things very carefully. We look for patterns, and the patterns allow us to say, I can fix that. 

The interesting thing about our rationality is not simply that we are not paying attention. The big thing is that we fix things automatically, and that has important implications for patterns and communication. 

Let me give you some more key ideas and tell you a little bit about some of the thinkers behind this. One is Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize about 20 years ago. Interestingly, Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for economics, yet he is a psychologist, not an economist. Think how annoyed the world’s economists were that a psychologist won the prize. Think how annoyed you would be if a non-artist won a big arts prize. 

The other thinker is Richard Thaler. He wrote a book called Nudge, which you may have heard of. Three or four years ago, he also won the Nobel Prize, again showing that behavioural economics, or this kind of psychology, is important. The most recent person is Esther Duflo, the youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize. She is a French economist and won it two years ago. These three big thinkers are talking about the science of decision-making. 

They are talking about three things that matter. One is evolutionary psychology. This is the idea that as we all walked out of Africa 200,000 years ago, some of us ended up in Australia and some of us ended up in Scotland. Why you would go to Scotland from beautiful sub-Saharan Africa, I don’t know, but some people did. We have hardwired some things into ourselves. I’ll give you examples of those in a minute. 

We are also talking about neuroscience, where we can now look inside the brain and see some of the chemical and magnetic responses. If you make a decision to do something, we can track where in the brain that is happening. 

We also have behavioural economics, which is what the whole field is more generally called. This is really about the difference between what Dana and I call do data and say data. Do data is what people do. Say data is what people say they do. This is one of the reasons why we are not very much in favour of market research or focus groups, where people tend to say what they think is the right answer. I think we’re going to prove to you that this happens. 

Let me give you a couple of experiments to see if I can prove some of that. I want you to look very quickly at these two pictures and decide which of the two images you prefer. Which of the two faces do you like more, A or B? Nearly all of you are choosing A. Of course, New Zealanders are always a little different, but nearly all of you chose A. 

Why do people choose A? The answer is to do with evolutionary psychology. A and B are actually made up of two different faces. In the first case, A is made up of a picture of Tiger Woods, about 35 per cent, and a stock model, about 65 per cent. B is made up of two stock models that you don’t necessarily recognise. 

Dana and I have done that experiment in Zimbabwe and Cuba. I have done it in Egypt, Argentina, Brazil, and India. Everywhere in the world, the answer is the same. The answer is that people subconsciously saw Tiger Woods’ face. You recognise something about it. 

One of the evolutionary psychology things is that as we walk out of sub-Saharan Africa, we look for people we recognise. If we see people we recognise, we think, that is quite safe. I know Catherine. I am safe with her. She is not likely to attack me or kill me. 

That is important because we find that many arts organisations say they are bored with their old brand and want to look different and change things up. We want to caution you. If you do that, you may be losing the value of subconscious recognition of the brand, which is an important piece of evolutionary psychology. 

Let’s move on. When we look at neuroscience, we now know that the part of our brain stimulated when we are given a gift is the same part stimulated when we make a response. Dana is going to give some examples of where a museum says to people, here is a free guide to the museum, and places that free guide beside the donation box. That can increase the gift level because of a technique called reciprocity. It stimulates the same part of the brain. 

Giving people a gift before asking them for a gift is an important part of this work. There is also a third part about what I call do data and say data. 

For example, one of the things we asked you in the questionnaire was whether you think you are more competent than your peers in the charity sector. Goodness, this is not a shy and modest group. I think about 68 per cent of you said, yes, I am more competent than my peers in the charity sector. 

I’m sure James and Catherine have brought together the brightest and best for this webinar. But if that answer was accurate, it should be 50–50. You can only be averagely competent compared with your peers. 

This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. People tend to overestimate their ability in many fields. I have to say this may be partly gender driven, but I’m seeing that most people here are women and we still see that bias. 

You may say, we are a little smugger than we should be. The Brits invented being smug, I guess you could say. But what is interesting is that if you ask people how generous they are in fundraising, 75 per cent of people think they give more than average to charities. 

Again, one reason not to say to people, give what you can, is that people may think that by giving $5, $10, $15, or $20, they are being more generous, when in fact they may not be. You need to cue people about what the averages are, so they can align their behaviour. If the average person gives $20, and I think I am more generous, I should give a bit more. 

That is important. People think they are better than they are. That is the difference between what we call do data and say data. 

Dana, I think I’m going to hand over to you in a few minutes. We’re up against the first half hour, if that’s okay. I’ll skip to the end of the set of slides. 

What is Daniel Kahneman’s big idea? He is the original Nobel Prize winner. Daniel Kahneman says that we have two decision systems in our head. 

The first is called system one. System one helps us make those 27,000 to 40,000 decisions really quickly, implicitly, intuitively, emotionally, and, importantly, unconsciously or subconsciously. We could not think through every choice rationally, such as what colour socks should I wear today? 

We use our automatic process to do that. I’m speaking to you in English now. It is Scottish English, so it sounds a little weird. I’m not thinking about the words. But I love going to Spain and I love speaking Spanish, even though my Spanish is awful. 

Whenever I go to Spain, I like it because the word bar is the same in Spanish as it is in English. I think, I’m in the right place to have a drink. But I go into a bar and, as I approach the bar person, I think, I want a beer. I know that the verb to want in Spanish is querer, and I know that I need the first person singular of the verb, which I believe is quiero. 

The Spanish bar person is tapping his fingers, thinking, just ask me for what you want. Then I get confused because I know that in Spanish they have masculine and feminine nouns. I cannot remember whether cerveza is masculine or feminine. Is it un cerveza or una cerveza? Then I end up struggling through it. 

What is happening there is that instead of using system one, I am having to use system two. System two is explicit, slow, analytical, learned, and conscious. It is the same if you learned to drive in a manual car. You probably learned to drive using system two. Now you can drive home without thinking about every gear change. You can think about what you’re having for dinner, because you are using system one. 

We use system one, and we need to encourage donors and supporters to use system one as much as we can. It is the difference between how we think and how we think we think. 

Let me give you an example of system one and system two. This is my last little thing, Dana, before I hand over to you. I’m going to show you a tube train. I’m sure many of you have been to London. Here is a tube train. I want you to quickly decide if the tube train is leaving the station or entering the station. 

Most people are saying entering or leaving. People are slightly confused. Now I want you to do something slightly different. Whatever you think it was, I want you to tell the train to go the other way. You can now see it leaving the station. You can now see it entering the station. I am not changing the image at all. Leaving and entering. By saying the word leaving, you can see it leaving. By saying the word entering, you can see it entering. 

I am in control of your minds. What is happening is that your system one is saying, I can tell what is going on here. Unfortunately, your system two then comes in and says, but you do not have any data for that. System two often comes in and tries to get you to say something more sensible. 

It is the difference between Captain Kirk and Mr Spock. To be clear, the irrational one is not in charge here. One of them is the captain and one of them is just the mister. For your donors and supporters, it is Captain Kirk who is in charge, and that is who you need to talk to. 

Dana, I’m going to hand over to you to talk about some of the experiments we’ve done in fundraising, including the world’s largest fundraising experiment. I’ll change the slides for you if that’s okay. 

That’s perfect. There are some key concepts that have been presented that I want you to keep in mind as I present this. 

The first thing is that we make thousands of decisions a day. That causes what we call cognitive overload. It is that feeling of brain hurt you get when you are thinking too hard about something and have to use that part of your brain. 

The reason for that is because your brain makes up about 2 per cent of your body weight but uses about 20 per cent of your energy. There is an evolutionary need for us to conserve that energy, to protect ourselves, and to be able to do what we really need to do, such as run from predators or run after prey. 

Because our brain is trying to conserve that energy, we use heuristics, which are mental shortcuts. They help us bypass thinking instead of using logic all the time. 

We did the world’s largest fundraising experiment, and this is a couple of examples of some of the heuristics we might talk about. I will provide you with a framework of all the overview heuristics. There are about 149 heuristics and cognitive biases, but only about eight to 10 of them are really useful in fundraising. One of those is anchoring. 

For the world’s largest fundraising experiment, we worked with Arts Council England to identify 11 different arts and cultural organisations in the UK. These ranged from free-to-enter museums, to small touring companies, through to probably our largest cultural institution, the Royal Opera House, which has a significant number of patrons, supporters, and donors. 

We wanted to devise experiments using decision science at their core. We wanted to get data about how this works in cultural fundraising and use the experiments to inspire other people to take a more scientific approach to their fundraising. In and of itself, the experiment was a social norming exercise. I’ll talk about that term in a moment. 

Each organisation devised a different experiment. I am going to talk you through three of those experiments, the results, and how they went. 

It is important that we did some training with all the organisations. We used a framework called MINDSPACE. MINDSPACE is a framework that brings those 149 heuristics and cognitive biases into a simple nine-part formula. It presents the key concepts you need to consider when using decision science principles in your practice. 

The M in MINDSPACE stands for messenger. What we know from the science is that, as receivers of communication, we are heavily influenced by whoever communicates a piece of information. 

Think of classic dental adverts. You might see a beautiful-looking woman with big teeth, a white lab coat, and a clipboard. She says, this toothpaste is fantastic, I recommend it. Our mind says, that is a recommendation from a scientist or a dentist. That is the messenger effect at play. 

It is this idea that we are heavily influenced by who communicates a piece of information. From a fundraising perspective, we need to think about who is communicating the information. What is their authority or legitimacy? Are they likeable? 

A big part of why we all slightly liked face A is because there was a recognisable character in that face, someone we already knew. Thinking about these different aspects can affect your fundraising. I’ll show you an example of one organisation that experimented with the messenger effect to ask, who is the most effective messenger for our fundraising? 

The I in MINDSPACE stands for incentives. Our responses to incentives are shaped by the mental shortcuts we experience. For example, when we have donation options on a page, most of us tend to choose the thing in the middle. That is called the Goldilocks effect, as in not too hot, not too cold. 

This has interesting implications for how you highlight particular information. Having a pre-ticked box or a pre-prescribed amount can affect the way people recognise and behave on an online donation form. 

The N stands for norms. Norming tells us that we are strongly influenced by what other people do. I mentioned social norming a few moments ago, and this is exactly what I meant. 

Essentially, this is partly from evolutionary psychology. When we were coming out of sub-Saharan Africa, we followed the pack. We followed our tribe. The reason for that was because we did not want to be ostracised and left on our own. This still affects us today. 

It means that when we see other people doing things, especially people we recognise as like us, we are more inclined to do them as well. That is social norming at play. I think this is one of those fundraising lessons we already know. We just may not have known the scientific term behind it. 

The D in MINDSPACE stands for default. This is about the fact that we tend to go with the flow of preset options. I mentioned things like a tick box effect or having a pre-prescribed amount on a page. These are shortcuts that make it easier for us to make decisions. 

A suggested donation amount is a useful default because it helps us understand what amount is being asked for. We do not then have to shift into our system two brain to ask, how much exactly do they want? How much am I willing to give away? What difference will that make? That takes us out of system one and into system two. 

By adding defaults into our process, we ease the process and reduce the cognitive load for people, so they can go with the flow of preset options. 

The S in MINDSPACE stands for salience. Salience is an interesting phenomenon about how our attention is generally drawn to things that seem novel or relevant to who we are. This is why many appeals during the coronavirus period had strong traction. Many of us could identify with what it means to be isolated, to be away from friends and loved ones, and to feel unable to access arts and cultural opportunities. 

The salience of that experience enabled people to understand and appreciate the value of what we do in an even stronger way. Salience can be everything from that deep and meaningful interpretation through to the fact that sometimes a more recognisable name, or something coming across in news or social media that is completely disconnected from our cause, can still have a knock-on impact on our cause. 

An example is when Beyoncé released her album Lemonade in 2016. We saw exponential increases in sales of lemonade globally, just because more people were thinking about it and had a positive association with a great album. That is salience at play. There are interesting implications for fundraising as well. 

The P stands for priming. Priming tells us that our actions are affected by subconscious cues. You all know this by now because we played those games with you in the surveys. The anchoring technique that Bernard talked about is an example. The subconscious cue of being near 23rd Street meant that when people were considering what their monthly donation might be, that number influenced their decision, in that case in a positive way. 

The A stands for affect. Affect tells us that it is heart over head. Our emotions shape our actions. Keeping people in an emotive space is much more likely to drive the behaviour you want than bombarding them with lots of information, which requires them to move back into system two. 

Keeping people in system one means keeping them emotionally engaged with the messaging, the communication, and the action you are trying to encourage. 

Sorry, Dana. While you were talking about priming, shall we show people the apple experiment? 

Very quickly, when you were sent the questionnaire, you were asked one of two questions. Catherine divided you into two groups randomly. In one example, you were asked, how many calories do you think an apple has? I think you were cued with, do you think it is 51? In the other example, you were given a cue of 151. 

Half of you were given a cue of 51. Half of you were given a cue of 151. The average difference was between about 70 and 110. By cueing people with that number, you get a higher result. That can be applied to fundraising. If you are listening to this and thinking, I would not fall for that, I’m afraid you did. You do. 

Exactly that. The C in MINDSPACE stands for commitment. Commitment tells us that, as human beings, we like to be consistent in our commitments to who we are, how we express ourselves, our identity, our values, and our beliefs. The reason is that the world is a complex place. The simpler our understanding of ourselves is, and the more consistent we are with who we are, the easier that is on our brains. 

This is interesting when it comes to fundraising retention. Keeping donors on board means recognising that, at some point, when they donated to you, they expressed a commitment to something. That might be supporting young people to access the arts, a commitment to ballet, or however they decided to commit by supporting you with a donation. 

Reminding them of that commitment can be powerful. You might say, you supported us last year because this is what you are passionate about. That reminder helps them be consistent with that commitment. So commitment and consistency can be very powerful when we talk about supporter retention in fundraising. 

Similarly, this is where reciprocity comes in. Bernard showed you that image where the same part of our brain is activated when we give a gift and when we receive a gift. The power of reciprocity, and being able to enable and empower people to commit to giving something back because they have been activated in that way, is important when it comes to the general promotion of philanthropy and giving. 

Finally, the E stands for ego. This is something I think is commonly understood in the arts sector. In fundraising, we know people like to act in ways that make them feel good, or better, about themselves. What are the ways you can communicate that to people so they stay in that space where they feel fulfilled, understand the agency they have over a donation, and understand the impact they have? 

We talked to all the experimenters about these different principles. Some decided to focus on one principle. Others decided to use a range of heuristics and interventions to achieve their fundraising aims. 

The first experiment I’m going to talk about is by a company called the Handlebards. They are a very small touring theatre company based in the UK. They take Shakespeare’s shows and tour them in outdoor settings, and they do so on their bikes, hence the name Handlebards. 

The Handlebards are a team of two, with a freelance team of actors and performers. This was the first time they asked their audiences for a donation. They had no fundraising experience before this. 

The experiment that the Handlebards did focused on the messenger. Unlike other companies, they said, we are going to take one of these principles and really focus our experiment on that. The key questions with the messenger are, who is doing the ask? Do they have the authority, credibility, or validity to do that ask? How likeable are they? 

The hypothesis the Handlebards decided to test was this. Will the identity of the messenger have an impact on the level of gifts? That meant both the average gift and the number of gifts given. They decided to test four different messengers. 

They asked, who within our pool of people has some legitimacy or authority, or is likeable? The first messenger was a celebrity, patron, or ambassador figure. They happened to have Adrian Scarborough as an audience member. He is a famous actor in the UK, and they decided to test whether his public profile and presence as a recognisable character would influence their fundraising efforts. 

The second person they decided to use was one of the performers in the show, obviously the most recognisable face to the audiences. The third person was a young participant, somebody who had taken part in their educational programs. The fourth messenger was an existing audience member who was already a small-scale supporter of the Handlebards. 

It is important to know that Adrian Scarborough was in Killing Eve at the time, so he had a strong immediate presence as well. 

They filmed four fundraising videos. The messages were exactly the same, but the messenger was different. Adrian said, as a famous actor, this is why I think the Handlebards are fantastic. Tom, the actor, said, as one of the performers in the show, this is why I think the Handlebards are great and why you should support them. Sophie, the young participant, said, as someone who has taken part in the programs, this is why I think you should support them. Lindsay, the supporter and audience member, said, as a supporter and audience member, this is why I think you should support the program. 

Quick guesses in the chat box. Which of these do you think had the most impact? Who had the highest average donation, and who had the most donations? Was it Adrian Scarborough, Tom, lovely Sophie the child, or Lindsay, a fellow supporter? Maybe that draws on social norming. What do you think? 

There is a bit of a mix. You had very different reactions. At Team MC, we were convinced it was going to be Sophie. We thought she was so endearing in the video that we had a feeling it would be Sophie. I’ll show you a little bit about what everybody received, and then we’ll talk about the result. 

This is essentially the email that everybody got. They split their mailing list into different A/B tests, with four separate segments. Each segment received a different video and a different ask from a different person. This is typically what that email looked like. It was headed Giving the Gift of Shakespeare, and everybody got access to a two-minute video from Sophie, Tom, Lindsay, or Adrian, saying why they support the Handlebards and why they think you should support them too. 

Now for the results. The results showed that Adrian Scarborough got the highest amount of click-throughs. Most people opened the email. He also got the largest number of donations and the highest average donation. The results were very similar across the rest of the people, averaging around £28 to £30. 

This connects directly to the example Bernard shared about Tiger Woods. There is something about a recognisable, memorable face that persuades us to do something, especially when we have a very positive association with that person. People did at the time because he was a great actor in a show that was very much within the target audience of people who also go to see the Handlebards. 

There were interesting findings there, and I think they went a little against what we predicted. This is why it is so interesting to experiment and test these things. It is great for them because they have gone on to do a lot of work on their fundraising with some of this knowledge in place. 

They are doing really well in terms of their appeals. This is a tiny company with about 5,000 supporters, getting £7,000 to £10,000 from a mailing. The important thing here is the importance of experimenting and recognising that what you like, or what might work for you, is not necessarily what works for the market. 

One of the things we need to talk about is the need to experiment. I’ll ask you very quickly to do something on the screen. I’m going to ask you to say a little Buddhist chant that will help you with your fundraising, which is, I am not the target market. I am not the target market. A second time, I am not the target market. And a third time, I am not the target market. 

Every time you look at something and say, that would work for me, recognise that you, your board, your marketing manager, or your very clever 12-year-old designer are not the target market. You need to test. 

At the other end of the scale, from the tiny to the huge, this is a case study by the Royal Opera House. We worked with Marina Jones, who is the head of memberships and campaigns at the Royal Opera House. She was working on her legacy proposition, encouraging existing supporters, people who are giving regularly to the Royal Opera House, to consider leaving a gift in their will as well. 

She does an annual direct mail campaign and wanted to use decision science principles to improve the results. The starting point was very much affect. What powerful emotions could they draw on in the first instance? 

Sleeping Beauty is the ballet that the company reopened the Royal Opera House with in 1946. Many patrons were coming in those early days. It is a show performed year on year. Everybody has their favourite performer who played Aurora in Sleeping Beauty. 

This was a clever way for Marina to get to the emotions of people who care deeply about this work and to start identifying clusters of people who are in a particular tribe. Your Aurora might be Margot Fonteyn. It might be someone else. This helps understand where people are coming from, what their positive associations are, and who they most emotionally identify with. 

She did this cleverly on the envelope. This was the front of the envelope. It was a reverse envelope and a powerful way of using what we call adjacency pairs, which are a greeting and a greeting, or a question and an answer. In this case, the question was, who is your Aurora? That immediately gets people into an emotional affect space where they are thinking about that amazing experience of Sleeping Beauty that they love. 

She tested two separate letters. In the follow-on reading, we will give you a more detailed breakdown of all these things. In version one, she used terms like the messenger effect. She used a letter from an existing legacy pledger to do that social norming part, people like you and me do this. 

In the second version, she added and tested loss aversion. Loss aversion is the notion that people are twice as likely to be motivated by what they stand to lose than by what they stand to gain. 

Often in the arts, we frame things as, wouldn’t it be wonderful because more children can have better access to arts and cultural opportunities? That is a nice thing, but it is not as motivating as saying, if you do not support today, all these children are going to lose out on the chance to engage with culture. Framing things as a loss, either a loss for a group of people we care about or my loss, the opportunity I lose to support something brilliant, is more motivating. 

That is what she tested in the second letter to see if it had a stronger effect. 

She also did interesting work in the leaflet that accompanied the letter overview. On the cover, you will notice something that uses the gaze. Where are the eyes of Francesca Hayward in this particular image? Where is she looking? She is looking down at the call to action. 

This is a useful nudging technique. Often, we are told to use images where someone is looking at the camera. That can be powerful. But if the person in the image is looking where you want the audience’s attention to be directed, the audience will often follow their gaze. 

That is called using the gaze to affect and nudge people towards the information you want them to look at. That was a nice technique Marina used on the front cover. 

On the next page, there is some of the defaulting I talked about. There is a pre-ticked box that says the Royal Opera House is an important part of my life, and I want to support it in the future by including a gift in my will. That makes a slight suggestion. 

You will also notice that the quote uses reciprocity. Someone says, I have had lots of pleasure from this and I felt it was time to give something back. That uses social norming and the idea of being reciprocal by giving a gift back to the Royal Opera House. 

She also used some helpful techniques to explain the process of making a gift in a will. Legacy fundraising is different because we are not asking someone to act immediately on a call to action. We are not saying, we need you to support this thing right now, click this button. 

What we have to say is, you care about us. This is part of your identity. When the time is right, or when you are next at the lawyers, or when you are next thinking about updating your will, please remember us. There are many stages and aspects involved in that. 

To make that easier for people, she used chunking, which means dividing information into easier, more digestible pieces. In this case, she created a four-step process for what it means to leave a gift in your will to the Royal Opera House. 

She used signals showing the time it takes to take one of the options, or the amount of money associated with one of those options. Again, that makes it easier and quicker for people to make decisions. It keeps them out of a system two space and keeps them in a system one space. 

On the final part of the leaflet, there are again a few decision science techniques. The back page uses strong social norming, with a couple of statistics saying that 75 per cent of the people who leave a gift in their will are people who already support, just like you. There is also a little ego push in terms of what the money will do, what they like to see, and how they are going to support it. 

There is also another reminder of reciprocity, with a quote saying, it is time to give back. Please think about what I could be contributing to the future. You can see how small interventions overall can create a more successful and more effective campaign. 

That is exactly what happened. She had a better response rate. What was really interesting was that she invited people to say, now is not the right time for this conversation, but please talk to me in 12 months. For the first time, she got as many people in the pipeline for that as she did people making immediate pledges to leave a gift in their will. 

The third experiment I’m going to talk about very quickly is very different. This is the Bluecoat in Liverpool. It is a free-to-enter museum and gallery space. They wanted to encourage and incentivise on-site donations through donation boxes and donation points. 

It is worth saying that they started from a very low baseline. There were not many donations going through the three or four different donation points they had throughout the building. There is more detail in the attachment, but I’ll give you some examples of the interventions we made. 

On this particular donation box, there were decision science-informed improvements that we made. The first thing we did was elevate the payment device at the bottom. We put the leaflet, which Bernard mentioned before, a map guide, at the top to create a signal of reciprocity. 

The other thing we did was add a suggested donation amount at the top, which was £3. It said, tap to give £3 and get an instant warm feeling inside. That also massaged the ego element. 

The second thing we did was improve another donation box. In the image on the far left, the donation box was almost hidden. It was a very small grey box in the corner with a loose call to action. It looked as though they were trying not to receive donations. 

The first thing we did was move that box from a not very proactive area into a proactive area, with more information and a sign to encourage reciprocity. We created some anchoring by saying, give £3 for the next 300 years. That was the thing we did in week one. 

In week two, we took a little cardboard cut-out. This was one of the schoolboys. The Bluecoat used to be a school before it was converted into a gallery, and it was a school in the Victorian era. We used this little Victorian boy with his flute to nudge people towards the call to action. 

Before these interventions, that box was getting zero pounds and pence a month. By the time these interventions were in place, the box was getting about £100 a month. By moving it, adding the cardboard cut-out, nudging it, and making a couple of small changes, it went from making no money to making £100 a month in a short time. 

The third example involved making minor improvements to some of the other existing donation boxes. One used the endowed progress effect. The endowed progress effect is the fact that we like to complete things. We like to see the completion of things. In the same way that you like to complete a picture or do puzzles, we have that same tendency. 

We put a new wrap around that bucket to say, it’s your Bluecoat, but we need you. That invited people to fill in the blanks. We also made some minor improvements to the text on the outside donation box. 

With this experiment, what was most interesting was that these changes did not have that much impact. But we did notice that many people come to the Bluecoat to use the loo because it is a free public, accessible space. For some people, it is a local place to come and have a wee. 

So we put a sign on the back of the loo door to remind people and say, please keep art at the heart of Liverpool. Please consider donating today. That took those boxes from getting about £2 to £3 right up to £60 per box, just by having a priming message about the need to support on the back of the loo door. 

You might be surprised where your fundraising spaces are and what can drive behaviour in people. Those are the three UK experiments. I’m going to hand over to Bernard now to talk very briefly about the experiment we did in Australia with some of you, with Linden. 

Thanks to the great generosity of James, and with support from Catherine, we were able to do a couple of experiments. One we have done and are continuing with, and one I think Dana is going to bring back to everyone with the question, what would you do? 

I can see that the very clever Melinda Martin is there on the screen. Hello Melinda. Thank you so much for joining us. You did quite a clever thing by having a dinner. You were having a dinner and decided that although people were not expecting to be asked, you might ask them for money at the dinner. 

Here is a picture of you looking very clever in the middle there. I do not want to embarrass you by bringing you in, although you were looking fabulous there. I think there were about 40 people at the dinner. Is that right? 

We had 40 people at a dinner with three artists. 

That is quite a high artist-to-audience ratio. You had not really asked people for money before at dinners, but you did some great work. We helped with a little pledge card that you distributed towards the end of the dinner. Is that right? 

We put the pledge cards on the table with a handwritten note from me. 

That was great. You can see the pledge card doing many of the things Dana has talked about. There were three choices, giving people a sense of agency about what their money would do and helping them see how they could make a difference. There was also a thank you for your support and a thank you for coming. I think you also gave people a really nice little artist card as part of reciprocity. They received one of four little cards. Is that right? 

When they arrived, they got a little pack of postcards to thank them for joining us for the dinner. They received something they were not expecting. 

As well as a very nice dinner and a great talk from you and some artists. There were only 40 people there. I think they were in about 15 family groupings, so it was not 40 individuals. Some of them were wealthy, but they were not all individually wealthy. You did not do fantastic business, but tell people how you did. 

We raised $1,650 from the dinner. We had never asked for that money before at a dinner. They had already parted with $250 a couple to come to dinner, so they had already made an investment in the organisation. For us, it was a really interesting experiment. We learned a lot. 

Even listening now, I am reminded, as we are finalising our new case for support, of all those things we need to incorporate. One of the great things that came out of it is that it encouraged our board to match that money. The board will match that. Essentially, we have made nearly $3,000 from a dinner where we had no intention of using it as a fundraising event. 

It means that we will continue to use that approach. We now have these useful tools for the future. When you come to dinner, there will be an expectation that we will ask you for something more. 

Goodness, Melinda, when you are on a mission, you are on a mission, aren’t you? 

I am. 

You were so great to work with. You got two $500 donations in that, which are not bad donations at all. The point is that you need to start somewhere. You need to experiment a little. You are not a huge organisation and you do not have lots of very wealthy supporters. 

Marina at the Royal Opera House got a $50,000 gift from sending out the legacy letter. They are talking about very wealthy individuals. We consciously chose some big examples and some small examples to say, start somewhere. If you are a big organisation, you can work with big numbers. If you are a smaller organisation, start somewhere and try some of these techniques. 

It was such a pleasure to work with you, Melinda. I hope we are going to help you with either your case for support or your next annual appeal. As a great chief executive, you get it. Having all this fancy science is useful, but having a chief executive who gets it is the single most important thing. Thank you for that. 

Thank you so much. It was great to be part of the adventure. 

Dana, we are all right for time now. I think we are coming up to the next section. James, we are going to hand over and give people some questions. Dana, I think you have a little exercise for people now. We tried something with the Linden team, and I think you have a little experiment you want to share with the Melbourne team now. 

We are in the process now of working with Melbourne Fringe on another experiment. The hypothesis, or question, for that experiment is, how can we encourage audiences, people who pay for tickets to Fringe shows, to support us philanthropically? How can we use our newsletter as a vehicle to do that? 

How can we communicate to people who are buying tickets and say, aside from that specific event, what we want you to consider is supporting this whole initiative, this whole idea? That is the question in mind. Now that you have seen what you have seen, we have some key questions. I would love to hear from you in the chat with some ideas. 

As I ask you some prompt questions, add any ideas that come to mind in the chat. They might be from the examples we have shown you today, or things sparked by the questions. Using the MINDSPACE framework, what would you do in this situation? You have a newsletter. You have a way to communicate to a particular audience. What tools or techniques might you use in that newsletter? 

How can you encourage audiences to support you philanthropically using that newsletter? Put yourself in the shoes of Melbourne Fringe. How can you encourage your audiences to support you philanthropically using that newsletter? Here are a few prompt questions for each of the MINDSPACE principles. Add ideas in the chat as they come to you. 

We talked about messenger. Whoever delivers a message makes a significant impact. Who do you think might be the most impactful person, or people, to present an idea or an action? Is it somebody relatable? Is it someone who conveys authority? Is it someone likeable? 

Simon Abrahams, CEO, makes a lot of sense. He is an authority figure and CEO of Melbourne Fringe. Any other ideas? Maybe a couple of high-profile performers. That is a great idea. Is there somebody who got their break in that Adrian Scarborough role who can say, this is the value of Fringe? Fringe is the start of our careers. You need to support this if you want to see us on the telly or in films. Maybe a board member is also a good idea. 

Now think about incentives. We know we are more likely to be motivated by what we stand to lose than by what we stand to gain. How could you frame giving as a potential loss for the individual? What is the urgency around it? Is there anything you could do there? Is there any reciprocity you might be able to offer these people? Add any ideas in the chat. 

This one is quite interesting. How can we make it feel like people might miss out? Speaking about the loss through COVID could be one option. For me as an audience member, I lost out on my Fringe last year. How can I make sure I do not lose out on that again? Maybe it is by supporting the core organisation. 

Imagine my life without the Fringe. That is a nice way of framing some loss aversion. Lovely ideas here. 

Norming. We like to do and behave as others do. How can we demonstrate to people that others like them are giving? Any ideas on the social norming side? 

It is worth saying that, from many different experiments, the stronger and closer you can bring that pool of others like you, the more persuasive that narrative is. How can we use that effectively? For example, you could say, 60 other people like you today have already given. That is an interesting way to bring it closer and say, this is why we need you to take action today. 

One of the interesting things Dana is saying is that we know Marina has done this at the Royal Opera House. There is a sense of tribalism. Rather than talking about the whole audience, Marina consciously got people to be tribal about who their favourite performer was. 

You also see that with Wikipedia. If Wikipedia has ever asked you for money, they often say that most people do not give. They consciously say, most people do not give. We are looking for a small number of people like you who really care about this stuff. So make people feel they are special. 

Norming does not mean everyone does it. Norming can mean you are special because you do it. That is particularly interesting if you are running or managing patron schemes or supporter circles, where the point is exclusivity. Reminding people that this is a group of very dedicated people who are different to the norm, but normal among their peers, can be an important tool. 

I can see the tribalism of Melbourne, Sydney, and Perth coming out here. The Scottish invented tribalism, but Australians have certainly acquired it. You just changed the names of the tribes. 

Next set of considerations. Let’s get some more ideas flowing. Think about salience. How can we make the behaviour or the option we are promoting seem like an interesting choice? Is there anything that feels prominent, salient, or easier to understand? 

For example, is it match your ticket with the price of another ticket, rather than give us $20? Again, send through any ideas about making it a little more salient, easier to grasp, and more relevant. 

Similarly, defaults. Does anybody have ideas about how we can offer choice, but not too much choice? What kind of choice should we be suggesting? Should we recommend an amount? Is it about a scale? Should it be a little landing page with a few options? What are some of those ideas? 

I know these are not specific examples, but we are interested to see how you are interpreting this thinking. Melinda, the example you used, saying that the board will match people’s money, is both salient and gives people a sense of agency. 

Denise, I think we definitely have some perspectives on gold, silver, and bronze. Who likes to be in the bronze club? No one really. It is an interesting idea to have different levels, but it is useful to think about the naming of those levels and the tribal aspect of what those levels each are. 

Fan and superfan. That is a good example. Sarah, your point is useful too, about giving us a sense of what the money will go to. Rather than saying, give us $20, you might say, support a child to see a show, or frame it by the value of the thing rather than the particular amount. That way, we associate it with value instead. 

The final three parts of MINDSPACE are affect, commitment, and ego. Think about the specific emotions we want people to have. Do we want them to be angry? Do we want them to be sad? Do we want them to be joyful? How do we do that? 

Can we remind them of a commitment? What kind of commitment might audiences have to the Fringe that they do not realise, which we can remind them of and use to our effect? 

In terms of ego, Catherine’s suggestion is useful. The glass of wine in your hand type of thing is a nice way of framing it as something those people know, recognise, and may associate with the Fringe. It is the feeling they get, or the feeling that makes them feel good, and maybe a feeling many of us have missed. 

Georgie, that is a useful point about stewardship. I could not have performed this without your support. That is a strong suggestion and a nice ego stroke. 

Now we will take all those ideas. I am kidding. We do have some ideas about what we are going to do. I think there is some social norming we are going to focus on. We will look at the defaults we use and make sure we are using affect, salience, and a bit of priming in the messaging and communications as well. Stay tuned for some of those. 

Great. I think, James, we have done what we said we would do and wanted to give people some space to ask direct questions, either in the chat or however you want to manage that. 

Just to say, I think we agreed that we will give you a 70-page download about all of this. I could see some of you writing notes, but there is lots of material. If you want more, you can get in touch with us or we have a couple of websites that can help. 

James, do you want to try and handle some questions if people have questions? 

Definitely, Bernard. While we are waiting for questions to come in, is the document you are going to send us going to flesh out that MINDSPACE acronym? It is terrific. 

Absolutely. It takes you through both the theory underpinning the framework, which is a simple way to encompass evolutionary science, behavioural economics, and the other areas we have discussed. It also gives many examples directly from the 11 big experiments that we did. We talked about three of them today, but we have done other interesting experiments, not just in the UK, but internationally. 

The question is whether there is such a thing as too much of the MINDSPACE elements. That is an interesting question. I would say that all of this begins from a core point. These tools and techniques will never persuade people to do things they were not already inclined or willing to do. 

We are starting from the baseline that, if someone comes to your donation page, you have a choice. You can use some of these techniques and principles to make it as easy as possible for them to give, to maximise that giving, and to encourage them to give at a higher level than they might have originally expected. However, you are not convincing someone to give if they never wanted to give. 

When we are fundraising, we are hopefully doing so once we have established that these are people who are willing, happy, and ready to receive that messaging. The MINDSPACE elements are about making that process easier and more motivating for them. They use some of the science behind what we already use as intuitive or instinctive techniques that make up good fundraising practice. 

Is there too much of the MINDSPACE elements? It is always on a case-by-case basis. You are not always going to use all of the MINDSPACE elements in what you are doing. However, there are often interventions where you can start with one element, incorporate others, test some others, and see what works. 

It is also important to know that people can become fatigued by some techniques and tools. At that point, it is important to mix things up and change the approach. 

There is also an important thing called cognitive overload. Do not try to be too clever and do not give people too much choice. My worst kind of cognitive overload is when membership schemes are all laid out with too many options. There is too much choice. 

If we have too much choice, our brains freeze. Should I go bronze, silver, solo, or something else? This is the worst thing you can do because it brings in system two. It makes people stop thinking about being altruistic in system one and instead ask, what is the best deal for me? That is a different thing. We are talking about philanthropy, not whether this makes business sense. Please avoid cognitive overload. 

Dana and Bernard, there is a question here from Sarah about ways we are communicating. We heard from Jimmy Buck, a local chap, about how communication is changing and how we can use tools. Even in the last 18 months, social media and digital communication tools have become perhaps the norm, or even more powerful than they were. Any comments on that? 

I’ll say something about digital. Dana, you are slightly younger than me. That is true. Things are changing, although I think the whole digital thing gets oversold. Digital giving has increased by 100 per cent in the last year, but that means it has gone from 7 per cent to 14 per cent of giving. That is true in the UK, it is true in the US, and I’m sure it is true in Australia as well. 

There is a difference between me receiving an individual solicitation or direct mail pack, and then fulfilling my gift online. Many digital companies include me paying by credit card as online giving, but that is not the same thing. 

We also need to recognise that people talk a lot about young donors. Young people, millennials, and Gen Z are just as generous as people over 40 or over 50. They just do not have the money. I’m sorry. I have the money. I’m a boomer. I’m holding on to it until I die, but I have the money. 

There is a great question from Australian fundraiser Sean Triner. What is the best way to persuade the under-40s to donate to charity? The answer is, wait until they are over 40. Older people have the money to give. Engaging younger donors through newer techniques is a good way to get them on board, but the money still sits more with older donors. 

It is also useful to think about the largest single transfer of wealth in the history of the world, which I know causes Dana personal pain. 

A lot of the wealth that has been accumulated, particularly by the baby boomer generation, is about to transfer. We are about to see the biggest transfer of wealth in the history of humankind when those people die. They also happen to be among the most generous and philanthropic people. 

There is something called a bequest marketing gap. These are people who are generous and may be thinking about leaving a gift in their will, but are not necessarily doing it, or even aware that they can do it. There is a gap to fill over the next 20 to 30 years. Legacy giving globally is one of the few fundraising markets that will grow significantly over that period. 

That is why bequests are so important, and why legacy giving is so important. Organisations need to put the tools and techniques in place now so they can make the most of that opportunity. 

Dana and Bernard, Philip asks a question about how powerful it is to use donors to meet other donors, or perhaps for the organisation to introduce donors to each other. Have you done any experiments in that area? 

There is no question that having other donors who are like me, in the sense of my tribe, can have an effect. I told you about the mistake I made with the streets in New York example. Another thing I discovered was about putting up a big board saying thank you to the Jane Smith Foundation and the Arts Council of England, and so on. 

I had said to one small arts centre, put your donation box in front of that board, so that when people come in, they think, all these important people are giving money, so my money will help too. What happened was that donations went down. People thought, if all these big people are giving money, my £5 or £10 does not really make a difference. 

People were denied agency. That is such a key word. You need to give people agency. A beautiful thing Melinda and her team did was to say, here is what $350 will do. It will pay for a talk in a non-English language for a group of people who want to visit, or pay for an artist to have a studio space for a day. That gives people agency about what their money will do. 

Without the structure behind it, donors meeting other donors will have some social norming effect. However, the principles are that people need to see that either it is a mass or majority of some kind, or that it is an exclusive minority. The closer they feel they align with those people, in terms of values, background, and identity, the stronger the social norming will be. 

I am just reading this question from Natalie Bell. Natalie, are you online? Do you want to ask this? I remember that, right at the beginning of this webinar, you were the one who had read the unconscious bias book. Are you online? Do you want to ask this question in person? 

Sure. I am interested to know, how do you challenge people who are quite embedded with the say data and the messaging that you get, such as, it has always worked like this before, so why is it not working now? How do you challenge those ideas or bring them over to the do data? 

That is a great question. The internal work is as much about using these techniques as using them with your supporters and donors. A big part of why we produced this data was to enable cultural organisations to say, these people are using these techniques, so we need to be using these techniques too. 

That means encouraging people through social proof and social pressure. You can say, other organisations are doing this, and we need to be doing it as well. Appealing to the ego of particular people you are dealing with can also help. 

I would also suggest framing the use of this technique as a loss. For example, if we do not do this, we are going to be behind other organisations. We are going to lose the opportunity to maximise donations in this instance, or to gain new donors in that instance. It depends on the particular application. Can you use loss aversion to persuade or convince them otherwise? 

It is always a tricky challenge. Part of the reason we encourage the experimental approach is that sometimes it is very hard to get buy-in for something people may not immediately subscribe to. Getting them to commit to an experiment in the first instance is a useful way to say, can we at least have an opportunity to test that idea, prove it wrong, or try something new? 

You can then use their commitment to that experiment as a reminder when it comes to implementing the approach across the organisation. There are very specific tools you can use from MINDSPACE to do some of that internal influence. 

Another thing to think about is the difference between heuristics, unconscious bias, and noise. Heuristics are quick rules we use that tell us we do not need to think about something too much. We might fix the grammar in a sentence automatically, or choose to be with someone we like. That is a heuristic we can use. 

Unconscious bias has many negative consequences in terms of unfairness and social injustice, and we should address it and tackle it wherever we can. There are good examples in decision science, especially in Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow, of how to try to tackle that, whether it is about sentencing policy, unfairness, or hiring. 

I almost want to say that unconscious bias is a bad version of heuristics. There is something else called noise, which Daniel Kahneman’s new book is about. Noise is where people are not really paying attention. They are not really listening to what we are saying because life is messy and full of noise. We need to try to reduce the noise in order to make our message simple and clear. 

A nice example, which is in one of the other experiments we will mention in the book, is from the Shakespeare Schools Foundation. As people went into a theatre for a children’s theatre experience, they were asked if they wanted to take a sticker that said, I love Shakespeare. 

They went into the auditorium and could choose to take a sticker saying, I love Shakespeare. You are at a Shakespeare festival, so it is a bit of a no-brainer. As people left the theatre, there were people with collecting boxes and T-shirts with the same logo, saying, I love Shakespeare too. 

Donations then went up because people had taken a sticker through reciprocity and saw a message that fitted with their ego. We have done that many times. By getting people to choose a sticker, they are not really aware that they are unconsciously saying, I sign up to the Shakespeare tribe. That tribal thing is important. 

The other thing I would say about Daniel Kahneman’s book is that it is a book that many people buy and hardly anyone reads because it is very academic. I would probably recommend Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational as a quicker and easier book. 

Agreed. It is not necessarily a better book, but it is an easier read. 

Natalie Bell has read Thinking, Fast and Slow. Perhaps we will dive into that book for a webinar next year. That will scare us. 

That has been tremendous. We are out of time. Thank you both very much. That was a terrific session. 

I think this webinar showed that our jobs are not as straightforward as we might think. You have demonstrated that there is a science behind what we are doing, and that we need to go deeper into how we think about the role we have, how we communicate, how we develop our asking, and perhaps how we work more closely with our marketing teams as well. 

That is what came to my mind. It is about ideas, doing things more effectively, and having a better understanding of how people respond to the prompts we give them. But test those ideas as well. 

It has been terrific. I also want to remind people of Bernard’s latest book, Making the Ask: The Artful Science of High Value Fundraising. It is available on Kindle now. It only came out a couple of weeks ago. 

It is not actually out yet. It comes out on the 15th, but if you buy it now on Kindle, it is only 99 cents. A bargain of a book. Buy it now before it is officially released and you will get a bargain. 

Thank you to those at Linden New Art and Fringe for your involvement in this webinar. The next Knowledge Series webinar, which some of you may already be booked into, will take place on Thursday 3 June on everybody’s favourite topic, tax. Tax and tips for arts fundraisers. Please join us for that. 

We do hope you are enjoying the Knowledge Series. If you would like to suggest future topics for these webinars, please email your state manager and we will take your suggestions on board. 

Thank you for participating today. Thank you again to Bernard and Dana. You can go and grab yourselves a coffee and recover from your early morning. I wish everybody a terrific rest of the week. Bye-bye.