Better Together - A Petrus Development Show Episode on Donor Visits

In this week's episode of the Petrus Development Show, Andrew and Rhen return to chat about making donor visits with other members of your team.  The addition of a partner for certain donor visits is definitely a wise strategic decision, but it also adds the potential for awkwardness and unexpected challenges.   

Show Notes:

Development directors make many donor visits alone, and that's just an accepted fact of schedules and logistics.  Not everyone can come to every visit.  That said, there is a time and a place for bringing someone else with you on your visits, and Andrew and Rhen discuss how to best prepare for partnered visits and make the most of your time together with the donor. 

In this episode, Andrew and Rhen answer the following questions:

• How many donor visits should you make per month to be successful?  And, based on those numbers, how many of those visits should include a team member?
  
  
• What members of your team should you bring on donor visits?
   
• How do you know when it's the right time to bring someone else on a donor visit with you?
  
  
• How do you prepare your director or other team members to join you on donor visits?  Are there best practices for how you interact and play off one another during the meeting?
  
  
• What can you do if your director doesn't want to be involved in donor meetings?
    
   

As Rhen mentions at the end of the episode, Petrus has a sample phone script you can use for calls to request donor meetings.  Would you like to see it?  If so, click here for more information. 

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

00:15.26
aggierobison
Well, howdy everybody, welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I am Rhen Hoehn with Petrus, and joining me today is Andrew Robison, owner and president of Petrus Development. How is it going, Andrew?

00:33.95
AROB
Rhen, it's going great. Hope you're having a nice summer and getting ready for some thimbleberry picking.

00:41.85
aggierobison
I am. It's about that season. Ah, I'm excited to get out there with the kids, pick some berries, and have some jam for the winter. Like some good berry jam, have a taste of summer when it's... oh yeah.

00:51.76
AROB
There you go. I am not familiar with thimbleberries. I don't think I've ever had thimbleberry jam all the years I came up visiting with you, maybe once or twice, but it doesn't seem familiar.

01:03.81
aggierobison
I don't know, it's pretty expensive to buy. It's like $25 for an eight-ounce jar. They usually grow in alpine areas. But I guess we have an alpine climate, even though we're only at like 700 feet of elevation, so they grow well here. We like to go pick them and make some jam.

01:21.50
AROB
We do not have an alpine climate in Texas. Ah no, but we do have pecans, and so that's... I think people in Texas are very proud of their pecans. Some people have pecan groves, and pecan pie is very popular, and candied pecans and all of that. But no, no thimbleberries there.

01:42.75
aggierobison
I'll have some of that next time I'm down there. Who? Sounds good. We're all berries here: thimbleberries, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries. Lots of those around here. It is berry tasty. Oh well, today we want to talk about making donor visits with other members of your team, right? A lot of our donor visits are ourselves. You know, development staff going up meeting one-on-one with a donor, but sometimes you bring a second person. And I, ah, the first time I ever did this, I brought Father Ben, the director of the campus ministry I was working at, and we had no idea what we were doing or how to play off each other in the meeting, how to signal each other when we needed to at certain times. And so we went, met this couple that invited us over for lunch. Um, it was just a unique situation all around, but they invited us over for lunch, and we had this big multi-course lunch, had this great conversation, and the conversation just kept going. And I had scheduled our next donor visit. It was about 4 hours after this one started. I was like, "That'll be plenty of time. We'll be able to go take a break, go for a walk, whatever, and then go meet this next set of donors." And we were late for that meeting actually because this lunch went so long, conversation was so good, and I did not know how to... I was the timekeeper on our team. Father Ben doesn't really necessarily keep track of the time. That was my job, to keep time and get to the next place that we need to be, and I didn't really know how to signal him like, "We got to get out of here. We're late for our next meeting," right? And so it was a little bit of a disaster of like, "Oh we got to go, we got to go, get us out of here," and then we're apologizing to the next donor, "We're coming, we're coming. We're not standing you up," right? And so I learned quickly that you have to kind of plan for these types of meetings, practice parts of them, and know how to signal each other and all that. And some of that just takes some practice, but I wanted to talk through that dynamic here on this episode today.

03:34.56
AROB
Yeah, sounds great. Yeah, bringing along another individual can add a completely different dynamic to your meeting. It can be a way for you to schedule a second or a third or a fourth or follow-up meetings if you say, "I'm gonna bring somebody else with me." There's a lot of benefit to it. So yeah, anxious to dive into this conversation.

03:53.29
aggierobison
Exactly. So maybe as a first step to set the table here before we get there, if you're a development officer, a full-time development officer, how many donor visits should you be making in a given month on average to be successful?

04:06.10
AROB
15 to 20 donor visits per month is a good target for any development officer. Now, I did that as a development director when I also had to do annual fund letters, I had to do newsletters, I had to do monthly giving processing. 15 to 20 visits was still a target for me. When I worked at the Texan and Foundation, I didn't have any of those responsibilities, and so I was on the higher end, 20 visits per month, but that was always my goal. And I will tell you, the months that I was actively seeing people and asking, those led to solicitations, those led to good cultivations. Seeing people leads to raising more money, and so going on donor visits is key to that whole process. And I will say that the months and the years when I did that consistently were always more successful when it came to more gifts to the ministry.

05:03.90
aggierobison
Great. So if you're making 15 to 20 visits in an average month, how many of those do you think you'd typically bring somebody else with you on the visit?

05:12.30
AROB
Yes, so a good target would be 5 visits per month you do with your director. So if you're the development director, your director might be the principal, it could be the school president, it could be the chaplain, it could be your pastor, could also be your board chair. But if you can set a goal to do 5 visits per month with that other individual, then that's a good target. Some months you're going to hit that, some months you're not, but that at least gives you something to shoot for.

05:41.43
aggierobison
Great. So you mentioned director. Is that typically who you bring, or are there other people you might bring with you on a donor visit?

05:47.60
AROB
Yeah, you can take anybody on a donor visit that is going to represent your organization, talk about the impact, build rapport with your donors, and set up for a continuation and expansion of that relationship. So, you know, when I worked at Campus Ministries, occasionally we would take college students. In fact, a lot of campus ministries, St. Mary's Texas A&M has a student ambassador program, so they have 15 or 20 students who go through some training, and then that's part of their role as they go on donor visits. You can also take staff members. So a great way to ask for or to steward a donor who is supporting a particular program is to bring the staff member who's in charge of that program. And so you can take your teacher, you could take a coach, you can take your campus minister, whatever that looks like. And then of course, for your high-level donors, vision and goals and kind of where the organization is going is important to them, and there's nobody that can or should be telling that, sharing that vision better than your director. So taking your director to meet many of your high-level donors is a great way to get them, get your donors excited about where the organization's going.

07:07.89
aggierobison
When do you know when is the right time to bring somebody else with you on these visits? Are there something you look for specifically?

07:15.75
AROB
Yeah, so it depends on every donor, right? So some, you know, as an organization, you're always going to have donors that are very either very wealthy or very active in the community, have a high profile. And as a development director, it's gonna be a challenge for you to get an appointment. They're just not going to take an appointment with you, but they might see you if the director is with you. And so sometimes first-time appointments with individuals like that, you want to take your director. You want to take somebody, board chair, somebody with authority, leadership-level authority within the organization. Now if they're not at that level and you can get visits, you can get a visit with somebody without bringing your director, then it's a good idea to save that sort of "director visit" for a follow-up. So a lot of times I would go and I would see individuals, whether they're alumni or parents or whoever they are, and then as part of that discovery process, I'm figuring out, all right, what's the end? Where are we going in this relationship? Do they have significant capacity to give a larger gift? Do they have a huge network to be able to connect us with more? So when I start seeing potential with that relationship for it to go somewhere, meaning more dollars, more connections, whatever that looks like, then that is kind of playing that card, "Hey, I'd love to come back and visit with you and..."

08:41.30
AROB
I'd love to even bring my director with me next time. I know he or she would love to meet you. Is that something that we could do? Yeah, so that kind of sets you up for that next appointment, building that relationship.

08:51.49
aggierobison
Yeah, exactly. It gives you a reason to come back to them a second time. It also just saves your director time because they're really busy, right? For you to kind of go out and meet everybody the first time and kind of weed out, okay, some of these people...

09:05.15
aggierobison
You know, in my experience at a campus ministry, it could be some alumni who just wanted to talk about their college day stories and the wild hijinks that they were in, and they wanted to reminisce. They didn't really... When you started trying to move the conversation to what's happening at the ministry, what type of... you know, all that...

09:20.47
aggierobison
They just go back, "Yeah, but let's talk about this thing that happened back in the '60s," and "I'm sure you heard this story all around campus," that type of thing. They never really come and engage with the mission that we were trying to share. Somebody like that, okay, maybe I'm not going to come back and visit them a second time, so I don't need to use my director's limited time on that visit. I'll find somebody who is engaged with the ministry and bring them to meet that person, right? So you're saving this time by figuring out who are the highest priority people for them to get in front of in those 5 visits out of 15 or 20 every month.

09:47.91
AROB
Yeah, and that's what those discovery visits are for, right? You're essentially learning about your donors, and they're learning about you. So you're sharing information, but even more so, you're learning about your donors. And you know, in a way, you're kind of triaging: who do I need to bring my director back to see, and who do I not? And you know, like I mentioned earlier, sometimes you want to steward a donor who's supporting a particular program, who has a particular interest in something that you do. And so maybe it's not somebody you'd bring your director to come see, but you might bring the campus minister, or you might bring the gym teacher, or you might bring the program director or somebody like that because it's going to build that relationship without pulling your director away from the many responsibilities that he or she has.

10:37.34
aggierobison
Right, you want to have the right person in the room with that donor, right? I remember asking somebody, you know, what was the biggest ask you've ever made, and they said $10 million, but I wasn't in the room for it. I said, "Oh, tell me about that." It's like, I built this relationship, I set it up, but it became clear...

10:55.82
aggierobison
...that when it came time to make this ask, the right people were the bishop and this well-known priest. And so I got them into the room with that donor. They made the ask, and they were successful. And yeah, I did all the setup work, but those were the right people to be in the room with those donors at that time. And so as you get to know the donor, you'll kind of start to learn that. I had one donor who I talked to on the phone several times. He was out on the East Coast and happened to be there for a conference right next to him and called him up, and he said, "Oh, call me when you get here, and we'll have a meeting." And so I called him when I was out there in DC, and he says, "Oh, you're not the priest," and I said, "Oh no, I'm not. I'm one of the staff." He's like, "I only want to meet with the priest." And so he won't meet with me, right? So then we arranged for Father Ben to travel out there, meet with them, and they started a good, long relationship. He's still a big supporter of the ministry now. But for some people, there's just, you know, got to have the right person in the room with them. So it's navigating that and figuring out who is the right person.

11:51.67
AROB
Yeah, my old boss, he was going to see an individual about a big gift, a major gift to the campaign that we were working on at the time, but same thing - he knew that this individual needed to be asked by a priest. But...

12:06.65
AROB
I remember if our priest was out on sabbatical for an extended time or if he was just traveling, but the normal priest, the pastor, was not available. And so Greg, my old boss, he said, "I need a priest, I need a collar," and so he went and he found Father Keith. Father Keith, great, great priest, great guy, never did any development. And he said, "Father Keith, memorize this line: 'Mr. So-and-so, would you prayerfully consider a gift of $100,000 to this campaign?'" And he said, "That's all you have to say. If that's all you say in the meeting, say that." So Father Keith was so nervous, and I used to play golf with him, and he told me about this, and he would get so nervous. But he, you know, Greg sort of cued him up, and he said, "Mr. So-and-so, would you prayerfully consider a gift of $100,000?" and then he shut up and he sat on his hands, and he said, "For you, Father? Yeah, I will." So it was like, oh, it's funny.

12:58.15
aggierobison
I love it. All right, so you got this meeting set up, and in my experience, the collar does open a lot of doors, right? You can get meetings with people. And the director too, yeah, I know.

13:07.66
AROB
"Wait, you're not the priest? I'll see the priest," when he jumps.

13:12.82
aggierobison
Doesn't necessarily have to be a priest though, can be the director of a ministry. And even if I'm not a priest, if you can say, "Hey, I'm calling on behalf of the director, and they've asked me to reach out to our alumni, to our supporters," to whoever that might be, our benefactors. Because you're calling on their behalf, people will respond to you a little bit more. So, but so you've got this meeting set with you and whoever else is going from your team. How do you prep that team member for this visit? Whether they're made in two situations: one, if there's somebody who does fundraising a lot, like maybe the director does, or two, if it's somebody like a student at campus ministry or maybe a board member who is making one of their first fundraising visits and they don't know how to prepare, what to do in the meeting. How do you prep them for those meetings?

13:52.35
AROB
Yeah, whoever it is, your job as a development director is to make them look good and make them look prepared. So I remember one time we had a priest transition, this is when I was up in Ohio, and so we were going to meet somebody from our leadership council. He was very...

14:09.71
AROB
...you know, had a high position within the university, a very important guy, very limited time, super nice, loved to see us, but it was the first time for the new priest to meet him. And so as we were walking across campus, I gave... I had printed out, I had gone into his record and I had pulled kind of previous gifts, done the donor profile report. But then I had written in there just a couple of things that I knew about Joe that I felt like our new priest needed to know. And so as we're walking over there, he's reading it. And again, you can prep, you know, ideally, you're prepping them well in advance. But the reality is, a lot of times you're driving from, you know, appointment A to appointment B. And you give them that sheet and they're reading it in a car as they're pulling into the next appointment, right? There's just the nature of the work and how busy we are. So we're walking over and I gave him this note and he reads it, and afterwards he said, "Oh my gosh," he says, "I have never been this prepared for meeting somebody new in my entire life." He said, "This is really great." I said, "Yeah, it's just the report and, you know, a couple of notes." He said, "This is really good." And so we get in there and he knows about Joe, and you know, it wasn't like a creepy "I know everything about you, Joe," but it was like, "You know, I'm familiar with this," and the donor recognized that Father was prepped, and that made him look good, but then it made our entire ministry look good in his eye. And so, you know, that would be kind of the right way to prep somebody. You know, the wrong way to prep somebody is to not tell them anything and they show up and then they have to ask all the silly questions that...

15:40.68
AROB
...this donor has already told you or anybody else. And so making them look good is not just for sort of optics of that meeting, but it can directly influence that donor's perception of the organization and how worthy that organization is for them to continue giving and to give more.

15:58.79
aggierobison
Excellent. And then any best practices for how to work together or play off each other in the meeting itself?

16:07.67
AROB
Yeah, I like to plan for one person to be the timekeeper and have no way to cue the next person to get out, and then you just spend three and a half hours eating lunch and talking with people. That's kind of my go-to for...

16:20.22
aggierobison
Ah, four and a half is even better. Yeah, it's...

16:23.71
AROB
So this is something that as you go on meetings, you will learn how to develop a rapport with your partner. And so the kind of best-case scenario I had when I worked at the medical school: My Dean was great, and we did a lot of donor visits together. I knew that when we got there, it was his time to shine. He talked about the school, he talked about the students, he talked about his experience. He was just very personable, and that was a great sort of space for him to be in, talking, you know, updates and just kind of getting to know somebody. When it came to talking about the project and asking, that was not his area of comfort, and so what we figured out very quickly is that his line would be... and he would kind of throw me a couple of bones like in the conversation, you know. He'd say, "Yeah, Andrew's doing this," and I'd, you know, chime in for a couple of seconds. I wasn't like, yeah, you know, kind of Johnny Nobody in the room. But it was clear that, you know, he was there to start to get the conversation going and to sort of give the updates. But then when it was time to talk business, he would say, "Andrew's got a really great project that we're doing that he'd like to share with you about." And it was a very clear handoff, and you could even... there were times that the donor would be, you know, physically sort of directing his body looking at the Dean, and then when he would say that, he would like sort of shift his, you know, turn his entire body to look at me. And so it was a great dynamic because the Dean was sort of saying, "I know we have a rapport, but I want to give sort of hand the baton off to Andrew who's going to talk about this project," and it gave me authority to then talk about it, and then he would chime in. So again, like, how do you... is that a best practice? No. Is the best practice that you, you know, you have a couple of meetings, you kind of, you know, bungle a couple, you learn from them, you learn the, you know, the dos and the don'ts of working with that individual? It's hard to say that's the best practice, but the fact of the matter is that everybody is a little bit different, and they might have times that they shine and times that you shine. So it's really about building rapport with the partner that you're going to see and then figuring out how to make those transitions.

18:35.61
aggierobison
Great, and what I've always found helpful is to let the donor know if you're making an ask, specifically let them know which of us is going to be following up with them. I've had that be a confusion in the past. So let them know, "Oh, Ren's going to follow up with you next week, and we'll see how you feel about this project," right? That type of thing. So...

18:51.21
AROB
Yeah, and you know, like in my story with Greg and Father Keith, right? So Father Keith's role in that visit was to make the ask, and that was not an area of comfort for him. And so Greg prepped him by saying, "Memorize these whatever 7 words, and when you say them, put your hands under your legs and do not say anything else," right? And so it was very simple training, very basic, but Father Keith went into that knowing, "I know how to do this. I may not like it, but I know how," and so it like gave him the confidence to do it. And sometimes that's what it takes, is a little bit of training and sort of prepping your director or your student or whatever for their role so they have confidence so that they can perform in that meeting at the best of their ability.

19:35.30
aggierobison
Great. I think that was a pretty good overview. Hopefully, if you're listening, as you prep to take out your director, your board members, your volunteers, anyway, your staff to go meet some donors and build some relationships and grow your ministry.

19:49.17
AROB
Should we talk about what happens if you have somebody, a director that doesn't like to go on visits or that can't find the time? So...

19:55.99
aggierobison
Ah, scratch my last... Yeah, let me just set you up for that. So just scratch my last piece there, Edie. Sorry, that's great. So what about a situation, and this comes up fairly often in the organizations we work with, where the director doesn't want to be involved in fundraising? They say, "Nope..."

20:13.98
aggierobison
"I have fundraising staff. I can wash my hands of this and sit it out."

20:15.93
AROB
Yeah, so that's not an ideal situation. Let's just start there, right? So if that is the situation, best course of action is to help them understand why it's important for them to be involved and help them with...

20:34.40
AROB
Developing some confidence because 9 times out of 10, it's just a fear. It's, you know, everybody is busy. Everybody can find the time to do this. It's just a "I don't want to, I'm afraid of what can happen," and so, you know, taking them to a conference or to do some webinars or some training or some consulting or whatever coaching, whatever that looks like, can help sort of build the confidence and then they're more likely to go, right? But even then you have some people that just aren't going to or you can't sort of make that shift. And as sort of bad as it sounds, if you have somebody who is really like an, um, anti-going on visits and, you know, is going to create a, I don't say hostile, but an unpleasant environment, like don't force the issue. Don't take them on visits when that's how they're going to react and that's how they're going to respond. And if you're in that situation, like I feel for you, right? And I've, fortunately, I've had good bosses, but I know people that, you know, worked with a lot of people, that's their situation. So what do you do in that situation? You find the next best person. So if your director won't go, try to get your board chair. Or if you, you know, don't have a board and or, you know, that's not something that they are willing to do, get somebody else on staff. Get your, you know, maybe there's an assistant director or maybe there's an associate pastor or, you know, the assistant principal or your teacher, whoever. Find somebody you can build a rapport with who can speak to that and...

22:01.83
AROB
Again, you don't want to throw your director under the bus when you're seeing your donors and saying he never comes on visits with me. That's not going to help you in any way. But it does give you somebody who you can bring along, who you can build a rapport with, make positive headway, and make the best of the situation.

22:17.71
aggierobison
Great. Anything else you want to hit on? Yeah, that's great. So before we end, I want to mention that, you know, to get to bring somebody with you in the meeting, you have to get the meeting first, and so it might be helpful to have a script for making the call to get the meeting. And we have a script for calling these potential donors to ask for a meeting available for free on our website. If you go to petrusdevelopment.com/147 - this is episode 147 of the Petrus Development Show. So it matches up. At petrusdevelopment.com/147, you'll find a script there with some different options of, you know, how you should approach what to say if somebody answers the phone or if you get a voicemail, or, you know, depending on how they respond, what you can say. You can go grab that script for free, petrusdevelopment.com/147, and give you a little more confidence to make those calls. I know even after I'd made dozens or hundreds of those calls, I still like to have a script in front of me because sometimes somebody would answer and you'd just be blank like, "Oh, what do I say now?" I just have something to get me going, right? So that can be pretty helpful.

23:29.38
AROB
You know what I used to do is funny. I would write my phone number, my like callback number, office line, on a little piece of like a sticky note and stick it on my computer or on my phone, and people would walk in. They're like, "Why is your phone number on a sticky note?" I'd say, "Because when I'm leaving messages, I don't want to stumble over my phone number," and so I just read it. Like, I literally, you know, for years I would do that, and, you know, leaving it there doesn't then do any harm and it kind of triggers your mind to, "Oh yeah, I need to leave my callback number." That's it.

23:58.11
aggierobison
That is exactly what I did after once or twice accidentally giving them my wife's phone number as a callback number. That's just the number I had memorized. It was very similar to mine, like, "Oh no." So yeah, you definitely want... Yeah, just make your life as easy as possible when you're making those calls. Oh boy.

24:12.13
AROB
There you go, and so it's all about...

24:17.10
aggierobison
Excellent, well thank you for joining us today, Andrew. Enjoy the nice July heat here and we'll talk to you again soon.

24:22.79
AROB
I will. Enjoy your thimbleberries, right? Thanks, Rhen.