In public media individual giving, membership is king. It’s where we’ve had the most success. In fact, we’re kind of famous among nonprofits for how good we are at getting large numbers of donors to give small amounts. And that is something to be proud of.
If you work in public media major giving, you also know that our successes in membership can sometimes affect how we think about other areas of giving.
Perhaps you’ve experienced one or more of the following:
- Donors move into a major giving portfolio based only on a gift level instead of on a qualifying process.
- There is a significant percentage of donors in your portfolio whom you don’t know well at all.
- You don’t have a plan for each donor in your portfolio.
- Your organization does not have projects defined that can be matched to donor interests.
Nearly all public media organizations are fluent in membership. But when public media fundraisers take the tactics that made membership wildly successful and mis-apply them to major giving, it results in low major giving revenue and frustrated major giving officers.