HOW TO CULTIVATE NEW MEMBERS

We are not talking about cultivating acres of new crops but we are talking about taking time to care and give attention. Cultivation refers to the methods you will use to build a relationship with a donor. How to contact new donors? How to inform prospects about your projects and encourage them to give? Who should reach out to cultivate new donors? How to court and sustain donors? These are some of the many questions you may be asking yourself.

First and foremost, you should have already gone through the extensional crisis of whether what you are offering has value. Once you have gotten through that, you are ready to cultivate your membership. The phases of the cultivation process can easily be remembered as the '4Rs' but not all parts of the process need the same attention. Below are how experienced development directors divide their time:

• Research, 25%
• Romance, 60%
• Request, 5%
• Recognition, 10%

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Research

Cultivation strategies are based on the information that is gathered in the identification phase.
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• Define your target market: Who is your ideal member? Consider the activities of that person and how you can get in front of them.

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• Connecting: Carefully consider where your new members are and how you can connect with them where they are. This could cover a range of activities from direct mail, telephone, email contact, to events, personal visits, and peer-to-peer networking.

ReAD "finding new members"

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ROMANCING

Romancing should be called stewardship but we couldn't turn down an easy 4R rule. Stewardship is all about maintaining and evolving long-term relationships with members. Effective stewardship will ensure that the donor knows their membership is being valued and put to good use, will appropriately recognize the membership, and will ideally engage the member to feel even more positive about your organization. This part of the process will take up most of your time, but we have written an article with tips and tricks to automate some of these interactions here.

READ "10 WAYS TO AUTOMATE ENGAGEMENT WITH YOUR MEMBERS"

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REQUEST

Solicitation is the phase where you will make the ‘ask’. There are several ways to achieve this – direct mail, telephone fundraising, face-to-face solicitations, peer asking, as part of a legacies campaign, or through online communication. Long story short, "Just do it". 

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RECOGNITION

You must be prepared to act quickly to accept a membership and thank a donor. For major commitments, this can be an involved process with a requirement for due diligence, agreements, and other red tape. It is important to have the appropriate mechanisms already in place. For smaller and regular commitments like membership, it is important to have a system (like Member Center + HubSpot) that can reassure donors that their donations are being handled professionally. Traits of professionalism, making your membership sign-up painless, easy, and instantly sending a personalized thank you email.

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By investing wisely in stewardship activities, you can keep donors engaged in a donating cycle and encourage them toward regular repeat giving and giving in increasing amounts, ultimately increasing your overall pool of donors and prospects, and boosting your fundraising income.

The stewardship phase should feed back into cultivating the donor for a future ask. However, fundraisers should be extremely cautious that stewardship and cultivation phases are not just about preparing to make the ask. These phases are about engaging the prospect/donor in the institution. Donors who only hear from the institution with financial requests disengage quickly.

You should invest time and effort in research, cultivation, and stewardship activities to have the best response rate. Be sure to remember to record details and notes every phase. HubSpot is especially well-suited to support all of these efforts. Why? Well, the commercial sales process called "the sales pipeline" is very similar to the donor cycle. We wrote an excellent article here outlining that process, similarities, and how to benefit from using HubSpot and the decades of sales technology to improve your fundraising. ​

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member center

Member Center is a plug-in built on one of the most powerful customer relationship managements (CRMs) tools on the market, HubSpot. HubSpot is a free CRM software used to organize, track, and nurture your leads and customers, making it easy for your whole team to track the status of every customer relationship. By pairing with HubSpot, Member Center is able to help you focus on building a meaningful relationships with each member. 

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