What’s Being Planted Now?

A colleague and I got coffee last week. Giving USA had just landed and she was in a good mood. $617 billion. A record. The most Americans have ever given in a single year. Her board had already forwarded the number around with exclamation points.

She asked why I was quiet.

Words were going to take too long. I grabbed a napkin.

I drew a pyramid. At the top I wrote "major gifts," because that is where the growth came from this year. Almost all of it. Fewer people, giving more.

Then I drew an arrow up the side of the pyramid and wrote "grown, about a decade."

Here is what that arrow means. Major gifts are not acquired. They are grown. A $50,000 donor almost never walks in the door as a $50,000 donor. They walk in as a $100 donor, years earlier, and they climb. The relationship that produces a big gift is usually built over the better part of a decade.

Which means the record we are celebrating this year is a harvest. It was planted five to ten years ago, down at the bottom of that pyramid, by small donors nobody was celebrating.

Then I got to the bottom of the pyramid, and I scratched it out.

Micro donors are down almost 9 percent this cycle. Four of every five first-time donors never give again. Not eventually. Not after a falling out. They just never come back. The bottom of the pyramid, the exact ground where next decade's major donors are supposed to come from, is going bare.

I wrote one sentence under the pyramid and circled it.

Today's record was planted ten years ago. What's being planted now?

She looked at the napkin for a while. Then she said the thing almost everyone says.

"So we need to acquire more donors."

I understand the reflex. It is the trained reflex. But the data will not cooperate with it. Acquisition was basically flat this year. The Fundraising Effectiveness Project numbers say we are bringing new donors in at roughly the same rate we always have. The pipeline is not emptying at acquisition.

It is emptying at the front door. We get the first gift. We make promises when we take it, some spoken, most of them implied. And then four out of five of those donors never see us again.

There was one more thing on the napkin. I had run out of room, so I wrote it sideways up the edge, the way you write the thought that will not fit inside the drawing.

What did we promise them?

That is the question I actually care about, and it is a different kind of question from "how do we get donors back." That first question is about the donor. What they did. Whether they renewed. Every CRM in the sector can answer it, because every CRM tracks what the donor did.

The sideways question is about us. What we said we would do when we took the gift, and whether we did it. No CRM has a field for that. The failure has nowhere to live in our systems, so it only ever shows up later, disguised as a lapsed donor, long after anyone can trace it.

A retention problem is a promise problem. A major gift pipeline is a retention problem with a ten year fuse.

That is the whole reason Show Me the Receipts exists. The napkin is the diagnosis. The instruments for the sideways question, the ones that give a promise a written record and a due date before it can break silently, live here on this site.

She kept the napkin.