In Search of Professional Givers
Posted on Mon, Jun 28, 2010
Giving for most people is something they do when asked or when something extraordinary is happening in the world. It is not something on their daily to-do list. Fundraisers know this so they are constantly coming up with emotional appeals linked to calls to action.
Then there are the people who consider giving an integral part of their lives. They don’t need a call to action because they proactively support the causes and institutions which matter most to them. These individuals are professional givers, people who devote a portion of their most precious resource – time – to making a difference.
Bill Gates is of course the extreme example of a professional giver, but it is rare for a founder and CEO to leave his or her profession prior to retirement and devote all of his/her time to doing good. What is more common is for someone who has done well, or won the DNA lottery, to spend a portion of his/her life focused on giving.
Thanks in part to Bill we are seeing more and more of these professional givers. These are very valuable donors, so finding them has become a high priority.
How do you find them?
The first step is to analyze your database to discover not only who is giving, but also how they are giving. You can do this with TrueGivers by using the Type of Gift data. Here are ones to look for:
- Capital Gift / Campaign Gift
- Endowment Gift
- Named Funds / Named Endowments / Area of Interest Funds
- Planned Gift / Legacy Gift / Bequest / Deferred Gifts / Estate Gifts
The second step is to look at the giving activity. You want to find donors who have given multiple gifts to any one organization and donors who have given to multiple organizations. The Type of Gift data helps you with these acknowledgements of long-term giving:
- Yearly gifts, past 2-4 years
- Yearly gifts, past 5-9 years
- Yearly gifts, past 10+ years
You can then look at the giving details to find multi-year and multi-organization giving activity.
There is another important clue that a donor is a professional giver and that is the establishment of a Donor Advised Fund (DAF) at a Community Foundation. This takes both time and money so you can safely assume that a person with a DAF is someone who is focused on philanthropy.
The challenge of course is DAF reporting is not like a foundation where you can download their latest tax return. Fortunately TrueGivers has hundreds of thousands of these donors so they will be part of your screening results.
All givers are important and should be treated with utmost care. Having said that, there are certain donors to whom fundraisers need to pay special attention. Chief among these are the professional givers, individuals who have made the decision to be proactive, not reactive, about their philanthropy.
Be proactive about finding professional givers, and your search will be well rewarded.
David Lawson
PS Check out the Giving Pledge website to see how the Gates' and Warren Buffett are trying to get their peergroup to join them as professional givers.