The long-term success of any worthy work is directly proportional to how successful those involved in that work build relationships with others. If you are to be successful in the work to which you have committed yourself, it is essential that you sustain the involvement of others. There will be people who will clearly understand the mission to which you have committed yourself and will choose to support you because of their understanding of that mission. I categorize this group as those with rational relationships. Only the support you receive from those with whom you have rational relationships is sustainable.
The first step is to identify those people with whom you could build a relationship. Every person is surrounded by a group of people with whom he has influence. Market universe is defined as ‘the sum total of the individual universes of everyone who is impacted by your work, either directly or indirectly.’ The second step in the process is to qualify our prospects.
All the prospects you have will fall into one of three broad categories. First, you have those who are directly benefiting from the services you provide. We will call them nuclear. There is another group of your prospects that benefit indirectly from the services you provide. We call them ‘affinity’ prospects. We call the third broad group of prospects fringe. This group has a geographic association with your work. The rule of linkage defined simply is this: the closer someone is linked to you, the more likely they will be to support you.
One of the most important things you will have to remember as you begin to build a program for your work is that it will be very advantageous for you to create linkage among those groups with whom you do not have it naturally. If the only reason you pursue a relationship is for what you can gain from it, then that is manipulation. Relationships are sustainable only when they are rooted in a commitment to someone or something.
The first step in achieving your potential will require that you bring people out of the sea onto the front porch. I call that the entry-level opportunity. Every time someone participates in a program or a project that you sponsor, he comes out of the sea and moves to your front porch. It may have been emotion that brought me to your porch but it will always be rationalism that will bring me into the foyer. And it is only rational support that is sustainable.
Prospects aren’t prospects until you have their names permanently recorded somewhere. The best way is simply to enclose a registration card. Add a couple of boxes on the card that people could check. One might make a qualifying statement like ‘I am a client.’ The next boxes on your registration card are even more important. Say, for instance, ‘I would like to receive your organization’s free newsletter’ or ‘I would like to receive Organizational Updates from you.’ If anyone checks one of those boxes, they have told you that they are interested in you and your work. It’s like I have extended to them an invitation to come off the porch into the house.
First, you will need the name and address of your prospect. You should store other pertinent data like phone numbers, giving details, and other items that will enable you to track a developing relationship. Some of your prospects might match your definition of the ideal perfectly so we’ll call them ‘A’ prospects. Some may match the profile in some ways, ‘B’ prospects, some may match the profile in some ways, ‘C’ prospects, and some may not match it at all, we’ll call them ‘D’s.’ If the facts were known, you could appeal to John Doe for now until the end of time and he would never respond affirmatively. Your goal with John Doe should be to bring him from where he is, a ‘D’ categorized prospect to a ‘C’ categorized prospect. At some point in time you should know where every single person on your database is in relationship to your organization.
In the word AID, the ‘A’ stands for the word ‘attendance.’ The letter ‘I’ for ‘involvement,’ and the letter ‘D’ for ‘donation.’ If you use this guide to evaluate your prospects in relation to your organization, you’ll get a pretty clear picture of where people are. If one of your prospects has attended one of your organization’s activities, has been involved in some way in something you have done, and has made a contribution of either his time or resources, let’ call him a category ‘A’ prospect. If he has done two of the three, let’s call him a ‘B’ prospect. If he has done two of the three, let’s call him a ‘B’ prospect. If he has done one of the three things, let’s refer to him as a ‘C’ prospect, and if he has done none of the three, let’s call him a ‘D.’ Instead of one relationship-building program, I might have three or four going on at the same time and probably more than that. You might have a program designed to bring fringe ‘D’ prospects to ‘C’ prospects, another to bring Affinity ‘D’ prospects to ‘C’ prospects. A special request to a group of Category ‘A’ cultivated prospect might yield a 50% response. Sometimes even more. When cultivation has been successful, solicitation will be successful.
Most are already doing what needs to be done, they simply don’t take advantage of the things they are already doing. Organizations turn every activity into a meaningful event to build relationships. The first step in the process is to identify your prospects, those groups of individuals with whom you could build relationships. The second step in the model is to qualify your prospects. The third step is cultivation. Review your calendar of activities for this year and make a list of those things you are currently doing that you might turn into a meaningful developmental event. Alongside each indicate what you could do to turn that activity into an event.
The fourth step in the relationship-building model is called solicitation. There are a variety of ways that you might ask for that support, but the most effective way is to seek the involvement of people in conjunction with an established program. A program is more likely to be responded to than a straight out appeal. Programs provide people something they can plug into. And they don’t have to be fund-raising in their orientation. Rule of Communication: one on one is best; the further you remove yourself from the ideal, the less likely it is that you’ll get the response you want. The best way to ask people to become involved in my organization is to go directly to them. And the best way to secure their involvement is through a program. A project is anything that you do that tends to elicit an emotional response. A program tends to elicit a rational response. What you are striving for is the sustained involvement of your constituents and that will only occur as they rationally understand and support your mission. Projects should always be used to facilitate relational goals.
Projects should never be thought of as an end in themselves but always a means to accomplish a worthy end. It is not just numbers that will determine your success, it is the quality of the numbers that you have on your database. Some projects are an excellent way to add qualified names to your database, and many can be great entry-level opportunities to bring people out of the sea of prospects onto your front porch. It’s not just the names that are important; it is how many names and the kind of names that are important. Every project should have quantifiable goals. Things like ‘we want to add this many names to our database.’ Or ‘we want to add this many nuclear names or this many affinity names, or this many fringe names. The main emphasis of every organization’s developmental focus should be primarily on programs because they generate rational support.
Every organization has developmental potential. It’s the amount of money that they could raise to fund a capital need. Look at all of income I received and average out what I can determine came from people who rationally gave as opposed to those who may have given for emotional reasons, multiply that number times five. There is a rule in fund-raising that goes something like this. The average donor to a discretionary gifted cause is capable of giving five to ten times his average annual gift if properly motivated in a capital funding campaign. Your developmental potential is based on real giving. Project, or emotional giving, has no bearing whatsoever on developmental potential. An organization that funds its short term needs on a series of funding projects and has done that consistently over a period of many years is not really very healthy developmentally.
There is a rule relating to capital campaigns you should not begin a new capital campaign until five years after the beginning of the previous one. The rule is based on another rule and that is that a developmental generation is five years. If an organization does developmental work consistently, year after year, every five years there will be enough change in your constituency to justify a new campaign. Some organizations choose to move into a capital funding campaign to fund an early phase of the long-range plan. After the campaign is over and people have paid their pledges to you, as I already inferred, giving tends to go up. And, as real support increases annually, so does your developmental potential. It may be practically impossible for you ever to bring your real support to high enough levels to fund your vision through one capital campaign. In that case you should phase in your plan for the future.
If your organization is to experience success in ways that you dream of, you must begin an orchestrated pro-active process of building relationships. There are some very specific things that you must do. You need to identify those with whom you could build a relationship, qualify those people as it relates to your needs and their potential, cultivate them, and eventually come to a point where you provide them an opportunity to share in your work. People have so much to give besides money, and they can assist your developing organization in so many ways.
Your constituents deserve the courtesy of being asked. You shouldn’t just assume that people will help, and you mustn’t presume upon people. You need to work to build a relationship with them and ask them for their help when the need is there and the time is appropriate. People need to be thanked; they need to be acknowledged in appropriate ways for the contributions they make to your success. You have needed them to accomplish your objectives and you will continue to need their active involvement s you build for the future.
People give to people. They don’t give to buildings or necessarily to programs; they give to those people whose lives will be enriched by those buildings or those programs. If you are to sustain the involvement of people, you must acknowledge their current involvement. You must thank them well and you can’t simply drop them; you must continue to cultivate them and seek meaningful ways to engage them in our developing needs.
Define success in the kinds of quantifiable terms that everyone can relate to. The key is objectivity. People need to see progress. It’s the lack of progress that yields despair and apathy.
An Executive Book Summary prepared by
Thomas L. Law, III, DoM
Tarrant Baptist Association
Fort Worth, TX
(For more than 200 more summaries by Dr. Law, go to www.tarrantbaptist.org)
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