Fundraising and Stewardship as Customer Service
In my experience the nonprofit world really likes to think of themselves as completely unique and different from the forprofit world, with different challenges, roles, and outcomes. I’m convinced this is a mistake and if more nonprofiters were to look to the for profit world they would find their problem has already been solved, just with a different name.
In this case, fundraising professionals are always talking about stewardship. ‘How can we better steward our donors’. There’s no needs to reinvent the wheel here, it’s called customer service, and forprofit organizations have been perfecting the art of customer service since the beginning.
Businesses learned long ago that if ya hey treat customers as walking wallets, they loose out. Find raisers have discovered the same thing about donors.
All fund raisers need do is look to the masters in the field such as Southwest Airlines and Disney for inspiration on how to surprise and delight their ‘customer’ (aka donor) at every turn.
What if fundraisers were to turn the equation around so that instead of always searching for new donors, the donors came to them wanting to give because they heard about the great experience?
