Some time ago I met a nonprofit leader who was trying to recover from a negative experience with a development officer that had left the organization. During their time there, the development officer would not record the content of their meetings, claiming that it was a donor's "personal information" that the leader should not be able to see. When the D.O. quit, the leader was in a lurch, because they had no clue what conversations had taken place and what the status of those asks might be. This leader didn't know enough about fundraising to understand that what their development officer was doing was unethical and a bad practice.
Fundraisers are among the most social, connected workforce out there. We love to network, we love to ask deep questions, and most of us are great listeners. This is a tremendous upside for a group seeking to build relationships and facilitate philanthropic partnerships. However, many of us struggle with the administrative side of the job, especially in the area of writing effective contact reports. Compared to the excitement of meeting with a donor, writing reports can feel very boring. However this is a crucial part of the job that CANNOT be disregarded.
So why is taking down notes about a donor meeting so important? Contact reports are critical to building and maintaining your organization's most important relationships. It is a record of your institutional history that will remain long after you are gone. Contact reports not only allow your successors and colleagues to understand the status of gift conversations, the should also help them understand key facts about the constituent, answering questions like:
What do they value?
What is their family like?
How did they respond when I asked them for assistance?
How do they like to be thanked and recognized?
Where do they spend their time?
What other organizations do they support?
Why do they give to our organization?
How do they want to be engaged with the organization?
When will they be ready for an additional solicitation?
A fundraiser or new leader coming into a new organization would benefit greatly from having notes like this on each of their donors. It should be a fundraiser's goal to make sure this happens and with a high degree of excellence. I had two formative experiences that helped me learn to craft contact reports even as a new fundraiser.
In college I was a resident advisor. There I was trained to write incident reports. They taught me to record the facts of an incident and to leave my opinions out of the document. The focus was to be on what happened, not on my feelings or thoughts on the matter, and to record the whole thing in third person with great objectivity. Contact reports should be done in the same way. Save your opinions and commentary for your strategy documents and focus in directly on what happened, what was said, and how the donor responded.
In my early days as a fundraiser, I worked at a large organization that used a "home-made" web based CRM. This CRM had significant limitations, one of them being that you couldn't edit your contact reports after they were entered. Our leaders would remind us that what we were writing would be there forever, so it was critical that we do a good job of it. As a result I learned to be very thoughtful in what I recorded. Not only were my comments permanent, I knew that every fundraiser in the place had access to what I wrote. Typos and poor grammar would not be helpful to my career.
Fundraisers who are looking to improve their contact report writing should consider a few helpful tips:
Record what happened as soon as possible after the meeting. The more time that passes between the meeting and when you record it, the more likely it is that you will forget something important. To combat this I would use a recording app on my phone to take a voice note when I got back to my car immediately after the visit.
Most CRM's will have a place for a contact report title. Be sure to utilize this place well. Succinctly write out the most crucial thing that happened in the meeting. This allows you to quickly understand the business purpose of the contact report and how it fits into your overall strategy for the constituent.
If you have a clear strategy in place for a potential donor, that strategy should have specific steps planned out. Enter those planned future contacts in advance of them happening with the expected date. This will save you time and also serve as a helpful reminder of your planned steps.
Fundraisers may prefer the relational aspect of their work to the administrative, but an appointment with a donor isn't complete until they've recorded what transpired. In fact, my policy has always been, "If it's not recorded, it didn't happen!" That should be your policy too. In my next blog, we will take a look at what NOT to record in a contact report.