Benevon Weblog

New Book: Missionizing Your Special Events

I am delighted to announce the release of my newest book: Missionizing Your Special Events: How to Build a System of Events That Engages Donors Who Will Stay with You for Life—a book for those truly committed to crafting a streamlined System of Events for their favorite nonprofit. Read below for an excerpt from the new book and for information on how you can order the book.

Events, special or otherwise, have become a staple of the fundraising diet of every nonprofit organization. From bake sales to black tie galas, we all know what to expect when we show up: get out your checkbook and—in most cases—have fun! There's nothing wrong with that.

Somewhere along the line, good people who love the work being done by their favorite organizations got sidetracked into the entertainment business. They figured that, rather than having to talk to people about the amazing and meaningful work of their organization, if they could just entertain people—give them some good, honest fun or a product in exchange for their money—they'd have a winning fundraising event. The prevailing thinking was that people won't go for the serious stuff—they just want to have a nice night out, play some golf, and go home happy. So why get serious when we can just entertain people and get them to give money?

At Benevon, we say those days are over. While those events may raise short-term money—in many cases a lot of money—they generally are not designed to grow and develop the base of people who truly support the work of the organization. The value proposition is: we will give you an enjoyable evening, and in exchange, you will give us your money.

Think of the last fundraising event you attended. How did you get invited? Why did you say yes? How much did it cost you—when you add in the babysitter, the parking, and the new outfit you bought to look great there? What did you get in return? Did you have fun there? Would you have preferred to write the group a check and stay home? Did you learn anything memorable about the group putting on the event? The day after the event, could you have told someone the name of the group that benefited from your money and one inspiring thing about their work?

If you are a volunteer or on the board or staff of the nonprofit group that put on the event, was it really worth it? What did it build in the way of long-term support? Did you resent the amount of effort it took? At any point in the process, did you find yourself thinking, "There must be a better way than this to raise money"?

We have found, having worked with teams of board members, staff, and volunteers from more than 3,000 nonprofit organizations over the past twelve years, that it is time for that value proposition to change. People are hungry for more than a nice chicken dinner. If they are coming to an event anyway, why not educate and inspire them, so that in exchange for their ticket price, they can walk away with an idea of what their money might have helped your group accomplish—and a way for them to become more involved should they choose to do so?

The Benevon Model provides a template by which every nonprofit can convert its seemingly haphazard stream of labor-intensive events into a tightly crafted "System of Events." Over time, this system educates and inspires event guests and builds long-term relationships with major donors. As the organizations become more and more self-sustaining in their funding, they find that they are able to phase out many of their events.

And for groups that have very few special events, the model provides a blueprint for how to start from scratch and do it right—with as few events as possible!

In the chapters that follow, you will discover a new systematic approach for creating long-term sustainable funding for your organization from individual donors: the source of over 80% of the charitable funds contributed to nonprofits in America today.

Then you will learn to customize the ideal System of Events for your group. Be forewarned: this may be uncomfortable, as it will include how to strategically modify the program and format of each event, how to rotate the time of year of the event, how to substitute the event with a more program-related event, or how to eliminate an event altogether. Furthermore, in between each event, you will need to do a great deal of follow-up with guests.

This book is designed to restore the most important element in every event you ever put on from here on out—your organization's mission! And, in the process, you will learn to systematically connect with those special event guests to convert them into long-term supporters.

Ultimately, this book has one simple message: if your event is not, first and foremost, educating people about the real work of your organization in such a powerful way that they feel compelled to either become more involved with your organization or tell others about your work (or both), then you should not be having that event.

Conversely, if you take the time to carefully craft each event with a particular objective in mind, you can design a System of Events, and, over time, all of your events will integrate with one another to build long-term supporters who love your work and will engage others, not merely to sell a ticket or bring in short-term cash, but because they truly believe in the mission of your organization.

Missionizing Your Special Events: How to Build a System of Events That Engages Donors Who Will Stay with You for Life is available now in our online store.

We are also offering a sample chapter for our E-New$ subscribers. Subscribe to the E-New$ to receive this sample chapter.

New Book!

We are delighted to announce the release of Terry Axelrod's newest book: Beyond the Ask Event—Fully Integrating the Benevon Model. This book explains how to take your organization's implementation of the Benevon Model to the next level of cultivating and connecting with donors. It will show you how to grow our mission-based Benevon Model into a comprehensive system that continually generates new supporters, many of whom will become major donors. This is a book for those truly committed to achieving long-term sustainable funding for their favorite nonprofit.

Beyond the Ask Event gives you the tools to build the bridge from the Ask Event^™ to sustainable funding and keep the pipeline filled with passionate donors. Chocked full of step-by-step exercises, scripts, templates, and checklists to guide your team through the process, Beyond the Ask Event is the one book you'll need to move forward if you are serious about attaining sustainable funding.

This book is available now on our online store and is also included in the Benevon Library.

Message from Terry Axelrod: Benevon Launches Strategic Partnership with GrantStation

I am delighted to announce an exciting new strategic partnership between Benevon and GrantStation, the pre-eminent grants research subscription service for up-to-the-minute grantmaker information.

Over the years, we have received many questions from our alumni groups and our E-New$ subscribers about how to integrate their grants program with their growing individual giving/major gifts program using the Benevon (formerly Raising More Money) Model. Questions like:

• We know that over 80% of the money given to charitable organizations in the U.S. comes from individuals and the remainder comes from corporations and foundations. What is the ideal balance we should be aiming for in our funding mix?
  
  
• Our longstanding foundation funder has told us they will be cutting back on our grant next year. How can we plan to offset that amount with individual funding?
  
  
• How can we find the best private foundations to approach when our government funding is going to be cut back?
  
  
• Should we invite funders to our Point of Entry^®?
  
  
• What is the best way to approach a funder for a grant to pay for the tuition for our team to come to the Benevon workshops?
  
  
• How should we follow up with a Point of Entry guest who wants to refer us to a foundation they're involved with?
  
  
• Should we keep our grants program going now that we have developed a strong individual giving program using the Benevon Model?
  
  
• How can we staff both our grants program and our individual giving program?
  
  
• Will foundations make five-year pledges?
  
  
• Many of our Multiple-Year Giving Society^™ Donors have family foundations. Should we stop writing proposals to those foundations and just work with the family members directly now?
  
  
• Will foundations stop supporting us if they know we have become successful with individual giving? How can we show them our overall funding strategy?
  
  
• Should we invite our foundation funders to our Ask Event^™?
  
  

These questions led us to seek a partner in the grant funding area—a partner whose approach would mesh philosophically with our model and who is capable of customizing services to the unique needs of the broad range of nonprofit organizations we serve. We have found that quality partner in GrantStation.

GrantStation is a set of online tools and resources to help you identify the right grantmaker (government or private) for any given program or project. Unlike any other research tool on the web, GrantStation offers a searchable grantmaker database with each profile built on what the grantmaker intends to fund this coming year—not what they've funded in the past. In this way, GrantStation's Web site is forward-looking, and its content changes daily to keep up with the latest information.

To launch our partnership, Cindy Adams, GrantStation CEO, and I will be moderating a series of free interactive one-hour conference calls designed for our mutual subscribers.

Meshing and Maximizing your Individual Giving and Grants Strategies: A Conversation with Cindy Adams, CEO of GrantStation and Terry Axelrod, CEO of Benevon

• Key topics* to be discussed on each call:
  
  
  • What is the best mix of individual and grant funding to strive for?
  • What is the best way to staff for individual and grant funding?
  • How can understaffed nonprofits focus on the grant funders and individual donors who will be most likely to say yes to their requests?
  • What is so unique about GrantStation and Benevon, and how can we mesh our efforts in both areas?
    
    
• Dates and Times:
  
  
  • Call #1: August 14, 2007 from 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. PDT
  • Call #2: August 16, 2007 from 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. PDT
  • Call #3: September 6, 2007 from 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. PDT
  • Call #4: September 13, 2007 from 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. PDT
    
    
• These one-hour calls are free of charge (with the exception of the long-distance fees required to place the call). The calls are open to all nonprofit staff, volunteers, and board members. You must pre-register to participate on the calls. Registration for all conference calls is limited.
  
  
• To Register: click here and fill out the registration form.
  
  

Please come prepared to ask questions.

* During each call, we will announce special discounted savings on some of our products to encourage you to take advantage of this new relationship. For example, all Benevon E-New$ subscribers will receive a 55% discount on an annual GrantStation subscription (normally $599, now $269).

Thank you again for your support. I hope to be talking with many of you on these calls.

Giving USA 2007 Statistics

The Giving USA Foundation has released its "Giving USA 2007" yearbook of philanthropy, revealing that donors gave an estimated $295.02 billion in 2006—nearly $12 billion more than in 2005, or a 4.2% increase over 2005 figures. Benevon is proud to be a contributor to this annual report.

To read more about these statistics, visit our Web site.

Sustainable Funding Podcast from Terry Axelrod

Listen to a new podcast from Benevon Founder and CEO, Terry Axelrod. She discusses sustainable funding for nonprofit organizations and the Benevon Five-Year Sustainable Funding Program^™.

Sustainability--It's Not About You

(Part Three of the Sustainable Funding Message from Terry)

I am always so impressed and moved by the caliber of people who come to our workshops. It is such a privilege to work with people who are doing work they love—people who are asking to be coached and trained to do it even better. There's a generosity and an openness that is a great gift to our staff. We get to be with people who are so connected to their purpose, doing their life's work, and living their passions. It's as if we always see people at their best.

I am particularly inspired by the "superstars" among them. These are the people with an impressive track record of fundraising success, major gifts, capital campaigns, and endowments under their belt—people who have been there, done that, yet they still come to our workshops to learn and be coached. Why would they do that?

They've learned over time that one person—no matter how charismatic or hard working, no matter how wealthy or well-connected in a community—cannot bring about systemic change in an organization and sustain it long-term. That kind of culture shift requires an ever-evolving group of people to embrace a new approach, test it, wrestle with it, customize it, and ultimately, make it their own. In that way, they can authentically pass it on to others, who in turn can challenge it and ultimately embrace it.

Just as the culture of scarcity took time to nestle into our psyches, so the new abundance-based approach takes time. That same good feeling we all got when we were little kids putting our pennies in the charity buckets is at the root of all abundance-based giving. The natural urge to contribute to that which matters to us is at the root of the model.

No one single superstar in an organization can grow those deeper roots of abundance in a culture. It takes a team of dedicated people. We have seen many examples of nonprofits that have that one "ideal" board member, the most revered development director, or the wealthiest major benefactor, yet they struggle to broaden that base of support. I wonder what those organizations will look like in ten or twenty years once that superstar has moved on.

If you are one of those superstars in your arena, you no doubt know what I mean. It's easy to have it all work while you're there. But the test is in your legacy. With what will you be leaving this gem of an organization? This new way of thinking—connecting donors to your real work and then following a systematic approach to grow them into major donors—is the "heavy lifting" of the nonprofit and philanthropic world. It's what everyone wants, donors and nonprofits alike. Yet it takes real work, with a group of people who may not always agree with one another. It takes moving beyond "superstar status" to the real reason you got involved in the first place: to fulfill the mission of the organization and to sustain it over time. It's about the kids, the cure, the faith, the earth, and truly—as you know—it's not about you.

Benevon en Madrid y "Diecisiete Minutos a Fondos Sostenibles"

Thanks to our partners at Daryl Upsall Consulting International, based in Madrid, we have launched a wonderful initiative to bring the Benevon Model to Spain. On January 23, 2007, Terry Axelrod presented the Benevon Introductory Session (simultaneously translated by Miryam Delgado) to what was purported to be the second largest gathering of Spanish NGOs ever. Spain is flourishing economically and many feel that the time is right to bring the Benevon Model to this country of bright, effusive, generous people. In attendance were sixty people representing the twenty-nine most prestigious international NGOs with offices in Spain, including Cruz Roja (the Red Cross—our hosts for the session), UNICEF, Greenpeace, Save the Children, and Doctors of the World.

As a result, We are proud to announce that we will be offering our first Benevon 101 Workshop in Madrid on May 7–8, 2007. This will be translated into Spanish, again thanks to our Spanish partners. Furthermore, to ensure the smoothest possible cultural translation of the model, any Spanish group that comes to the workshop will receive extensive additional on-site consulting from our Spanish partners. We expect wonderful results!

One other wonderful by-product of this event is that we now offer a Spanish-subtitled version of our free online seventeen-minute video, which is available on our Web site.

Sustainable Funding For Your Mission

(Part Two of the Sustainable Funding Message from Terry)

I've been working on a new book that I am very excited about. It's the book I have been wanting to write for eleven years. It's called Beyond the Ask Event—Fully Integrating the Benevon Model, and it will be coming out later this year. It's all about the science of the cultivation process, personalizing contacts with each donor, and customizing each step of the process to the donor's unique interests—in short, treating donors the way we all want to be treated—on the pathway to sustainable funding.

Eleven years ago when we started, we had to seduce groups into our 101 training with the promise of quick money from an Ask Event^™. Granted, that "quick money" is no less seductive today, but most groups now know us for what we are really after—long-term sustainable funding from donors who truly understand and believe in the mission of the organization.

Last month in Dallas, at our major gifts laboratory and 401-level workshop, we asked groups that are well-along in our Five-Year Program to tell us what they were most proud of accomplishing out of using the model. Although these twenty or so groups had collectively raised over $30 million using the model, their answers were not about the money. What they were most proud of was consistent across the board: "We are finally getting known in our community for our real work, not for what people think we do, but for what we actually do."

One woman spoke of her nineteen years as executive director of her organization, a residential treatment facility for young male sexual offenders. She told us that, up until three years ago, the organization had hidden what they really did, for fear the community would ostracize them or the boys. Their fundraising consisted of lovely dinner parties and auctions in the beautiful hotel in town, to help support the "kids."

"Now," she said, "we don't hold back at all. We just put it right out there and tell them what kinds of bad things these kids have done, and then we tell them about the bad things that were done to them as children. We educate people at our Point of Entry^® Events about the cycle of abuse and violence. We tell them about the 90% effectiveness rate we have with our boys. Once they leave us, in most cases, the cycle is truly broken." She had us all in tears with the pride she took in speaking freely now about their real work, and educating the community in the process.

Heads nodded as many groups shared similar stories about the liberation of their mission. Faith groups feel that they can speak freely about their faith to donors; advocacy and environmental groups finally see that they don't have to sugar-coat their missions or entertain people to charm them into giving.

Rather than presuming—like it is "given"—that all fundraising naturally entails pressure, entertaining, strong-arming, manipulating, or selling something in exchange for the "gift," we actually see people saying "no" to these old-style tactics and saying "yes" to a new, mission-centered approach that honors the donor's intent to make a true contribution from their abundance as opposed to a one-time donation from scarcity.

This shift in thinking affects the donors and nonprofits alike. In Louisville, Kentucky, our generous alumni meet in "Benevon user groups" to share best practices and actually help each other attract those mission-focused donors, rather than guarding their donors from each other. They realize the process is treating everybody with a new level of respect and dignity because it honors the mission of each organization and allows donors to naturally self-select based on their passion for the work. Rather than cheapening the fundraising process, it ennobles people's natural love of contribution.

Once people loosen up on the scarcity belt, they can begin to taste the possibility of sustainable funding. Whether it's in the form of an endowment, a reserve fund, or a significant major gifts program, they see the power of our model to fill their "pipeline" with precisely the donors they would want for the long term.

At first, because they have seen our model as a means to only one end—the Ask Event, it looks like a lot of work on top of everything they are already doing. I liken it to the programs on the desktop of your computer. You have Outlook, Excel, and Word, like you have your golf tournament, your direct mail program, your gala, your grantwriting program, and then you have your (Benevon-style) Ask Event.

The shift I am seeing out there (and I credit our Five-Year Sustainable Funding Program^™ groups for this) is that many groups are telling us that our model has now become more akin to the Windows operating system on their computers—and all of their existing programs now fit within it.

We see a rollover in the third year of using the model. By that time, most of the skeptics and naysayers have been won over to the integrity or the results of the model, or they have chosen to move on from the organization. The power of the Point of Entry Events (if they have been done properly) to generate new guests who are genuinely interested in learning about the work of the organization (regardless of whether they ever give money) is becoming evident to the board and staff leadership. By liberally "blessing and releasing" those who do not wish to get involved, and then personally cultivating those who have told you they are interested in a particular part of your work, the model spirals up and up—quickly.

The evidence is coming in—both factually and anecdotally.

As I said in our last E-New$, and I am proud to repeat it, in 2006, our groups raised over $80 million which they "attribute to" their use of the Benevon model. Groups in our Five-Year Sustainable Funding Program raised three times more than our non-five-year groups. Of course, our goal is for each group to attain their definition of sustainable funding. For most, simply stated, that means an endowment large enough to generate in income or interest enough money to cover their operating "gap" every year.

Groups in our Five-Year Program pull out laptops, calculators, and all their lists of existing donors, and together we make a ten-year spreadsheet to quantify exactly how they will reach their goals. Our skilled coaches are nearly obsessed with each group's success, and they coach them rigorously to attain their benchmarks.

For me, the real joy comes in the phone messages I receive at all hours of the day and night, from people in our programs gleefully reporting on their successes in receiving major gifts. "We just got the $3.5 million dollar gift we practiced at the lab! We just did what you taught us, just like we practiced, and because we had done all the cultivation, we knew when the donor was ready. We are so thankful. The donor was so happy to make the gift that he hugged us as we left."

The only thing better was that the next week, the same woman called to say, "We just received a gift of $1 million from another donor."

We are seeing that the science of this mission-focused cultivation process has the power to transform an organization's culture.

"Top Ten Ways to Get Started With the Model" by Terry Axelrod

If you think this approach to building sustainable funding from mission-focused individual donors might be a good fit for you, here are some ideas for how you can start educating yourself and your team about how the model could work for you:

1. Make a list of the reasons why you volunteer or work at your organization. What's so special about the mission that keeps you coming back? Why does the work of your organization need to be sustained for the future? Passion for the mission is the starting place for everything in our model, and it's the perfect first question to be asking yourself: Why am I so passionate about this group?
2. Visit our Web site to take our Suffering Survey. Find out if you're suffering about fundraising, and if so, how to end the suffering!
3. Define sustainable funding for your group. Keep talking to others at your organization about the possibility of attaining sustainable funding. Have a discussion about how you would quantify that for your group: endowment, a major gifts program, more individual donors, a reserve fund, etc.
4. Make a list of all the things your group already does to raise money (e.g., candy sales, golf tournaments, parties, auctions, or mailings). Rate them in terms of their dollar return to your organization. Then rate them according to the amount of work each one takes to produce. Lastly, rate them according to how mission-focused each event is. Discuss your findings with your group. How satisfied or frustrated are others in your group about the way you are doing your fundraising now?
5. Make a list of all the program-related events your group puts on in the course of a year (e.g., the children's music concert, grandparents' visiting day, open house at your summer camp, graduation day for your adult literacy class, or beach clean-up day for your environmental group). Notice that you could be opening up some of these events to the community as a way to educate people and connect them to your work.
6. Watch our free online video, Seventeen Minutes to Sustainable Funding. Learn how the model works. See what questions it triggers for you.
7. Have five people on your board watch the seventeen-minute video.
8. Get on one of our free, regularly scheduled one-hour topical conference calls for faith groups, youth groups, health and human services, or education groups, and listen to what other people in your field have to say about how the model has worked for them. Ask questions about how this could be customized to the unique needs of your organization. For more information, visit our conference call calendar page.
9. Come to one of our live introductory sessions. For more information, visit our in-person introductory session page.
10. If your group seems interested, call or e-mail Benevon to request a private thirty-minute call with one of Benevon's trained staff or coaches to get your questions answered about how the model could be customized to your organization's work.

For more information on getting started with the Benevon Model, listen to a podcast from Terry Axelrod. (Note that this audio file is large and may take some time to download.)

Sustainable Funding Message Taking Hold

(Part One of the Sustainable Funding Message from Terry)

As I've been traveling a great deal over the last few months around the United States, Canada, and Europe, including the United Kingdom, I have been seeing glimmers of our real message about sustainable funding finally catching on. I see people beginning to realize there is more to what we have been saying and teaching than a new-fangled fundraising event that threatens to "saturate" their town, displacing the golf tournament or gala trend of the day.

In Madrid, one of the largest-ever gatherings of nonprofit leaders came together to hear our message. As a result, we are excited to be partnering with the top Spanish consulting firm to bring our sustainable funding program to Spain this year. In Toronto, Edmonton, and Calgary, we had national Canadian nonprofits attend our sessions in search of a long-term solution. In January, we held our first-ever Benevon 101 training in London and have launched a wonderful relationship with Amnesty International UK. And in a small room in Denver, I had two remarkable nonprofits come up and ask how soon they could join our Five-Year Sustainable Funding Program^™. Admittedly these are small indicators, but they are very telling to me.

The success of the groups in our Five-Year Program has been noteworthy. The final 2006 results are in: our groups raised over $80 million (in gifts and pledges) which they "attribute" to their use of the Benevon Model. Groups in our Five-Year Sustainable Funding Program raised three times more than our non-five-year groups. Those groups that completed their fifth year asked us how they could sign on for five more years! They see the return on their investment paying off even more so in the later years as they build their major gifts program and, for many, endowment. Our goal is for each group to attain their definition of sustainable funding. For most, simply stated, that means an endowment fund large enough to generate in income or interest enough money to cover their operating "gap" every year.

I feel that we are finally getting to do the work that our model is designed to do—the deeper work of building lifelong donors for each of our groups. More and more we get phone calls from people saying, "We bought the books, we've been trying this on our own, but we just aren't raising the kind of money you talk about. We think we are finally ready to come to one of your workshops."

People are realizing that this isn't a quick fix. It is about the longer-term transformation in the culture of an organization, and that isn't going to happen overnight. Nor is it going to happen through the valiant efforts of one expert fundraiser. It takes a team of passionate people and a systematic approach, customized to an organization and then implemented over time, gradually working its way into the fabric of the organization.

These accomplishments are very heartening to me. My time is now spent with our "Five-Year Groups" doing everything I can to ensure their success in attaining sustainable funding and learning from every success and every mistake so we can refine the process for groups that come next. One of the lessons learned, which should have been no surprise, is the power of the five-year commitment. Groups that join this program and let us coach them rigorously have made a huge investment, and there is no turning back.

As such, effective this year, we will accept groups into our Five-Year Program before they have even attended our two-day 101 Workshop and we will be encouraging new 101 teams to attend only if they have a serious interest in working with us long-term. If you are just looking for a quick fix or an alternative to the golf outing or candy sale, you shouldn't try this. It will be too confusing to people, and you run the risk of alienating good people who love your work. In other words, you shouldn't even embark on this approach unless you are seriously interested in long-term sustainable funding.

This year we will continue to offer our 101 and 201 programs to groups on a year-by-year basis. But after coming to our 201 Workshop, if organizations want to continue on with us, they will need to be a part of our Five-Year Program.

Thank you for your ongoing support for the real conversation we are committed to bringing forth in the world—the possibility of sustainable funding for any group that is willing to do the work to make it happen.