We all know your most likely donors are the people who are most emotionally connected to your camp: alumni, parents, grandparents. But do you have updated contact information with all of these potential supporters? Have you been in touch to remind them of their love for Jewish Camp?
The first half of the JCamp 180 professional development program called Data2Donors is focused on helping camps do the hard work to find and reconnect with their long-lost alumni and other prospects. Want to get started on this tough, but important task? We've made the learning available via a thorough downloadable book of tips and tactics.
Then What?
Once you have your most likely supporters in your database and have reconnected with them, how do you know who among your donor database is most likely to make a transformative gift to your Jewish Camp? Can you name names?
Who, among your fan-base of Alumni, parents, and past staff is most likely to make a million dollar donation? Or would donate today to significantly grow your camp's endowment thus providing generations of Jewish children with affordable summers' full of joyful Judaism?
If you can't name specific people who fit this profile, then your camp may need to invest in prospect research.
Prospect research is a technique through which fundraisers gather relevant information about potential donors. We ask the question, does this person, who is already connected to our organization as a donor or Alumni, have the financial resources to make a major gift? Have they already demonstrated a habit of generous charitable giving?
If you think your Jewish Camps might benefit from prospect research to help advance fundraising efforts, then you may need to dedicate additional staff time and resources to the project. Time spent on prospect research will help your organization to find and qualify potential "major" donors who have the resources to make a large gift to the organization, although the definition of a "large" gift can vary considerably. Research will help assess an individual's capacity and propensity to donate.
Prospect research is done using a variety of resources, including public records, business and financial publications, and Internet databases. The second half of the Data2Donors program supports camps in embarking on prospect research. A major benefit of the year-long program, we pay all the fees to have camps' donor databases screened through a prospect research tool call "WealthEngine." For every record in the database that contains a current address, WealthEngine provides a "propensity to give (P2G)" score. The P2G score helps camps to focus in on a list of prospect major donors and their true capacity to give generously to your camp.
Having a meaningfully generated, researched list of prospective major donors with the giving histories and giving capacity is a huge help in raising more money for your camp. Why ask for $10,000 when the donor is willing and able to make a million dollar donation?
As Ruth Wallace, Development Associate of Albert & Ann Deshur JCC Rainbow Day Camp said this year:
- "JCamp 180's Data2Donors program has really helped us broaden our vision of who our supporters are. We have a Fan Base now, not merely an Alumni List, and it's filled with good data that will help us reconnect/stay connected with people who will, in a variety of ways, provide for camp's future."
We've made the learning from Data2Donors available via a thorough downloadable book of tips and tactics.