Maintaining Donor Relationships During Internal Transitions
Donor and community relationships lie at the core of your organization’s success. The personal connections major donors have formed with your leadership, major gift officers, and other staff are instrumental in securing the funding that powers your mission.
Transitions can disrupt these relationships, leading your university, independent school, or nonprofit organization to experience fundraising shortfalls during already challenging times.
Fortunately, organizations that plan ahead can implement structured processes to ensure valuable donors’ connections remain just as strong as they were before the internal transition took place. Here are four ways to keep donor relationships strong during times of transition.
Maintain a donor database.
When a major gift officer or development team member leaves your organization, the relationships they’ve built up with donors shouldn’t leave with them. By maintaining a donor database, your organization can keep lasting, detailed records of all of your supporters, even as team members come and go.
You can transition-proof your organization by using your donor database to:
-
Record all donor interactions. Every time a member or donor engages with your organization, make note of it in your database. Proper donor data management provides insight into where each supporter is in their donor journey. When a staffing change occurs, new team members can pick up where the prior ones left off, preventing stewardship from getting stalled.
-
Manage donor engagements. Each of your most important stakeholders, whether they’re major donors, grant officers, or corporate contacts, should have a designated staff member overseeing the relationship. Use your donor database or other project management software to assign team members to specific stakeholder engagements. In the event of a staffing transition, you can see which engagements need to be reassigned and maintain accountability for the transition.
-
Keep all profiles updated. Reliable, consistently updated data is essential for smooth transitions. For example, a major gift officer might learn in conversation that a donor has been promoted but not think to update the donor’s profile. If that major gift officer were to then leave your organization, that personal knowledge would be lost.
In addition to emphasizing the importance of keeping supporter profiles up to date, DonorSearch’s guide to donor databases also advises nonprofits to explore data appends. These data supplements can help your organization get its data back on track in the event that information is lost.
Create consistent documentation.
Smooth transitions require documentation, from how to perform various software-related tasks to details about a planned giving agreement. Make recordkeeping a routine part of your staff’s work to create continuity for donors, even during transitions.
A few types of documents you might create include:
-
Software training guides. Not all transitions are staff-related. If your organization is moving from one donor database to another, you will need a detailed migration plan to ensure donor records are preserved. Additionally, preserve institutional knowledge by documenting how to complete various software processes to aid new team members’ training.
-
Major campaign progress reports. Major, multi-year campaigns, like capital campaigns, should be able to continue without disruption during transitions. Keep these initiatives going strong by maintaining clear timelines, assigning specific tasks to uphold accountability, and actively creating plans to cover tasks impacted by the transition.
-
Donor data audits. Make note of when complex donor data management tasks, such as conducting prospect research or performing predictive analytics, were last performed, and keep donor profiles updated with relevant information. This will help your team determine when and how to perform future intensive data analysis activities.
Outside of donor-related activities, your organization should maintain consistent documentation regarding your finances, governance policies, HR standards, program guidelines, and all other management activities. This will help prevent gaps in your organization’s overall strategy outside of just donor stewardship.
Plan your transition process.
Create detailed transition plans far in advance of any actual transitions. This reduces chaos and confusion when a transition actually does occur, allowing your organization to operate as usual.
Depending on the nature of your organization’s transition, your plan should include:
- Executive search process details, including how potential candidates will be assessed and approved by your board of directors
- Merger unification plans, detailing how duplicate roles will be handled and how the decision to merge will be communicated to staff
- Plans for different types of staff transitions, including what to do for both planned resignations and emergency departures
- Risk assessment to identify any potential risks or challenges related to the transition and plan for them
- Communication guidelines for how to announce the transition to donors and other relevant stakeholders
- Donor handoff plans, including who will personally introduce major donors to their new point of contact
For organizations with complex fundraising structures, like large universities, you may need to create several transition plans and determine how they may overlap. For example, will a university foundation handle its transition independently, or will it also be overseen by the main university?
Hire transitional staff.
If your transition, such as an expansion or leadership search, requires new staff, you’ll need to devote significant resources to hiring, all while ensuring your current smaller team can still function. To ease these transitions, consider partnering with a nonprofit consulting firm for transitional or interim staffing.
Graham-Pelton walks through how interim staffing can aid all types of nonprofit organizations, including universities and schools:
-
On-demand expertise. Recruiting quality candidates can be a time-consuming process. Transitional staff provide immediate expertise while you search for and train your new permanent team members.
-
Flexibility. Since transitional staff are hired on an as-needed basis, they can work with your organization for as long or as short as needed. If your timeline changes, reach out to your consultants to extend your engagement or wind it down early.
-
Stability. Transitional staff fill gaps on your team and provide consistency during periods of rapid change.
Transitional staff will be a core part of your team. This means you will need to provide them with access to the tools, data, and information that your permanent staff use on a day-to-day basis. As such, make sure you partner with a reputable consultant that you trust has the skills to work within your organization’s systems.
Internal transitions, whether it’s leadership succession, rapid hiring expansion, or a merger, can disrupt your organization’s day-to-day operations. Protect donor relationships during transitions by planning in advance, and consider partnering with experienced nonprofit consultants for help as needed.