Effective stewardship means the difference between sustained fundraising and engagement results and constant uphill battles to acquire new donors.
For nonprofits, stewardship is a smart (and necessary) investment of time and resources, not least of all because it shows donors how much you value their support and involvement.
However, stewardship also requires an intentional approach to maximize benefits. For example, you might always thank donors after they donate or send quick messages (e.g., “Thank you, everyone—here’s what we accomplished together”) after successful campaigns.
But what next? Do you have concrete practices and plans in place for continuing to engage those donors?
A winning stewardship strategy is thoughtful and forward-looking. Let’s walk through the key steps to build or update yours.
Step 1: Assign clear ownership.
This first step is essential yet easily overlooked since, on the surface, you might already have everyone in place to conduct effective stewardship: gift officers who own individual relationships and communications staff who handle broad follow-up and outreach.
However, sustained stewardship needs more strategic oversight and accountability.
Someone who helps lead your fundraising team will be in the best position to take charge of stewardship. As this team member works to improve your stewardship strategy, support them with a committee of others whose roles span your operations and donor journeys: communications, board members, volunteers, and even past donors themselves. A range of perspectives provides 360-degree input and more well-rounded practices.
One of your team lead’s first tasks should be to set overarching goals or identify key priorities for your stewardship efforts. Improving retention rates by a specific percentage or among specific groups like mid-level donors or volunteers is a common goal to consider.
Step 2: Segment and learn more about your donors.
Donor segmentation serves two essential purposes: It makes your work more efficient and allows you to tailor your communications to particular groups more easily.
You likely already have a segmentation strategy in place for fundraising. Now, develop a variation specifically for stewardship.
Keep in mind that for general stewardship purposes, you’re looking less for a high likelihood to give and more at how and when donors have engaged with you. The goal is to create a segmentation structure that will help you quickly identify donors who:
- Have given (or volunteered or attended an event) recently so that you can express gratitude and capitalize on the recent interaction, or…
- Haven’t engaged recently so that you can spark a new conversation and get your nonprofit back on their radar
As you develop and tinker with your stewardship segmentation strategy, you’ll likely want to rely on a mix of these data points:
- Recency of engagement
- Loyalty (gauged via frequency of giving/engaging and/or length of relationship)
- Average gift size or lifetime value
- Gift type
From here, you can dive deeper to support any specific goals or priorities. For example, if you want to increase engagement among donors who’ve given in a specific way, like via planned gifts, you can zoom in on that group and quickly develop more personalized outreach.
Or maybe you’re interested in an intersection of two groups. Let’s say you want to bolster your recurring giving program and improve flagging retention numbers among your broad donor base. Hone your segmentation strategy on lower-level recurring donors you identify as at risk of lapsing (perhaps measured via lack of engagement with your communications). Create a segmented list of donors who fall into this group, and then spend some time giving them extra attention.
Note that segmentation relies heavily on your technology. If your CRM or database has been holding you back, or you’re unfamiliar with these best ways to use it for segmentation, consider making updates or investing in training.
Step 3: Determine your outreach methods.
With a solid and adaptable segmentation strategy in place, work with your team to lay out the various ways you’ll reach out to donors.
Ensure that everyone understands the goals of stewardship outreach: staying in touch and deepening donors’ connections to your mission, not necessarily asking for or cultivating new gifts. Stewardship messages fall into one of a few general categories based on their context:
- Acknowledgment - Directly acknowledging an individual donor’s interaction (donating, attending an event, giving for the very first time, etc.)
- Recognition - More broadly or publicly recognizing and thanking individual donors or segments of donors for their support
- Reporting - Sharing details about fundraising results, program outcomes, community impact, etc.
- Fostering ongoing engagement - Other ways you might engage broad or targeted groups of donors through volunteering, general outreach, event invites, etc.
Non-fundraising messages can take many forms and occur in all kinds of contexts, so try to list out all the most important touchpoints (that you either currently create or want to create) that fall into each of these categories. For example:
- Acknowledgment - Thank you emails/calls, welcome letters
- Recognition - Shout-outs in annual reports, invites to special thank-you events
- Reporting - Sending program- or campaign-specific updates to donors, developing a distinct impact report
- Ongoing engagement - Sharing volunteer opportunities, holiday cards, feedback surveys, more general event invites
This approach should cover all your bases, but take the time to consider your nonprofit, audience, and stewardship goals. Add more unique or specific touchpoints to best engage your donors at various stages of their relationships.
Step 4: Put it all together into a donor stewardship matrix.
Take all the information you’ve gathered so far and combine it into a coherent stewardship plan or playbook. A spreadsheet-style matrix works well for many organizations.
Here’s an example stewardship matrix from FreeWill:
This matrix includes the category, type, and cadence (i.e., when the message will occur and whether it occurs once or multiple times) of each form of outreach. You can then determine whether or not to include each outreach item in your standard stewardship plan for various donor segments.
Here are a few tips as you develop and implement your own matrix:
- Put careful thought into your cadences. Try to strike the right balance of staying on prospects’ minds without overloading them with communication.
- Emphasize promptness to your frontline fundraising and communications teams. If you determine that specific messages need to occur after a donor takes a particular action, create a concrete list of steps for following up in line with the plan in the matrix.
- Align your stewardship matrix with your overarching communications and fundraising strategies. For example, ensure everyone knows to avoid sending new asks shortly after a thank-you. Transparent communication and awareness of the matrix will be essential so that it meshes with rather than complicates your marketing plans.
Of course, you should make your stewardship matrix your own. It’s an infinitely flexible tool for distilling many communication steps for different groups into a simple playbook.
Once your team is satisfied with the plan, use it to anchor your stewardship approach. Gift officers can start enacting the time-sensitive steps triggered by donor actions, and the communications team can integrate the pre-scheduled messages into their calendar, developing tailored versions of messages for your target segments as recurring touchpoints approach.
Step 5: Stay proactive and improve over time.
Once you determine your goals, standard outreach messages, and a clear plan for how and when to engage specific donor segments, you have all the essentials to launch an effective stewardship strategy! Kick off your strategy by following the first steps in your matrix.
Ensure that your technology and team are ready to actively record engagement touchpoints so that you can track your performance towards your stewardship goals.
Double-check that you can collect and share data across the organization as needed. For example, newsletter unsubscribes, communication preferences, and dates of last solicitation should be actively referenced during outreach to provide the best possible donor experience. A well-run tech stack should make it easy to tag donors with these kinds of data points to filter them in or out of outreach lists.
Most importantly, don’t treat stewardship as a set-it-and-forget-it undertaking. Get feedback from donors and staff alike. Discuss potential improvements as a committee. Keep your segmentation strategy up-to-date to best support your goals and use your newest insights.
And stay adaptable! If a gift officer learns that a mid-level donor may have the capacity to make larger gifts or has a DAF account, be agile—resegment that donor or break them out of the standard stewardship cadence to send more personal messaging.
Stewardship fuels long-term growth and success for nonprofits.
While it’s often treated haphazardly by many organizations bogged down by the need for constant fundraising, more intentionally investing in stewardship pays dividends—ultimately reducing (sometimes significantly) the need for continuous donor acquisition and solicitations through improved retention.
