Nonprofit Workshop: The KEY to Survival and Growth of Your Organization

What’s different about Park City Community Foundation? Beyond just awarding grant money, the Community Foundation is the place for nonprofits to collaborate and learn from one another. And with education comes better governance and financial responsibility, which leads to stronger, more viable nonprofits. It’s one distinct way we’re giving to the organizations that give so much to greater Park City.

We offer accessible and affordable workshops to help nonprofits maximize their impact in the community—with a manageable workload.

Raising awareness on raising support, we bring in a big-name, national expert to our annual seminar to help nonprofits secure the resources they need to make the biggest impact. On May 3, 2018, Roger Craver and Caity Craver shared with nonprofit staff, board members, volunteers, and donors “The KEY to Survival and Growth of Your Organization”.

The topic this year was how to ensure fundraising success and sustainability. Our guest speakers were veteran fundraiser and author of Retention Fundraising, Roger Craver, and Caity Craver, CEO of DonorTrends and a fundraising professional for 18 years. Together they helped the audience of development staff, board members, program staff, and many others, to zero in on the vital signs to monitor and the key fundraising strategies needed for organizational sustainability.

Some key points that we took away were:

Keep the donors you have. Retaining donors is the most cost-effective thing you can do; reactivating lapsed donors is next best, but not as easy; and after all that, you still need to bring in enough new donors to fill in for those you haven’t retained or reactivated.
Recruit more donors than you lose. Look at the full lifetime value of a donor—it’s worth spending a bit extra to acquire a new donor, since the donations they are likely to make over a period of years will far outweigh the investment you made to acquire the donor.
We also learned best practices for making sure our organizations are donor-centric, acknowledging the interests of our donors and inviting frequent input and involvement.

An organization’s donor retention rate is a metric every board and staff member should know. We know from national and international in-depth research that donors leave for some very specific reasons. And we as board members and staff members can take specific steps to improve this metric. Ask: Is your organization donor-centric, are your donors being heard, and are you meeting their needs?