By Andrea Jarrell

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "The only way to have a friend is to be one." But what it means to be a good friend from a donor's perspective is changing. Today's donors have more options for their philanthropic interests than ever before, and they want deep connections with institutions that matter to them and share their values.

If your institution is engaging constituents just to ask for money, you may be missing out on true friendship with donors who want to be engaged in everything the institution does. You also risk losing donors who have very different expectations of what it means to be a friend.

In many advancement programs, the hierarchy of the office says it all-development chief on top, alumni relations below. The message is that cultivating friends, or "friendraising," which is almost always the purview of the alumni relations office, is subordinate to fundraising. The benefits of friendraising activities such as hosting receptions with faculty speakers and organizing affinity groups, regional get-togethers, and alumni trips are often referred to as intangible. Their value is seen only in the context of converting "friend" to "donor," a causal chain that's almost impossible to measure.

 

"If you think about how relationships are built, you would quickly see that the structure and metrics of most advancement programs are not compatible with building or sustaining real, authentic relationships," says Jay Goulart. Goulart is the executive director of advancement at Ridley College, a Canadian independent school, and co-founder of the WOW! Institute, which presents professional development workshops for fundraisers. Through WOW! and his work as a consultant, he has worked with advancement officers from a variety of institutions, including the American Red Cross, Dartmouth College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

"The design of advancement programs has been totally focused on acquisition, with industry metrics predominately connected to transactions, not retention," Goulart says. Most institutions would be hard-pressed to cite the average length of time a major donor stays on their books, he says. "In an industry that is based on relationships, we do not measure how long we keep them," he says. Rather, the metrics are cost per dollar and number of solicitation calls per month. "Given that fundraising is all about relationships, it seems to me it is the one thing we really fail at," he says, "and it costs individual nonprofits millions of dollars every year."

 

Hildy Gottlieb, author of FriendRaising: Community Engagement Strategies for Boards Who Hate Fundraising but Love Making Friends, counsels her clients to "turn the whole concept of friendraising as a step toward asking for money on its ear." She says advancement practitioners should think of friendraising the same way they think of making friends in their personal lives. "You don't make friends in real life so they can help you pay your mortgage. Real friends will do anything for you," she says. "They'll help you move. They'll dance at your wedding. They'll give you advice."

 

Asking for advice is in fact the best way institutions can extend the hand of friendship, she says. "When institutions think of their donors only in terms of money, they're leaving on the table all the real benefits that come with having true friends-their wisdom, ideas, experience, loyalty, advocacy, and, oh, by the way, greater financial support," says Gottlieb. "But that financial support is a byproduct of having real friends, not the main goal," she says.

 

Next-gen engagement

 

Patricia Jackson, vice president for advancement at Smith College, bristles at the term friendraising and the notion that there is some clear distinction in the way an institution treats a donor or a friend. "It's all about engagement and the opportunity to be involved in the college." Still, she says the quality and depth of those opportunities for engagement have definitely changed since she began her career in the 1980s.

 

"Baby boomers will soon be the bulk of our donors," says Jackson. The shifting of the philanthropic mantle to a generation that graduated in the 1970s and 1980s has definitely changed the rules of the game. "This generation is savvy and sophisticated. They thrive on substantive topics, and they read everything we send," she says. But deeper engagement with donors isn't just about giving them more and better information. Jackson agrees with Gottlieb that one of the best ways to engage donors is to ask for their expertise. She says the difference with this generation is that they expect to be asked for it.

 

To meet that expectation, Dickinson College in Pennsylvania has launched several new programs to pick the brains of alumni and parents. The Dickinson 2025 program brings to campus graduates from the 1980s and 1990s with a high capacity to invest and to be involved in the college. They spend two days with Dickinson's president and senior management team looking at all aspects of the college-from enrollment and finance to alumni relations and academics-to imagine what the college will be like in the year 2025. Vice President for Advancement Donald Hasseltine says the program has been so successful that they plan to take a modified version of Dickinson 2025 on the road this year.

 

A second program, a President's Summit, blends top prospect cultivation with the college's upcoming strategic planning process. Hasseltine says, "To begin the conversation, the president identified 13 premium assets that define a Dickinson education and make it unique. These assets will be used as a platform for discussion throughout a two-day program with the prospect group." Hasseltine says the response from those invited to the summit has been overwhelmingly positive.

 

If the test of real friendship is pulling through tough times together, then the economic crisis has been a tremendous friendraising opportunity. Smith's Jackson says, "Because the economic environment is constantly changing, our alumnae and donors are hungry for information about how Smith is coping. We're finding it easier to get appointments with people who were not willing to see us in the past. They say, 'I know you're not going to ask me for a large gift right now, and I really want to know what's going on.'"

 

On the flip side, Dickinson's Hasseltine says, "When the economy started heading south, it was becoming increasingly difficult for our major gifts officers to get appointments with prospects. Further, we were halfway through the public phase of our campaign, and our prospect base was getting shallow."
Dickinson turned once again to its advice-seeking strategy by developing a strategic planning survey to interview alumni and parents up and down the East Coast. Within a few months, Hasseltine and his team had made 250 parent and alumni visits and identified 71 new prospects in the process.

 

Is friendraising any more important during tough times? "The economy is just a great excuse to focus people's attention on what they should be doing all the time," says Gottlieb. "I find people are far more willing to listen to alternatives when the economy is bad, and they're more willing to do things the way they've always done them when things are good."

 

Friends speak up

 

"A society of friends" is one of the ways historian and former Yale University professor George W. Pierson described the institution in Yale: A Short History. That society has been evident at a series of campaign events to gather support for the expansion of the university's residential colleges.

 

Undergraduate life at Yale is inextricably tied to its residential colleges, each of which has its own dean, resident faculty, shield, dining hall, unique amenities, intramural teams, traditions, and cohort of students. Graduates affiliate as much with their residential colleges as they do with the university itself. Now, as part of its $3.5 billion capital campaign, Yale is adding two new residential colleges for the first time in nearly 50 years. Far more than a bricks-and-mortar project, expanding the residential college system is something like a family deciding to have two more children. The project's significance compelled Yale to develop a very different series of alumni and parent campaign events.

 

"Campaign events have traditionally been one-way experiences," says Mark Edwards, managing partner of Edwards & Company, the firm that designed the Yale events. "They are all about 'Let us tell you the donor why we matter and what we're doing.'" What's different about these events is that Yale steps back, and the attendees take the lead. The events begin with a poignant video about undergraduate life at Yale that serves as a conversation trigger. With no more than 30 people attending each event, everyone has a chance to talk. The focus of the event is to have attendees share personal stories of transformative undergraduate experiences. What occurs, in the words of one participant, is "an experience quite different from any event I've attended at Yale, or anywhere else."

 

Cynthia Beach, Yale's director of campaign special projects, says the events draw out emotional, touching information that would not have come out in other settings and identify new ways for the university to connect with people. "You get goosebumps," she says.

 

Edwards acknowledges that in the beginning there were concerns about donor participation: What if no one says anything? What if one person takes over? Will the experience feel worthwhile for busy professionals? "But what Yale has discovered, now that they've done more than a dozen of these," he says, "is that there is surprising willingness to engage and share."

 

Overall, says Edwards, "The events have not only generated philanthropic support, but it's clear they reflect the contemporary desire to participate in genuine, face-to-face experiences where people can actively shape the conversation, values, and direction of their chosen communities." Yale is now considering a similar style of event to bring together alumni and parents who work in the same industries.

 

Friend of a friend

 

Donors have had opportunities to talk to each other at events in the past, but at these new events Yale loosens its control and in essence allows institutional friends to "friendraise" each other. It is an in-person version of what happens online through social media, where individuals are both consumers and producers of messages about an institution. Social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter allow individuals to bypass an institution altogether and talk directly to each other. From an institution's perspective, that can be a positive or a negative depending on what is being said. However, such communication is now a given. Consequently, it's more vital than ever that friendraising move beyond simply maintaining good relations or qualifying donors.

 

Today's donors have the inclination and the tools to speak for the institutions they support. Rather than fearing a loss of control or missing out on this opportunity altogether, institutions need to tap into this network of friends.
Regardless of the technologies available or the economic climate, building meaningful relationships with donors is always important. In fact, while the first definition of friendship one can find in the dictionary is "a person attached by feelings of affection and personal regard," the second is "a patron or supporter." Institutional friendship is at its best when donors can be both.

 

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