When is the last time you took a bird’s eye view of your engagement strategy? From how many solicitations to send a year to maintaining your donor database and keeping your message aligned across teams, engagement can quickly become stale or ineffective without a tested strategy. In today’s episode, Kate Averett Anderson of the Blackbaud Institute sits down with fundraising experts Lawrence Henze and Nathalie Highland to discuss best practices for engagement and tools you can use to communicate with your supporters more efficiently. After the conversation, check out the free Development Planning Toolkit from the Blackbaud Institute to fill out your own Engagement Strategy framework and put what you’ve learned into practice!

This episode of the ENGAGE podcast features excerpts from the webinar Development Planning: Your Three-Step Guide to Engaging Supporters. Catch the full discussion, on demand, now.

Topics covered in this episode include:

• The pitfalls of an unexamined engagement strategy
• Breaking down silos for more effective engagement
• The benefits of reduced solicitations to supporters
• Tips for testing new approaches and conducting donor surveys

 Resources:

Development Planning: Your Three-Step Guide to Engaging Supporters

 Quotes:

“Through those direct and personal interactions with our staff and our experts, donors were given the opportunity to understand not just what we do, but how and why we do it. And so that has been a real benefit and jumpstarted our major gift program and has helped to spur our growth over time.” – Nathalie Highland

“I've always asked my clients to put me on their mailing list, and I would typically make a donation to them to see how they communicated with me as a donor. And I spent eight years tracking those communications. What I found was that there were some organizations that sent me at least at least 36 direct mail pieces per year!” – Lawrence Henze