AVI USA’s First Donor Development Training
On Monday, February 10th, AVI USA held a Donor Development Training in Auroville. The training was designed for AVI USA’s partners & projects leaders in Auroville, to discuss, create and collaborate in developing strategies for connecting with new donors.
The meeting, hosted at SAIIER hall was hours long, filled with curiosity, enthusiasm and creative ideas. Almost 50 project leaders, as well as AVI USA’s Beam support team, were in attendance, ready with questions and expectations about what the session would bring.
AVI USA Executive Director Matthew Andrews draws on his extensive experience in training and mentoring fundraisers at Best Buddies International, and offers ideas, strategies, and tactics to Auroville projects.
While many Auroville projects excel in sustainability, social responsibility, service to the community, women’s empowerment and many other qualities rooted in spirituality and social service, there are very few projects that have experience in developing and retaining donors.
This is where Matthew fills an especially needed gap, the ability to establish a sound financial foundation on which to develop the qualities of Auroville’s social and spiritually minded enterprises.
The donor development training, the first of many projected AVI USA trainings, which we will support in both in-person and virtual formats throughout the year, successfully brought the projects into the first stage of strategic fundraising and donor development.
After a brief introduction the 40 projects and slightly larger list of attendees, including our BEAM support team, were divided up into groups. Each of the groups had to pick a focus project and creatively generate fundraising ideas for that particular project, given the project’s client base, donor base, staff size and structure, and donor outreach possibilities.
The goal was set as a 25% increase in donors in one calendar year. For each goal the groups had to develop three strategies and for each strategy, three tactics. The atmosphere became animated and ideas flowed, some with real life applications, some just seeds with potential for the future. The groups joined back together to discuss their experiences, and discussed possible strategies.
The donor development strategies focused on website, local footfall (‘foot traffic’ in American English), social media and emails, while the techniques keywords were ‘create gravity’, ‘clear the path’, ‘incentives’ and ‘make it easy’. Some of the tactics included targeting existing donors, creating and maximizing events and touchpoints, donor profiling, partnerships, email lists, software integration and peer to peer fundraising.
Several notable ideas surfaced, including holding online workshops to generate interest. The workshops could be held either through the unit’s own resources or through AVI USA. The workshops could be exclusive for donors as a complementary offering, or open to the public by donation with special invitation and offerings for donors.
Another concept was generated by the interdependent support among the units, where some units could develop a service branch to specifically develop fundraising applications for the other partners. And some projects discussed collaborating with each other on local events to generate visibility.
AVI USA and Auroville projects have joined together in one of many collaborative sessions with open minds and hearts, with an aspiration to build the future rooted in service and devotion. We are looking to the future and to our journey together!