Making the Case for Major Donor Communications Software

Ready to introduce the concept of major donor communications software to your internal leadership team via Ovrture?

The following is a hypothetical conversation between the primary buyer of Ovrture, typically a communications or donor relations team, and organizational leadership who need to understand the business case for digital major donor communications. Our hope is that this either helps prepare you for the real conversation or can be passed directly to leadership to get them up to speed.

So, you want to buy Ovrture. What challenges of donor relationship-building does it help solve?

It helps elevate an advancement team above the "hope they read it," one-size-fits-all, analog means of communicating with major donors and prospects. Put another way: it delivers an analytics-rich, hyper-personalized, multi-touch means of communicating with major donors and prospects.

Will our major donors really access this platform? Will older donors really look at their computer or phone for what they're used to seeing in print?

Digital adoption by older high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) continues to increase. According to a PwC Strategy& Global Wealth Management Survey, 85% of HNWIs have 3+ digital devices, and 98% access the internet daily. Among older generations, smartphone adoption is 86 percent for Americans aged 50 to 59 and 81 percent for those 60 to 69. 62 percent of those 70 and older use smartphones, according to a 2020 AARP research study.

Okay, so how does Ovrture help build better relationships? Can you be specific and provide examples? Why not just create and print a case for support or nonprofit impact reports?

Ovrture allows a team to gauge individual engagement, share more focused content, and meet donors and prospects in a medium many increasingly prefer. Here are concrete, value-add examples of this from Ovrture's existing clients:

Analytics: Gauging Individual Engagement

A client shared a personalized site with a $10M prospect. The gift officer viewed the recording of how the prospect engaged with the site and determined they had a strong preference for video. Accordingly, she rebuilt the site around video and closed the gift.

Personalization: Sharing Smartly Focused Content

A client learned about a donor's interests and passions, then went to the institution's researcher in that area for a 60-second video message speaking directly to the donor about how they could help the initiative. The approach helped close the gift.

Dynamism: Ongoing, Multiple-Touch Interaction

A client sent a long-time donor an endowment report through Ovrture for the first time. The donor had been uncommunicative for a few years, though still giving annually, but loved the report and started communicating, curious to learn more about past students the fund had supported. The client updated the Ovrture stewardship report with more information on those students, which triggered more conversations in which the donor asked about new funding opportunities. In response, the client built a proposal for the donor in Ovrture.

Raising Sights: Creating Delight, Signaling Donor Importance

A client sent a major donor an Ovrture-based campaign feasibility study prospectus with a personalized video from the university president. The donor, who works in the technology industry, was surprised and impressed: "I've seen a lot of these over the years, and this is the best."

The platform built the perception that the university was elevating its game, that the campaign was crucial, and that this donor was vital.

Does Ovrture change the way our gift officers will strategize their interaction with donors?

Ovrture lets gift officers engage donors and prospects across the full fundraising cycle, from an initial ask through ongoing stewardship.

Through Ovrture, gift officers, and those who support them, can act on their own personal style and preferred degree of reliance on communications in advancing donor relationships. Whether it's priming the pump ahead of meetings, refocusing a personalized site to respond to donor interests after meetings, using analytics to gauge general prospect engagement and interest in specific areas, continually updating a site to stoke the conversation, or delivering a comprehensive, layered proposal, all of these are common uses for major donor communications through the Ovrture platform.

The result: fundraisers can be more strategic, focused, responsive, and entrepreneurial at every stage of donor engagement, and leadership gains the ability to measure effectiveness.

I'm getting the idea that Ovrture would multiply our capabilities, but are we ready for this? Do we have the capacity to pull it off?

Advancement operations everywhere are making significant investments in data acquisition, storage, and analytics, and most institutions are no exception. Given that effort, it makes sense that communication to major and leadership donors, the prime movers of financial goals, should be recast not only to further fuel this investment but to capitalize on it. This investment won't give one single area of an operation more capacity; it provides a common touchpoint for multiple members of a team, pushing the institution toward becoming a true digital advancement office.

Because it's a tool used enterprise-wide, Ovrture provides a rallying point that lets communicators, prospect researchers, development officers, donor relations professionals, and support staff collaborate as a connected, donor-centric team, shifting donor development out of disconnected silos and into a shared effort, where each stakeholder melds their distinctive talents and knowledge to build ever-greater affinity with individual donors, driving personalization deeper into the donor pyramid.

What has been donors' response to hyper-personalized communications?

Consider first the same question about traditional case statements and other printed tools; there's rarely real data behind the answer. With Ovrture, teams get high-texture, quantitative data that helps shape how they communicate with a specific donor: from hoping a donor read something, to knowing they read and watched it.

Gift officers get to look over a donor's shoulder as they engage with their personalized site, providing actionable data: whether and when the donor opened and read the piece, where their interest lingered, and which modes of communication seem to engage them.

In the hands of a savvy gift officer, all this information becomes grist for developing next-step strategies in the cultivation conversation. Ovrture informs strategy not just for individual donors but for entire portfolios, aggregating its observations of donor behavior across a program.

For instance, when a team uses Ovrture to send impact reports to 10,000 donors, the aggregated data shows how many reports get opened, how many are engaged and for how long, and which embedded communications elements get the most attention, data that fuels a continual improvement loop that makes future communications more effective in a way that traditional "send it and hope" communications can't match.

A few direct, qualitative quotes from real donors and prospects:

"This is very impressive. I have never received such a personalized follow-up before."

"Wow. What a cool piece of follow-up. So impressive. Can I ask who you hired to create this? This is exceptional."

"It is wonderful to see all of the different kinds of students our fund has supported and is continuing to support. Hearing thanks from them directly was very gratifying."

What have clients found are the biggest internal stumbling blocks to maximizing the value of Ovrture? Is there help solving those?

Like any new practice, it's crawl-walk-run. Most institutions start with a core inventory of "launch" content that works for many different donors, useful for initial sites as well as for training development officers, since they have real content to work with from day one. That inventory sustains momentum because newly trained development officers can start building real sites for donors right away.

They work with communications and proposal-writing staff to draw digital content from that storeroom to create the communication each donor or group of donors needs, then build content specifically tailored to each individual donor, with personalized messages and videos for each donor's site. The vision is for development officers to create highly dynamic and personalized communications while also drawing from a shared pool of content that is pre-approved, on-message, on-brand, and up to date.

Development officers' involvement in this process is not about pulling them into additional, unwanted communications work, but about using Ovrture as a tool that helps elevate their strategic thinking about the next move with each donor, what content would advance a donor's interest now, who might help tell that story, and what can be learned and acted on from a donor's analytics. Ovrture makes development officers better, not busier.

Assuming my organization is ready for this change, how long until we're up to speed?

Three months to launch; six months to achieve strong internal championship; twelve months to wider roll-out.

What could help me prove to my colleagues that becoming a "digital advancement office" will be worth the investment?

Ovrture has a distinct impact on donors, on a culture of teamwork, and on the bottom line. As one client put it: "Ovrture is helping us position our team so technology can do what technology is good at, and people can do what people are good at. It's all still about the personal connection."

This is new technology in service of an old craft: building enduring connections and creating donor delight.