Cultural Heritage Matters

Building an endowment is one way to ensure a cultural institution’s success. But it takes time. And a lot of effort. Your entire organization will have to get on board if an endowment of any significant size is to be developed.

You’ll need to make some preparations before you go out and ask major donors for endowment money. Start with these:

• Strengthen your institution’s case for giving. Announce to donors the measures the institution has put in place (say, over the last three years) to save costs and increase productivity and relevance to the communities you serve.
• Set ambitious new goals for the director and/or major gifts officer to spend more face-to-face time with their donors and prospects. Enlist willing board members and key staff to join in the effort and provide additional support for the director/major gifts officer. Ensure that all major donors are contacted personally every three or four months and brought fully up-to-date on what’s happening in your institution.
• Make the greatest possible use of online communications such as the website, blog, electronic newsletters, Facebook, and Twitter to recruit new supporters at low cost. Reinforce messages to members and the public through other channels (such as events), and convert online activists to library donors.
• Step up donor cultivation activities and events.
• Find low-cost ways to learn more about the most loyal and generous donors, and integrate new information into personalized appeals to them.

These are the ingredients to building a strong organizational foundation for your endowment. I’ll write more about each of these components later.

This entry was posted on March 17, 2010 at 3:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags endowments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.