In all of your planning for implementing the Benevon Model, the focus naturally shifts to showing your organization in the best possible light. After all, you want people to think well of you and appreciate your organization's outstanding accomplishments. In all of that excitement, it's easy to forget why you are doing all of this in the first place: to fund your unmet needs.

While those needs may seem obvious to you as an insider, you have no reason to expect your new visitors to become more involved if you do not make these needs crystal clear to them. If all they see are your impressive accomplishments, they will think you have everything handled and are not in need of further assistance. Rather than stick around to ask how they can help, they will move on with their vast resources and treasure to the next charitable organization in town, the one that has made its needs clearly known.

This does not need to be the case if you take the time to think through your needs and your plan for conveying them, either implicitly or explicitly, at every step of the model.

Rather than overwhelming people with a random list of your needs, cluster them into a maximum of three easy-to-understand categories. Sort them by program, such as program expansion to serve more of the people you now have to turn away, or expanding your services into another part of the region or territory, or adding an entirely new program. Or, if it helps to make your needs more understandable to donors, you can cluster them by the type of person served. Rather than "expanding our advocacy and support services," which is far too vague to be meaningful to most donors, tell them about wanting to expand the program that allows you to serve more people and then follow that up with a letter from one of those people served.

At each step of the model, you will need to walk the fine line between sounding overly needy and sounding fully funded. For example, at your Point of Entry^®, people will clearly see that your programs work, your staff is dedicated and hard-working, yet you can also point out, as an example, the line of people waiting on the folding chairs in the hall of your service center, because there is no more seating space in the main waiting room. Even if you cannot take people on a tour of the offices to see this firsthand, you can describe the situation to them in vivid detail or weave it into the testimonial story of the single father who finally gets up his courage to come to the health clinic with a sick child, only to find they can barely get in the front door, because the waiting room is filled up and spilling over into the hall.

The same can be done at Step Two of the model, the Follow-Up Call. As you are calling recent Point of Entry guests to get their feedback, listen closely to their areas of interest and highlight the needs in that area. Without coming out and asking for their support for more books in the library, you can easily say, "People are often surprised to see how much the teachers can accomplish with so little. We hope someday to have every shelf teeming with books."

And what about at Step Three, the Ask? Even if your organization is very well funded, the fact that you have not yet completely fulfilled your mission means that you still have needs. "While we know we offer the highest quality special-needs camp program in our state, that fact is of no consequence to the hundreds of children and adults we continue to turn away every year. Each week of camp costs us $25,000 and we would like to offer ten more weeks a year."

And finally, at Free Feel-Good Cultivation Events^™ where we thank and recognize donors, reconnect them to the work of the organization and encourage them to introduce others, it is natural to report on what has been accomplished with the money raised to date, and the gap that remains to be filled, again using facts, statistics, and emotional stories.

Planning ahead to succinctly convey your needs at each step of the model—using both facts and emotion—will enable you to quickly connect and reconnect with donors and stay true to your mission.