(Part Two of the Sustainable Funding Message from Terry)

I've been working on a new book that I am very excited about. It's the book I have been wanting to write for eleven years. It's called Beyond the Ask Event—Fully Integrating the Benevon Model, and it will be coming out later this year. It's all about the science of the cultivation process, personalizing contacts with each donor, and customizing each step of the process to the donor's unique interests—in short, treating donors the way we all want to be treated—on the pathway to sustainable funding.

Eleven years ago when we started, we had to seduce groups into our 101 training with the promise of quick money from an Ask Event^™. Granted, that "quick money" is no less seductive today, but most groups now know us for what we are really after—long-term sustainable funding from donors who truly understand and believe in the mission of the organization.

Last month in Dallas, at our major gifts laboratory and 401-level workshop, we asked groups that are well-along in our Five-Year Program to tell us what they were most proud of accomplishing out of using the model. Although these twenty or so groups had collectively raised over $30 million using the model, their answers were not about the money. What they were most proud of was consistent across the board: "We are finally getting known in our community for our real work, not for what people think we do, but for what we actually do."

One woman spoke of her nineteen years as executive director of her organization, a residential treatment facility for young male sexual offenders. She told us that, up until three years ago, the organization had hidden what they really did, for fear the community would ostracize them or the boys. Their fundraising consisted of lovely dinner parties and auctions in the beautiful hotel in town, to help support the "kids."

"Now," she said, "we don't hold back at all. We just put it right out there and tell them what kinds of bad things these kids have done, and then we tell them about the bad things that were done to them as children. We educate people at our Point of Entry^® Events about the cycle of abuse and violence. We tell them about the 90% effectiveness rate we have with our boys. Once they leave us, in most cases, the cycle is truly broken." She had us all in tears with the pride she took in speaking freely now about their real work, and educating the community in the process.

Heads nodded as many groups shared similar stories about the liberation of their mission. Faith groups feel that they can speak freely about their faith to donors; advocacy and environmental groups finally see that they don't have to sugar-coat their missions or entertain people to charm them into giving.

Rather than presuming—like it is "given"—that all fundraising naturally entails pressure, entertaining, strong-arming, manipulating, or selling something in exchange for the "gift," we actually see people saying "no" to these old-style tactics and saying "yes" to a new, mission-centered approach that honors the donor's intent to make a true contribution from their abundance as opposed to a one-time donation from scarcity.

This shift in thinking affects the donors and nonprofits alike. In Louisville, Kentucky, our generous alumni meet in "Benevon user groups" to share best practices and actually help each other attract those mission-focused donors, rather than guarding their donors from each other. They realize the process is treating everybody with a new level of respect and dignity because it honors the mission of each organization and allows donors to naturally self-select based on their passion for the work. Rather than cheapening the fundraising process, it ennobles people's natural love of contribution.

Once people loosen up on the scarcity belt, they can begin to taste the possibility of sustainable funding. Whether it's in the form of an endowment, a reserve fund, or a significant major gifts program, they see the power of our model to fill their "pipeline" with precisely the donors they would want for the long term.

At first, because they have seen our model as a means to only one end—the Ask Event, it looks like a lot of work on top of everything they are already doing. I liken it to the programs on the desktop of your computer. You have Outlook, Excel, and Word, like you have your golf tournament, your direct mail program, your gala, your grantwriting program, and then you have your (Benevon-style) Ask Event.

The shift I am seeing out there (and I credit our Five-Year Sustainable Funding Program^™ groups for this) is that many groups are telling us that our model has now become more akin to the Windows operating system on their computers—and all of their existing programs now fit within it.

We see a rollover in the third year of using the model. By that time, most of the skeptics and naysayers have been won over to the integrity or the results of the model, or they have chosen to move on from the organization. The power of the Point of Entry Events (if they have been done properly) to generate new guests who are genuinely interested in learning about the work of the organization (regardless of whether they ever give money) is becoming evident to the board and staff leadership. By liberally "blessing and releasing" those who do not wish to get involved, and then personally cultivating those who have told you they are interested in a particular part of your work, the model spirals up and up—quickly.

The evidence is coming in—both factually and anecdotally.

As I said in our last E-New$, and I am proud to repeat it, in 2006, our groups raised over $80 million which they "attribute to" their use of the Benevon model. Groups in our Five-Year Sustainable Funding Program raised three times more than our non-five-year groups. Of course, our goal is for each group to attain their definition of sustainable funding. For most, simply stated, that means an endowment large enough to generate in income or interest enough money to cover their operating "gap" every year.

Groups in our Five-Year Program pull out laptops, calculators, and all their lists of existing donors, and together we make a ten-year spreadsheet to quantify exactly how they will reach their goals. Our skilled coaches are nearly obsessed with each group's success, and they coach them rigorously to attain their benchmarks.

For me, the real joy comes in the phone messages I receive at all hours of the day and night, from people in our programs gleefully reporting on their successes in receiving major gifts. "We just got the $3.5 million dollar gift we practiced at the lab! We just did what you taught us, just like we practiced, and because we had done all the cultivation, we knew when the donor was ready. We are so thankful. The donor was so happy to make the gift that he hugged us as we left."

The only thing better was that the next week, the same woman called to say, "We just received a gift of $1 million from another donor."

We are seeing that the science of this mission-focused cultivation process has the power to transform an organization's culture.

Read part one of the sustainable funding message from Terry:
Sustainable Funding Message Taking Hold

Read part three of the sustainable funding message from Terry:
Sustainability—It's Not About You