What will it take to get your members thinking about you when it comes time to make a charitable gift to your association's foundation or to your nonprofit? How can you reposition your group to be among their top charitable giving priorities? How can you connect your members to the longer-term impact of your work so that they will consider giving to you annually, increasing their giving year after year?

Consider these eight tips:

1. Divide the work of your association or nonprofit into three "buckets." For example, you might choose professional development, student scholarships, and community education. For each bucket, choose a myth-buster fact, a human story, and an unmet need to showcase that aspect of your work.
   
   
2. Design a high-touch, succinct, one-hour Point of Entry^® Event for your members to be held in your office or theirs. Start with a talk from the Visionary Leader^™; remind them of the powerful mission of your organization, and then zero in on the three buckets with stories, facts, and specific needs without asking for money. Ideally, have at least one in-person testimonial speaker tell their own story.
   
   
3. Follow up one-on-one with a personal phone call to obtain their feedback on the Point of Entry. Find out what part of the presentation was most interesting to them. Offer to connect them to someone who works in that particular area. Tend those connections, one by one, to cultivate this person over time. At each point of cultivation, remind them of the inspirational stories and the needs, e.g., for students anxious to get into your field but in need of scholarship funding or the difference your profession makes every day out in the world.
   
   
4. Invite your members to a Free One-Hour Ask Event^™ where you tell more inspirational stories and facts and launch a Multiple-Year Giving Society^™ for unrestricted contributions to your association's foundation. Be sure that at least 40% of the guests at this Ask Event have attended a prior Point of Entry.
   
   
5. At the Ask Event, announce a Leadership or Challenge Gift contributed by a core group of members, including your board members.
   
   
6. Follow up after the Ask Event to thank your new donors. Be prepared to hear great things about how connected they felt to your mission and how they might like to attend again next year, perhaps serving as a Table Captain for other members who will, by then, have attended a highly inspirational Point of Entry Event.
   
   
7. Host special program-related Free Feel-Good Cultivation Events^™ to honor and recognize your new donors. Make sure these include a testimonial from someone who has benefited from one of the programs your foundation has funded.
   
   
8. Watch your Multiple-Year Giving Society grow as members are reconnected to their love for your nonprofit or foundation and, over time, pay off their pledges and increase their giving.