Try an Annual Stakeholder Meeting
Next up in our #DonorLove series: ditching dry, wordy annual reports, and trading them out for an annual stakeholder meeting.
But first, a quick review of where we’ve been this February. Week 1, we talked about figuring out your donor retention rate. Week 2, we talked about my #1 tip for starting conversations (and thus relationships) with your donors. Week three, we talked about how you can bring your donors into the mission-centered work you are already doing to get them more deeply engaged.
In this final installment of our #DonorLove series, I want to talk to you about better ways to engage your donors in lieu of your annual report.
What’s wrong with annual reports?
In truth, nothing. Annual reports can have their place, and I’ve written many an annual report that I was really proud of.
But for small nonprofits, I find that they are fairly low impact for a lot of work. We put a lot of time and effort into something that isn’t evergreen, donors don’t necessarily read them with the deep intensity we’d like, and—especially for small nonprofits—if you don’t have the budget for nice design, they can sometimes fall flat or be uninspiring.
We also have certain very rigid notions of what an annual report is. You know, the intro by the CEO or board chair (or both), the annual impact stats, the budget report, the donor roll…again, a lot of work for something that feels like a route, uninspired thing for our donors.
What can I do instead?
If you want to produce something that you can physically or digitally send to your donors and stakeholders, that’s awesome. If you have the time and staff capacity, it certainly doesn’t hurt to share more.
The glossy, 16-page, printed annual report feels like a real thing of the past at this point. But there are amazing things you can do instead. Here are some creative ideas of what I’ve seen from nonprofits I support or done with nonprofits I work with:
An Annual Report Video: One of my clients has a former beneficiary who has since become a videographer, and creates amazing videos for the nonprofit. Every year, they put out an incredible video report about what they’ve accomplished.
Canva Slide Show Video: Canva is an awesome tool for nonprofits. One of my former clients used it to create a slideshow of photos and impact metrics that they could email, share, and embed in a number of places.
Website Embedded Impact Report: Similarly, if you have an easy-to-use website builder, you can build a web page with your impact metrics and best stories and accomplishments from the past year. I love this example from Girls Who Code, which obviously shows off their mission by showing the excellent coding that went into the page.
Postcard Mailer: If you still like the idea of a physical annual report, try one that looks a little different. An arthouse cinema I worked with used to send out just a postcard with our major impact metrics to our members and donors every year. On our anniversary years (5th, 10th) we put together 8-page impact reports that we handed out at our anniversary events, and 2 of the 8 pages were “a look ahead” pages giving donors ideas of where we were headed and what they could fund.
Digital Storytelling Campaign: Develop a digital storytelling campaign that utilizes multimedia content to convey your nonprofit's impact and mission. This could include a series of short videos, podcasts, or social media posts featuring personal stories from beneficiaries, staff members, volunteers, and donors. By highlighting individual experiences, you can humanize your organization's work and connect with your audience on a deeper level.
Up the engagement with an annual stakeholder meeting.
I absolutely encourage reporting back to donors using any of the above non-annual report methods. What’s amazing about thinking beyond the annual report is that you can be more creative, more mission-centered (you know how I love mission-centered donor efforts), and most importantly, bring your nonprofit’s specific culture and vibe to your reporting effort.
If you want to take it to the next level though, I love the Annual Stakeholder Meeting as a way to make sure donors get further engaged in celebrating your successes and deeply understanding your realities.
What you call it, the vibe (relaxed or formal), how it runs (meeting or happy hour), who is there to report back, all of that can be customized to your organization. But the key ingredient is that you’re filling your donors in on everything: what you’ve accomplished in the past year, what you have planned in the coming year, what their support helped you accomplish, what you still need from them (financial and otherwise) to accomplish what you have planned.
Here’s what to think about:
Who needs to be in the room? I call this a stakeholder meeting, not just a donor meeting. Are there partners, government officials, beneficiaries or others who it would help to have in the room as you impact folks on your impact and achievements/
How do you translate your organizational culture? If your organizational culture is laid back, plan a laid back event. Nothing is weirder than putting on a show for donors. Celebrate your organizational culture and bring your donors and stakeholders into that culture by making the event feel authentic to your nonprofit’s day-to-day work.
How do you build relationships? Are you going to greet people as they come in? Allow for some meet-and-mingle time? Will there be a Q&A in the event? Will it be staff alone or will you have your board there to get to know donors?
What past impact do you want to communicate? What will you want to present to communicate your nonprofit’s accomplishments of the prior year? How will you use stories AND metrics to communicate this? Will you do it all by talking or sharing videos? Who will share stories? Staff or program participants?
What future needs do you want to impress upon them? I think we lose big opportunities when we don’t communicate future plans when we’re sharing past impact. If your impact in the prior year was lack-luster, communicating to your supporters your lessons learned and what you’ll do differently in the coming year can be a significant boost to your supporters’ confidence in you. If you’re riding high on a superb year, keep the momentum going by sharing how you will parley that into more success in the coming year.
Here are some examples of how I’ve done this with different organizations:
Policy Advocacy Group: Annual Impact Virtual Meeting
I worked with a policy advocacy organization in Washington, DC for five years. While I couldn’t get them to ditch the glossy annual report (it did serve it’s purpose, and after a few years we had plenty of staff time and funding to do it), we added an annual impact virtual meeting. We had donors around the country (and around the world), so it was hard to gather them in one place at one time. But we gathered everyone virtually, and our CEO and select program directors presented the most important impacts and updates from their programs. We usually held the event about a month after we sent out our annual report (and we announced the event in the annual report send-out campaign), which meant that our donors frequently came with questions about what they’d read. It was a great way to gauge their interest and attention.
Arts Organization Membership Meeting
I worked for an arts organization that had a membership program. We held an annual “membership meeting” to share our impact and plans with members, donors, and other stakeholders. I treated it like a stockholder meeting. We talked about our financial sustainability and growth plans; and also our intangible impact and program plans. We made it clear our members didn’t have voting rights with the organization, but held it in such a way that allowed them to feel they were sharing their feedback. It was a great way to get our members and donors invested further in the mission.
Grassroots Group One-on-One Meetings
If you’ve been in the grassroots organizing world, you know that one-on-ones are a key to relationship building. We leveraged this model with our donors as well. For our donors giving $1,000 or more (of which we only had about 20), our leadership team met with each donor in a one-on-one modeled on how we held our advocacy one-on-one meetings. It was a way to show our donors HOW we did the work as we explained the impact of the work. And our leadership team could divide and conquer because we were all deeply trained in grassroots advocacy. It was a great way I could get my leadership team—who were deeply afraid of fundraising—to do a thing they were good at in a way that supported fundraising. With 4 of us in the leadership team, that also only meant 5 donor meetings each…which was significantly easier AND higher impact than a boring annual report. (We were all good talkers!)
Here’s Your Assignment
The whole idea of Fridays 4 Fundraising is to give you something actionable to do in 45 minutes or less to improve your fundraising program. So here’s the assignment. Take 45 minutes, now that you’ve read through this, and think about what you’re going to do this year instead of an annual report. Think about how you can leverage the above idea of an stakeholder meeting to communicate to your donors in a way that is more meaningful, engaged, and interactive.
And then let me know what you decide to do!
