Many arts organizations have had to pivot their development strategies. What changes have you made since the pandemic began? 

When I look back in the spring, I remember we all just felt genuine concern. I think that’s what everyone felt. We immediately started calling people and reaching out to people, and I feel that that strengthened the relationship that we had with donors and their relationship to Richmond ballet. We did a lot of virtual activity – it was quite enjoyable to teach people how to use Zoom! Now we are at the point of thinking about how to be creative about benefits for our donors--how are we going to connect with people to show our gratitude in ways that are meaningful while not breaking the bank. There are so many considerations as we navigate the coming year obviously with budget being at the forefront, but we are confident we will find creative ways to engage our donors. 

You mentioned getting creative with donor benefits, have you developed any new benefits in the time of your closure? 

Yes, we are just about to launch some new benefits. While we are fortunate that we are able to have people come to live performances in our small theater, there is no bar, no intermission, and masks and social distancing are required, so there aren’t many ways for our donors to engage with the dancers.  We have been looking for creative ways that we can enable that connection. 

We have a dancer who is great at flower arranging, so for our very top donors we are going to make bouquets for them and have our dancers deliver the flowers to them before we start our performances. Usually it is the dancers who receive flowers on opening night, but we want to thank our donors and let them know that we would not be able to do this without them. 

Typically, we have dinner with the dancers for our higher giving levels. We are thinking about maybe doing something in our parking lot, where the dancers could go around and say hello to our donors in a defined space and we could set out wine for the event. We are lucky because we have a medical task force that is helping us assess what we can do safely. 

We also had to cancel a couple of special events in the spring. We had already ordered the wine, so we recently ordered wine tumblers with our logo and we plan to deliver some wine and tumblers to our larger donors. In the spring, our costume shop also pivoted and started making masks for healthcare workers and for families in need, so we plan to mail masks to some of our donors.  We’re looking at ways to utilize our resources and still make relevant connections with our donors- they need to know, this season especially, that they are part of the art. 

Have you made any changes to your donor messaging?

When the pandemic hit, we had just finished a large campaign. That meant we had enough space to feel like we were not immediately in dire straits financially. And in reaching out to our donors, we thought it was important to stay honest with where we were as an organization. We had a solicitation mailing planned in the Spring, and we decided to move forward with it. Usually our donor relations manager and I manage this kind of campaign—we craft the solicitations and people review them. But for this campaign, we brought together our board individual development committee, which is about 10-12 people, and every single person gave their input, which ensured we had many different viewpoints. It was a really long process, but we knew when we sent that mailing out that whoever’s mailbox it landed in, it was going to speak to them in some way. And I feel like having that consideration of all circumstances and ways people were affected made it an incredible solicitation.  We were really pleased to surpass our goals with that campaign and we learned from it. If donors feel like what we are bringing to them is relevant and they know they are supporting an organization that keeps that at the forefront of what they are doing with their art, it is really impactful.