Closing Session Recap:
May 27 (Replay at end of page)
Over the course of our summit, we have learned about the opportunities present in our segment of donors who are driven by a desire for community. For our closing plenary session, we explored ways to take action on these lessons at every donor level.
To start, we had participants in each session share some of their own ideas about the types of events and programs community donors might attach to. Here were some of your thoughts:
Events where donors can connect with artists
Placing QR codes that link to performances in public places
Events that support multiple non-profit organizations
Projects that bring new people in to enjoy events that donors already love
After a brief review of the donor segments and key takeaways from Monday’s session, we dove into the importance of the community donor.
Building Community Through Purpose
We revisited Shaw Festival Theatre to look at how their refreshed purpose — “pioneering a movement of real human encounters” — impacted the types of projects they conducted. One of their biggest changes was greatly expanding both the number of events they put on and who got to attend. With all this activity, they now get much more feedback and input into their approach. The community starts to take more ownership over the connections they want.
As a result, Shaw Festival saw a 30% increase in contributions, and those donors stuck with them in the pandemic, too, because they were so mission aligned.
When we look at many arts organizations, however, their main fundraising message centers around the art, from supporting the vitality of an orchestra to preserving the world-class nature of an opera. While these statements will certainly resonate with your arts lovers, they are only around one-third of your donor base. Additionally, we see in the below chart that the art message is not landing with our community donors:
Our purpose needs to be a guidepost for everything we do, and that purpose needs to be at a higher level than making great art in order to attract and retain audiences and philanthropic donors who are not connoisseurs.
This is particularly urgent given the generational trends in giving to various causes. We saw in data from Colleen Dilenschneider at IMPACTS Experience that as millennials age, they take their cultural values with them fully intact. So whereas previous generations aged into a higher appreciation of arts and culture, millennials unfortunately are not.
Additionally, when millennials are asked why they give to cultural causes, their responses are not the more relationship-based reasons that we see in our current donor bases. Instead, millennials are looking to join something bigger than themselves — to be part of a movement or a community. As a result, we think the way we think of “community” at arts organizations is changing.
Below, we have charted the three different types of community we defined on Monday, along with their likely proportions over time.
One of the key takeaways from this image is the growing importance of the “change” section of community involvement, especially as your “pillars of the community” age. This suggests that if you can figure out which important community conversations you’re best suited to host and then convene the community thoughtfully, you can attract sponsors motivated to drive certain kinds of positive community change.
How do we figure out which conversations we are best equipped to convene? Through shared values. A shared value is a belief that both our organization and our customers hold about a higher purpose, passion, or philosophy that has meaning in our lives beyond our specific genre or the arts in general.
Woolly Mammoth, a theater company in Washington, D.C., writes that its purpose is “to ignite an explosive engagement between theatre artists and the community.” The company then infuses this purpose throughout every activity it does, most notably in building community partnerships. If a donor (or prospective donor) were to look at the theater’s website, he or she would learn about the change Woolly is trying to catalyze in the community. It is a coherent story about what the organization is about and why a community-motivated donor might want to get involved. Donors come away thinking, “I know what Woolly is a champion for.”
Below, we’ve built out a framework of how an arts organization might orient their activities around the purpose of “empathy” — including things to avoid in order to stay true to this value.
This is what a true commitment to purpose looks like — one that has the clarity to draw a community-oriented donor in.
Values Above Benefits: Attracting the Entry-Level Donor
With this understanding of the importance and urgency of attracting community-minded donors, we examined ways to attract them at each level. To start, we looked at our base of entry-level donors. Typically, this is not where we spend a lot of our time, but we learned in our analysis that people tend to stay consistent in their motivations to give — even as they move up the pyramid. So we need to focus much more on this group to make sure we attract philanthropic donors.
We started by looking at an example from the Kennedy Center, of an invitation to join their membership. While it started off with a compelling offer to “become a Kennedy Center member today and view the arts through a new lens,” the letter misses the opportunity to do more with this, instead focusing on ticket discounts and the variety of performances one can view at the Center. Without that consistent throughline, even that potentially powerful message loses its impact.
Turning to National Trust, the government’s heritage preservation organization in the United Kingdom, we see an instance of an organization truly committing to one purpose statement. The Trust was looking for a message that highlighted what was differentiating, desirable for the community, and emotional about their work — something people would want to join in on as a movement. The phrase they chose was “Everyone needs nature,” which tied into many of their attendees’ needs, especially during the pandemic.
Below, you can see how this statement is woven into every aspect of their website, and how the Trust uses it to highlight individual givers and offer big and small ways to get involved.
Now, we know that we still have many donors who value benefits, but impact and benefits do not necessarily have to be in opposition. At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, giving levels have become a tool to showcase just what effect a donor’s dollars can have. Their three tiers of membership, shown below, are organized around what they fund. Rather than asking donors how much they want to contribute, they ask, “what impact do you want to have, and who would you like to be surrounded by?” This builds a sense of community in philanthropy.
Community Activation: Attracting the Emerging Large Donor
For our mid-level donors, events have often been a central aspect of engagement. When executed thoughtfully, these can be fantastic opportunities to build a network of people aligned around our purpose.
We saw examples from three arts organizations, which you can read more about in our collection of case studies. These institutions specifically created programs and events that empowered donors to help engage other donors, creating an impactful system of advocates.
Charlotte Ballet asks board members to act in one of three roles: ambassador, advocate, or asker. Asking for expressions of public commitment to those responsibilities make a big difference in board members’ consistent adherence to their roles.
The Chrysler Museum of Art held an event specifically for donors to bring along non-member friends. The event enabled the museum to talk about the impact donors have — deepening existing donors’ commitment to the organization and simultaneously attracting new donors to come in at higher tiers.
Finally, the Van Gogh Museum created advisory councils for each of their giving levels, giving donors the ability to shape the nature of community engagement for their tier and simultaneously reinforcing their sense of belonging.
To further gain inspiration for our gatherings, we looked to Priya Parker, an expert on events, and her book, The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters. Through her story of helping to plan a party for worn-out moms, we learned about the structure of a strong community event. A gathering should have a clear purpose, rules of engagement, and opportunities to opt in and out.
We’ve collected a series of questions arts organizations can ask of their own events here:
The rituals and symbols section of this chart is an area where arts organizations in particular can excel. We heard some of our members, such as River Oaks Chamber Orchestra (ROCO) and Boston Gay Men’s Chorus, sending donors special stickers and car decals, and others, like Ford’s Theatre, mailing cookie decorating kits during the holidays. All of these can serve as reminders of your greater purpose.
Community Leadership: Attracting the Major Donor
For our final section, we looked at ways a community-focused approach can engage even your largest donors, by inspiring them with your impact. Our data shows us that this group has likely more community donors than arts lovers, so it is all the more important to reach them in this way.
One caveat with this group is that they are most likely to be looking to be “pillars of the community” and looking for standing in the arts. They are not yet as interested in starting a movement for change. The most important thing you can do at the level of highest influence, then, is to bring others into it.
This brought us to a difficult question: how much does the nature of fundraising bolster the idea that “people with more money deserve special treatment.” An intentionally provocative statement, but one that is important to address when considering if there may be a way to change elements of our fundraising approach without undermining our effectiveness.
Often, we stick with donors who may not reflect our values out of a feeling that we have no other choice, but we do — and a focus on community could help in this challenge. With a cohesive, purpose-driven approach, we can attract funders who are excited by values that we share with the community. We can create a community of visitors and donors that is defined less by exclusive access and more by increased engagement. That will inspire generosity.
Fortunately, there is data to back this up. In research conducted last year by LaPlaca Cohen and Slover Linett, we saw that our audiences want a sense of community from their arts and cultural institutions.
And internally, we saw in our own survey results that only 7% of your donors want you to be doing less in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access. So we can be confident that, other than a few loud voices, our donors are likely not going to hinder our progress in this area.
Being truly inclusive, however, takes work. To see an example of strong community engagement in action, we looked to the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. From Nina Simon’s book, The Art of Relevance, we learned about the museum’s initiative to create “C3,” the Creative Community Committee. This was an effort to harness new voices into the decision-making process at the organization — and traditional ways of creating these bodies often led to creating “second class citizens” or members cut off from actual governance.
The structure the museum put in place with Simon’s help is illustrated below:
As a result, the museum got relevance, and each member got help advancing their own work. Today, C3 members get involved with each other’s work as advocates, donors, and partners. They volunteer at each other’s events. They help each other recruit staff and solve organizational problems. The lesson here is that you can build something special when you shift from thinking about what’s in it for your organization to considering what’s in it for everyone.
Our final example came from the world of medicine. Dr. Paul Farmer is Chair of the Department of Global Health at Harvard Medical School and founder of Partners in Health, a non-profit healthcare provider and advocate for the sick and poor around the world. At his core, Farmer is animated by this belief: “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.”
After giving a talk about this core purpose of his work, fellow panelist Bill Gates was so inspired by the message that he partnered with him to fund his work, leading to Farmer’s organization to operate on four continents and direct hundreds of millions in health services. If you articulate a higher purpose and show the potential of your purpose to change lives for the better, you are bound to build a community of supporters too — a community that’s much larger than the world of arts aficionados.
First Steps to a Community Fundraising Approach
So where do we go from here?
First, it helps to review our donor pyramid — and to update it to reflect the new knowledge we have gained from our research. The updated mental model has values at its center, values that are manifested both in the art and the organization’s engagement with its donors and community.
Over time, individuals attracted by the “good” these values create in the community are drawn to the center, and some may be willing to fund new types of activity. There are a few questions arts organizations can ask themselves when trying to pull donors and audience members towards these values:
What conversations would we want to host and who should be invited?
How would we reinforce belonging and create opportunities for deeper engagement?
How can we demonstrate our commitment to the community through unified programs and partnerships?
Finally, we shared a checklist of items you can start doing today to start working towards a true community focused approach to donor cultivation.
Of course, this is just the beginning of these conversations, and ABA will be with you every step of the way as you work on your own community initiatives — through private development team briefings, workshops, and data reports.
For access to any of these resources, you can contact your member advisor, and catch up on all the summit materials here.
Watch the Recording Here
