Survey points to three kinds of fundraising stewardship
Howard Lake | 23 October 2008 | News
Research into fundraising stewardship has found that it consists of three distinct concepts, delegates were told at Blackbaud’s 2008 Conference for Nonprofits this week.
Gordon Michie, director of development at Relationship Marketing, who devised the survey, was presenting his findings. He suggested it was better to think of a ‘Stewardship Spectrum’ which runs from passive through active to proactive stewardship.
The results were based on a survey which drew 105 responses.
Michie explained: “Passive stewardship is really all about the practice and process of donor care. It’s about getting names and detail right, making sure you thank donors properly, responding to their requests, complying with their wishes and putting as much control of the relationship their way as possible. This is centred on direct marketing techniques and puts very little emphasis on personal one-to-one contact with donors. In fact, it’s debatable whether this is actually ‘stewardship’ according to any accepted definition of stewardship. It is really a traditional customer service or customer care ethos.
“As you move along the Stewardship Spectrum, you come to ‘active stewardship’. This emerges naturally from passive stewardship as fundraisers begin to interact with donors and develop two-way relationships. Phone and email have bigger roles, as events. This is where fundraisers start trying to engage with their donors in supporter journeys.
“But as you get to the active end, the continuum breaks down. Proactive stewardship is much more about meeting donors, making personal phone calls to them, and arranging events with programme staff. So it’s much more like traditional major donor fundraising. There is far less emphasis on things like raising unrestricted income or minimising attrition as these are things that just don’t have relevance to major donors”.
The survey found that 60 per cent of respondents thought there should be a commonly-accepted definition of fundraising stewardship. However, it is people at the proactive end of the Stewardship Spectrum who want this; those at the passive end generally did not think there needs to be a common definition”.
Michie was pleased to find that, based on analysis of indicators of stewardship practices, “I was right in my hunch and there the is a role and a place for the phone in stewardship – quite specific roles along particular parts of the Stewardship Spectrum.”
Michie concluded that there are different ways to practise stewardship, depending on how involved with a donor you get.
“This is probably what a lot of people expected”, he commented, “but it’s good to be able to see some data that backs up that gut feeling”.
Last year, Michie published a white paper, “Pretenders to the Steward Throne” in which he called for a common definition of stewardship. “I stand by that call though I am prepared to revise it”, he said. “We don’t need a common definition because, as the Stewardship Spectrum shows, there can’t be a single definition of stewardship. But there is so much confusion around the term that we do need it clarified, because how fundraisers practice stewardship is very different depending on which part of the Stewardship Spectrum they’re on.”
Respondents to the survey will receive a full copy of the report later this month. It will then be available as a download from Relationship Marketing’s website:
www.relationshipmarketing.org.uk
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.