Volunteer Me - Closing Remarks - Week 3
What would motivate me to adjust those habits and contribute more?
On the content this week:
Rightly or wrongly, I often use my own motivations and donor habits as I analyze the engagement work we do. I’m 45 years old and have been giving to my undergraduate alma mater for almost 20 years. I just started giving to my graduate alma mater again. My wife and I finally have some disposable income now, thankfully, and we also give to other charities.
We have developed an approach to charitable giving that works for us, and we prefer monthly donations on auto-withdrawal. When all things are equal or better in the rest of my life, and my donor experiences are positive, I’ve been increasing the monthly withdrawal amount on an annual basis.
What would motivate me to adjust those habits and contribute more?
One clear way would be a volunteer opportunity that really stimulates my Radical Connection (more from The Generosity Crisis soon as we start the Book Club). I’m happy to volunteer to help students in a more intimate setting — such as a classroom presentation, a career chat, or a specific opportunity where I’m identified as the right person.
The important part is that someone from my alma mater or another nonprofit we support would need to reach out to me personally and ask me. I’m almost certainly not going to respond to an all-call marketing email.
I’m who they’re looking for, not just someone like me.
This would significantly increase the likelihood that I would adjust my monthly giving upward or make a one-time gift to a particular designation. I suspect others are the same.
In thinking about volunteer engagement as we did this week during Speaking Engagement, following Meghan Buzby’s Keynote, I keep coming back to the importance of dedicating resources to making these types of volunteer asks. To have a fully functioning, integrated advancement organization, someone or a group within the organization needs to hold volunteer engagement portfolios containing unassigned donors. They also need to develop and maintain a database of opportunities and create new programs.
The goal is re-engagement through volunteerism. I wrote an article this week on LinkedIn discussing how university leaders see alumni engagement as a cost center, and it’s my belief that focusing on volunteerism and its role in move management is the pathway forward.
On building Speaking Engagement
Over the last week, I onboarded 13 individuals from Dartmouth College and eight from Roanoke College. I’m grateful to Carolyn Gray Kimberlin and Nate Stewart for their support and interest in finding out what this “conference that never sleeps” has to offer.
Speaking Engagement uses Substack, but not in the platform’s traditional creator-centric model, where individuals gradually build paid subscriber audiences through consistent writing and digital content. Instead, our approach is organizationally driven. The success of Speaking Engagement depends on colleges, universities, and nonprofits investing in these resources as professional development and strategic infrastructure for their engagement teams.
We have several other teams interested and committed, and I can’t wait to see how this comes together and provides an avenue for practitioners from all over the world to engage with one another.
Don’t forget to register for the Agora!
Keynote Preview: On Monday morning, we’ll be sharing our Keynote with Mallory Willsea, Creator and Mar/Comm Consultant. Mallory is one of the very best in the business.
Thanks for the support, everyone!
Ryan
So much of advancement and engagement work happens inside institutional silos. The person who already solved your problem works at the school somewhere else, and you’ve never spoken. So you solve it again.
What you’re building changes that default. This new format means the conversation isn’t waiting for the next conference. It’s already happening.
Excited to see what surfaces from it.
As a senior director of volunteer engagement at a large institution that values alumni engagement, I could not agree more with your sentiments and am grateful that my employer shares this view.
What I would love for us to work toward is not selling the philosophy that schools should focus on volunteerism, since many alumni engagement and even fundraising professionals already agree, but rather how to implement the idea. Where do schools start? What are the baseline best practices? How does an institution go about auditing its data and programs to even know where to begin and where to focus its efforts? As conferences, white papers, and thought pieces often do, the focus is on generating ideas, but they often sing to the same choir--our choir of engagement professionals now needs the sheet music to carry the tune at their own institutions.