I recently came across this excellent article by The Fundraising Authority. As promised in the title, it provides a “Simple, Step-by-Step Process for Getting Your Board to Refer New Prospects to Your Non-Profit.” In a nutshell, here are the four steps:
Explain how referrals work and assure your board members that no one they refer will be asked for money until they indicate a desire to get involved.
Show board members how many people they actually know through a mind mapping exercise.
Ask board members for referrals usually in person.
Bring referral success stories back to board meetings on a regular basis.
My tip is to enhance steps 2 and 4 with visuals.
Visuals for Step 2: For the mind map, the point is for board members to brainstorm all the people they know by considering people in different categories of their lives. You can use Canva whiteboards (or a similar tool) to create a mind map that the board member (pictured in the middle) can use to add the names of people in each category on virtual post-it notes.
Visuals for Step 4: The article claims that “this is a key step. Nothing will convince your board members to bring you more referrals than hearing from other board members that have done it successfully.” You can visualize the donors that various board members brought in using tools like Flourish to show their networks, as in this example. Scroll over the circles to interact with it and learn more. Some board members brought in donors who, in turn, brought in other donors. To make something similar, select one of the network graph templates on Flourish and fill in the data needed. (See snapshots of the data I added for the visual below.)
Links data
(used to show who is connected to whom)
Points data
(used to show groups by color, size points according to amount of donations, and add images for board members)
To see past data tips, click HERE.
Let’s talk about YOUR data!
Got the feeling that you and your colleagues would use your data more effectively if you could see it better? Data Viz for Nonprofits (DVN) can help you get the ball rolling with an interactive data dashboard and beautiful charts, maps, and graphs for your next presentation, report, proposal, or webpage. Through a short-term consultation, we can help you to clarify the questions you want to answer and goals you want to track. DVN then visualizes your data to address those questions and track those goals.
