We’ve been working on a lot of campaigns with endowment components lately, across organizations with totally different missions, communities, and fundraising histories.
No matter how different these organizations and campaigns are, we often see something similar when the endowment piece comes up: People get a little sheepish about it.
All that confidence and enthusiasm that leaders and fundraisers carry with them when they walk into a donor visit with a shiny capital project to sell just seems a little harder to find when the ask is endowment.
At the heart of the hesitation is a messaging challenge:
Many fundraisers (including leaders and volunteers) don’t feel confident enough in their ability to tell a compelling story about endowment.
We love endowment and want you to walk into those donor conversations with total confidence, so we’re just going to give you our favorite framings for talking about it. Deal?
First, A Few Ground Truths
No matter what messaging frame you reach for, keep these broader guidelines in mind:
- Endowment is a means, not an end. Unless they served a decade on your Finance committee, most donors don’t want to give to the endowment – but they might be energized by the idea that making their gift as an endowment gives them the chance to make a far greater impact over time.
- Know that you’re not going to reach every donor. Endowment donors are a (blessed, beautiful) subset of your prospect base that thinks about time, investment, and impact in distinct ways. They also usually have a somewhat longer relationship history with you. Your messaging job isn’t to convert the whole population—it’s to magnetize and cultivate the good endowment prospects within your larger donor base, and perhaps to educate the rest for the future.
- Don’t tell yourself it’s a hard sell. It just becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are lots of easy, accessible ways to talk about endowment. So many, in fact, that you have to pick and choose which ones work best for you. Speaking of which…
Our Favorite Ways of Talking About Endowment
These aren’t magic words—they’re framings that might or might not fit your circumstances. We’ve seen each of them work in multiple campaigns.
- Building Permanence: Endowment is what turns an activity into a program, a great teacher into a lineage of great educators, and a mission into an institution. It ensures a given activity—or your mission writ large—will not just endure, but thrive over time.
- Innovation Fuel: Don’t typecast it as slow and conservative—endowment provides the foundation that makes it easier for your organization to stay nimble, respond to changing circumstances, or jump on opportunities; to pilot new programs that could become the future of your mission; or to take artistic risks because you’re not living and dying on ticket sales alone.
- Legacy: Endowment lasts forever, and it gives your donors the chance to leave an enduring legacy that expresses the things they care about most. Long after they’ve made their gift, and even long after they’ve passed, their endowed gift will continue to live out their generosity and vision.
- Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: The programs, places, teachers, artists, etc. that your donors value are supported and sustained today by generations of visionary donors who each did their part to build an endowment. Now it’s our turn to add our legacy to theirs and build for the next generation.
- Endowment Is People: It’s not some abstract asset on a balance sheet. Every year, it flows directly to the people who bring your mission to life—making an education possible for students and families; keeping programs accessible for the people you serve; attracting the most promising faculty/artists/staff/physicians and empowering them to practice their craft at the highest level.
- The Story Behind The Story: When you look at the leading educational/cultural/research/etc. institutions – the places that set the standard of excellence and lead their fields forward – they’re often the ones with the most significant endowments. That’s because endowed funds give them the ability to do more in pursuit of their missions, build more ambitious programs, and go into every year with a head start of funding they didn’t have to raise from scratch.
- Stewardship: By growing your endowment alongside your facilities and your programs, you ensure that everything your donors help you build can be sustained, maintained, and grown far into the future. This can take the form of building maintenance endowments, operating and program-specific endowments, or simply general endowment—but the message is the same: Everything we build together, we’re going to steward carefully for the long term.
- Weathering The Storm: In any mission that lasts long enough to matter, you’re guaranteed to face economic shocks, community crises, tough years, and all manner of external challenges. Endowment is your bedrock of stability and continuity to keep showing up for your community when it needs you most, and to keep your mission moving forward through all the ups and downs.
- Keeping Our Promises: Endowment empowers you to make commitments to the people and communities you serve with the confidence that you’ll be able to keep those promises far into the future. That can mean creating new programs, reaching out to new communities, or growing your existing programs—knowing that you’re not one lost grant away from having to pull back.
Don’t push all the buttons on the soda fountain at once with these – find what serves you best and adapt thoughtfully for your circumstances. Or, even better, come up with something totally fresh and specific to your organizational story!
One More Thing
Beyond the overall framing and messaging question, you will also have to do some donor education with your endowment-related communications—because it’s a complicated subject even for sophisticated donors, and every organization’s approach is a little different.
This is less a matter of narrative framing and more about having easy explainer-style content to help build an interested prospect’s confidence and answer their questions.
That can include the following kinds of content:
- How $X in endowment translates into $Y of perennial funding—and what that $Y can make possible year after year
- How your endowment is managed, invested, and directed by the board for distribution
- The history and track record of your endowment, including landmark investments, bequests, and campaigns that made it what it is
- What kinds of restricted endowments you offer, and what funding levels are required for those
- How you recognize endowed gifts at various levels
- What reporting and stewardship you provide for endowed funds created by donors
- Other endowment-related policies and practices
This can be as simple as FAQ content, and you may not need all of it right away. And fortunately, if you’re getting these questions, it probably means you’ve got interested prospects on the hook!
Find Your Frame
Don’t fall victim to the sheepishness or the self-fulfilling prophecy. You can tell, by our count, at least nine different compelling stories about your endowment—you just have to find the ones that serve you best.
And if you have your own frame—we’d love to hear it!
