Steven Endicott, Director of Development at the Vancouver Playhouse, tells us: I started here in February 2002. One of the first things I did was attend a roundtable AFP breakfast where Terry Axelrod was speaking. She talked about the Raising More Money model, gave a powerful example of how she had implemented it and had phenomenal results. In that introductory session, she did a pitch for the workshops they give.

She called me almost instantly, asked if we would be interested in taking the two-day workshop. We were really interested, but we didn't have the budget, and I was new, we didn't really move forward with it.

About a year later, we were looking at our development programs. We had a pretty strong corporate sponsorship program, but we really needed to ramp up and strengthen our individual giving program. The RMM model is all about creating and building lifelong sustainable donors.

So I said to my boss (Dawn Brennan, General Manager), I think this would be a great way for us to implement a systematic approach to fundraising from individuals.

She and I attended the two-day workshop in June in California. There was one coming up in Vancouver in October, but we’re a theatre company which produces five main stage shows a year, the first one usually in October. We wanted to use a tour through our production centre as our Point of Entry, while the first show was being built and rehearsed. We thought that would be powerful way to introduce people to the work we do.

So we went, came back with a plan, created a team of staff and board and started implementing the model, with the first tours September 2003. Then we took the whole team to the workshop in Vancouver.

We did the tours rigorously throughout the 2003/04 season and are now in our second year of implementing the model. We did a small ask event in December in our rehearsal hall, had 100 guests to test out if the approach worked, if we were building relationships, if we were ready to ask people.

The results were phenomenal. We did a true event in May 2004 in a hotel downtown, which is what they prescribe; it was also really successful. Their formula forecasts that you can expect at your first ask event to get the number of guests divided by 2, X 100. We actually exceeded that; we almost doubled their formula.

We limited our tours to 12 to 15 people, because the followup after tours is so critical, and that number is manageable. That’s the stage two of the program, cultivation between tour/Point of Entry and the ask. We’d make a followup call, ask them what they thought of the tour, the company, our mission, and if there was any way they could see themselves getting involved. 

If they indicated they had a particular interest in our activities or our mission, then we’d start to build relationships with them. We might invite them to a dress rehearsal or a special workshop. For example, if someone’s interested in learning to build a set, and we've got a designer coming in to do a workshop on that, we’ll invite them. We start that process before asking them to attend the fundraising event. Each time we interact with them represents an opportunity to raise awareness about who we are, our fundraising process, what we do.

We have an advantage over some nonprofits in having the backstage tours to offer. But really the Point of Entry can happen anywhere – a boardroom, over lunch, as long as it has the elements they talk about. It must include: facts about the organization, the organization’s mission, an emotional hook, and capturing names with people’s permission.

Tracking all this activity is certainly a challenge. We’ve just purchased a new ticketing and tracking database which will help record all the feedback. In the first year we didn’t have anything, so it was difficult to track all the contacts with prospective donors and the various stages they were at.

The ongoing support Raising More Money provides is really great. After the two-day workshop, we had a coach who worked with us between the workshop and our first fundraising event, helped us determine our message and our Point of Entry, whether events were being effective, helped us communicate our messages. They also invited us to participate in conference calls with other organizations which have implemented the model, so it’s like a users group. They really foster that. 

Terry Axelrod is following her own program, her own model. It’s a model I believe in because I believe it’s rooted in solid fundraising practice. She introduces people to the model, she follows up, there’s a cultivation process, then she maintains ongoing relationship-building with all her organizations.

A lot of time and energy goes into the first year. Their formula involves pledges over a five-year event, so they figure if you have 200 people at your event, the goal should be about $100,000, pledged over five years. So the return in the first year’s going to be $20,000. You figure the training costs $10,000, your net result is going to be pretty slim for all the work. But we ’way exceeded our expectations.

And it really involved the whole organization in fundraising, because everyone was involved in creating our tours. And that was great for us, a great spinoff benefit, getting that wholehearted commitment. It takes time to get the commitment because there are some naysayers at the beginning. Once people see the faces of the people leaving the tour, it’s inspiring because they're so wowed.

And if that’s not enough, here are the comments from Robin Campbell, Executive Director of the Surrey Food Bank:

We first learned about Raising More Money when one of my former employees, a member of AFP, investigated. She got hold of a copy of the book and looked at their web site. Then they came to town to do a free introductory session, so she and my president went to hear it. They came back so excited about the model, that when they had a second introductory session, I went down with our foundation chair, and we came back just as excited.

They were offering the course for the first time in Canada, in Vancouver, so we took it. It’s a costly program, but we brought six people and completely immersed ourselves in the learning process for the two days.

Among the things that attracted us were several of the sayings they have, like “you are not in the business of entertaining your donors”. That really resonated with me because I had spent the past five years spending an enormous amount of time and energy organizing a gala dinner and auction. I’m talking hundreds of hours of my time – all focussed on getting gift certificates to the local restaurants, picking up and phoning people and asking them for things, organizing the auction, printing booklets ... and all that time was being taken away from what I’m really paid to do, which is to operate a food bank and help poor people eat.

The other piece was about building lifelong relationships. I think that’s the whole key to Raising More Money anyway. It’s so easy to guilt someone into giving you $20, but if you can build a relationship with those donors, educate them about the work you do, have them get as passionate as you are about your charity and your work, then the support continues and you’ll have people who are prepared to donate more money and support your mission.

Raising More Money really helps you map out a plan to implement the model. They designed a Point of Entry specifically for us, we came up with the name, set the date for the first one, came up with a plan for doing the first Ask event.

We restructured our staffing slightly to ensure one person was the staff leader of the Raising More Money team. It really didn’t mean we had to hire anybody extra, we just had to refocus some people’s jobs.

What I didn’t expect, and was delighted to see happen, was that it changed entirely the way we work with our donors, the way we communicate our message. If someone came up the stairs to drop off a cheque to donate money, we offered them a tour. We engaged them in a conversation, asked them why they were supporting us, found out more about them. That in turn had those donors bringing friends and family and neighbours, and asking me to come and talk to them. 

It just snowballed from there. We are in great demand to talk about the work we do. So the education piece and the “marketing” fell into place. We changed our brochures to dispel the myths about food banking, talk about our operations. We just changed everything.

The thing that hit me in the introductory session was that this model just makes sense. Forget golf tournaments, forget dinners. Terry Axelrod uses the term “strong arming the Rolodex”. You don’t pick up the phone and start soliciting people. I’ll pick up the phone to call donors and say “wow, we got your cheque, the only reason I’m phoning you, in addition to sending the letter and tax receipt, is to say thank you. I know it’s the second time you’ve sent money this year, and I just need you to know that we really appreciate it. Do you have any questions about the food bank?”

They may say “no, I love the work you’re doing, I’m going to send you more money.” I’ll reply “Well, that’s just great, but it’s not the purpose of the call. We’re just calling to say thanks.” That sort of way of doing business is just terrific.

What happens after the workshop? We’re given a coach, and we have three hours of coaching calls. We made the absolute, we sucked every minute out of Linda. We found her extremely approachable; we’d send her all sort of eMails, she’d respond, it didn’t even count towards the three hours. 

We had about 270 people come to the first Ask breakfast out of 300 invitations. We raised $44,000 in an hour. That’s what we took in. We had commitments for $140,000 and change for the next five years.

So then we continued to follow up with phone calls to everyone who came to the breakfast, continued to let people know we were available to talk to groups and to help people, to do whatever we had to do. We’re now forming a group of about 50 ambassadors for the food bank, who are bringing other people in. We offer tours any time we’re open, we’ll do them one on one.

Our second ask event was last May. We raised $56,000 and have pledges for the next five years of $180,000 and change. Sometimes if organizations don’t stick closely to the model, they can have a worse second year ask event. That was not our experience, because we followed the model really closely.

We have hired a development co-ordinator as of October 1, which has allowed me to go back to the business of running a food bank, and we haven’t looked back.

I still hear people commenting, “how many people are using this model? because if too many people use it, there’s no way it’s going to work for me.” That’s a common concern. But the only people we’re interested in inviting to our breakfast are those people who are interested in supporting our mission and the work we do. That’s not everybody – other people are more interested in other causes.

Terry has a word for the people who look at you and say gee your organization just isn’t for me. She uses the term, bless and release: “It’s okay if you don’t want to support our work, you think another charity is more important to you. That’s just great. We’re just glad you support and get involved in your community and help people who need help.”

The whole thing is permission-based, so there’s no hard sell, it’s just relationships. And shoot, that’s what I’m good at. I just love to sit around all day and babble and get to know people. 

The model fit us perfectly. But I stress that it can be adopted to anything. Of the women who taught our course, one had implemented the model at a department of opthamology at a hospital; she left the department financially secure and with a model in place someone else could just take over and implement. The other one had been at a school for kids with learning disabilities. The model can be geared towards your own organization.

Even in the Vancouver area where there have been two courses offered, there are probably 12 nonprofits implementing it in Greater Vancouver – there’s room for everybody.

Imagine two volunteers and two staff people walking into a board meeting saying we have to spend this $10,200. It’s imperative. We’re going to do it. Board members looked at us saying what do you mean? And we’re stumbling over ourselves to explain. And their reaction is that this is just one way to raise money. It’s slick. It’s American. Will it ever work in Canada?

I thought maybe we could be gentler, change this or that. But when we took the course, my president made a motion that between now and our first ask event, we stick to the model 100%. That way, if it doesn’t work, we can’t blame us, we can blame the model. If we change it and compromise and it doesn’t work, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Ask me what’s wrong with it? I have nothing to say. You just have to commit to doing the model and stick to it. If you think oh I don’t have to do that part, it’ll happen without me working at it, that’s when you get in trouble.

You have to take the course. At the end of the introductory course, the speaker said you now know enough to be dangerous. Someone suggested that was pretty slick. She made the point she had to be slick and definite to convince participants to invest in the program.

One of my former employees tried to put on a breakfast by just reading the book . But it bombed. The web site has a wealth of information – you could spend hours there without taking the course, but it’s the two-day experience that’s really important, because it melds your team as well, then we found the three hours coaching incredibly valuable in keeping us all on track and pointed in the right direction.