It took many conversations
to bring us to the point of drafting and sending a letter, and logistics
were central to the discussion. Philosophically, the financial development
director and I were on the same page: Donating money to an organization
is a personal decision, and not ours to make for our volunteers.
Up to this point, we had
been making this decision for volunteer staff, simply by not
inviting them to consider supporting us financially. But our respective
departments each worked with separate databases for the audiences we
reached and tracked. We lacked any kind of contact management system
that would allow us to identify overlap between these audiences, and
specific evidence of their dual support of the organization through
volunteer involvement and financial donations…
So while we had a skeletal
system in place, we still had to meet on several occasions to exchange
and compare lists, identify which volunteers were already donors (some
were major donors, and had just recently been solicited to support more
substantially a different campaign), and determine what to do with donors
and volunteers who resided outside our organization’s jurisdiction…
During this process of refining
lists, reviewing drafts of solicitation letters, and periodically touching
base on related philosophical questions, I began to think more creatively
about the potential for a deeper level of collaboration with my financial
development colleague, and recognized that our respective professions
had more in common than either of us had explored in the past.
