It’s easy to know what some people are thinking because they tell you. Others are quiet and reserved and more difficult to read. These deep donors are like wells where the water table sits so far down that you need a rope and a bucket and a lot of patience to get anything up.
Solomon knew this about people three thousand years before development officers started writing case statements. The heart’s purposes are deep waters and drawing them out takes insight.
Why We Skip the Deep Questions
Most of us default to shallow questions because they feel safer. “Would you consider a gift to our capital campaign?” That is a fine question. It is also a bucket that never leaves the surface. It gets you a yes or a no and nothing else.
The deep questions sound different. What moved your heart enough that you started giving here in the first place? What would it mean to you if this worked? If you could fund one outcome and watch it happen in your lifetime, what would it be?
Those questions take longer to ask and longer to answer. When a donor goes quiet after one of them, let the quiet sit there. That is the rope going down.
Insight Is a Discipline
Some people seem to have a gift for reading donors. Most of what looks like a gift is preparation before the visit, listening during it, and the restraint to leave your agenda in the car.
A board member sat down with John six months after his wife’s funeral and said, “Tell me about Carol.” That was the whole question. John talked for an hour. The board member never took out a notepad and never mentioned the campaign. Somewhere in there John mentioned that Carol had put herself through school waiting tables and never got over how hard it was. The scholarship came four conversations later, and it was John’s idea. Nobody rushed him. The gift took its shape from what he said about her.
Donors who feel known by an organization are usually the ones somebody asked about their heart first. The money followed because a person finally understood what they cared about.
What Staying Shallow Costs You
Ask every donor the same generic questions and you will raise the same generic gifts. Without that one question about Carol, John’s scholarship never exists. You miss the widow who would fund the whole program if anyone asked about her late husband’s love of teaching. You miss the businessman who would triple his gift if he knew it would go toward the exact ministry his mother received forty years ago. Those people are on your list right now.
The purposes are down there. Somebody has to lower the bucket.
Think About This: Who is one donor in your portfolio whose motivations you have never asked about? What is one question you could ask them this month that you have been too busy to ask?
Response: Lord, help me remember that every gift is connected to a story, and every story deserves to be drawn out with care. Amen.
