Turning members into donors

April 9th, 2010 by admin

By Stephanie Hannah, Director of Communications, Northwest YMCA

Turning YMCA Facility Members into Donors

Special Interest Track – Recap

Turning YMCA Facility Members into Donors has been one of my favorite tracks so far. This seems to be a common problem at a lot of YMCAs because the room was packed.

This track focused on the Member to Donor Conversion Study done in the past year, which was inspired by a 2006 Environics study which showed that 70% of members had never given and 60% did not even consider the YMCA a charity. 1/3 of members did not plan on giving to the YMCA because they felt other charities are more worthy and 20% said they have not given to the YMCA because they have not been asked. The number one influencing factor in donations was people wanting to help local people.

Research showed that YMCA needed to increase awareness to members of the need for their donations. In addition, YMCA needed to show that what membership fees went to, that they are not a substitute for donations and show the need of contributions that would benefit the local community.

Three YMCAs tried this new strategy. They all took steps to better their campaign message. What I found the most interesting is they came up with two different pie charts. One chart showed where membership dues go, the other where contributions are spent. Educating the members on where the money goes was key to getting the members on board.

In addition to educating members, they changed their messaging to be consistent and simple. They also changed the way they educated their campaigners (or story-tellers), they made training mandatory and put it time limit on it and made it simple. One branch even got their campaigner packet down to 3 pages! I couldn’t believe it.

This tiny snippet of information from this great class will not do it justice. But the power point from this class will be on the exchange server.

All in all a great education that was very eye opening. Keep it simple, share the YMCA story its purest form and you could change facility members to donors!