Fund liaison assignments for donor stewardship

elizabethmesserli

We are developing a "fund liaison" program at our community foundation to more proactively serve our fund holders and make sure they know their "person" at the Foundation and we can provide more personalized, ongoing stewardship. Most of our fund liaisons are in our philanthropic services department and a few from development department. We are trying to figure out a system to make the staff assignments and have started with fund type (designated, nonprofit agency, designated, scholarship) and then breaking down DAFs (the majority of our almost 600 funds) by asset level. Because asset levels can rapidly change, we wondered if there's a better way to do this.

Does your community foundation have a similar fund representative - staff assignment process? What do you use for your categories?

Thank you!

Elizabeth Messerli

Community Foundation of Northern Colorado

LaurelShulman

Generally our fund types and the staff that steward those fund types are delineated by expertise and team. So our Scholarship, Designated, Agency, FOI, and unrestricted funds are the responsibility of our Community Engagement team. The DAFs, Corporate, and Committee funds are the responsibility of our Donor Engagement team. (Sometimes when a donor has more than 1 fund type they may or may not have 2 "people" at the Foundation. Depends on the situation.) I'm not sure we've found the best setup for our Agency and Designated funds, as they've lived both in DE and CE at various moments. We're still thinking about how we can best serve those donors with our staff. I would love to hear where you land with this @elizabethmesserli!

Triangle Community Foundation has assigned a fund liaison for each DAF and we have found ourselves realizing that this is a great model for a number of our donors but not all of them want to be engaged at that level (and that's okay!). We are considering shifting away from this model for our more transactional donors. Specifically, we're working to identify the donors who want to engage with us and keep them with a fund liaison vs. the ones who over the years have shown they have no interest in a deeper relationship with us and don't want that level of service, at least right now.

We're thinking about engagement in the following ways (many of which we can report on in CSuite thankfully):

• - Legacy gift with the Foundation
• - Attended a Foundation event
• - Consistently gifts into their fund
• - Consistently grants out of their fund
• - Emailed the Foundation for nonprofit recommendations
• - Made a grant to a nonprofit that we recommended
• - Involved their children or partner in their philanthropy
• - Supported the Foundation's impact areas or campaigns

Generally, if we move forward with this approach we will review our donors annually to determine if any of our transactional donors are showing a higher level of engagement. Our more transactional donors will have staff assigned to support them however they will not have an official "person" unless/until they show that they want more engagement with us.

elizabethmesserli

Hi @LaurelShulman,

I'm circling back on this thred as our community foundation reviews and seeks improvements to our fund liaison approach. I'm curious to know if you did move forward with the approach of assigning staff portfolios based on engagement preferences of the donors, and if so, how that's going.

Additionally, do you by chance use a "roadmap" for your fundholder support/engagement by staff, either used internally or shared externally to set expectations with new fundholders?
Year 1=X, X, X;
Year 2=Y, Y, Y;
Year 3 and beyond=Z, Z, Z

If it'd be easier to chat on a call, let me know and we can set something up.

Thanks so much for sharing your experience and learnings!

Elizabeth

P.S. All other fund stewardship practices welcome to be shared in this thred, too! Would love to learn from you!

LaurelShulman

@elizabethmesserli We have started this process. We took all of our lowest engaged fundholders (we call them transactional) and assigned them to 2 of our staff. They don't have a "person" per say but they have multiple resources (phone line, and an email at our foundation that is monitored by multiple staff) of how to access staff when they need them to answer questions. We will officially make this transition in January, after the end of the year grants chaos :-)

This transactional fundholder transition also coincides with the analysis of a tiered service. We're trying to determine if/what a tiered services effort for our fundholders who are more engaged would look like. Details are TBD on that front. If you want to learn more about it, it's probably better if I connect you to our Director of Donor Engagement. Feel free to send me an email (laurel@trianglecf.org) if you ever want to speak with her!