Adapt Your Message for Individual Donors Through Real Fluency

This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of The Major Gifts Report.

A person is considered fluent in a language when they can listen to a speaker and respond in coherent sentences. Fluency is the foundation of any complex conversation —
it’s a necessity for finding common ground.

Fundraisers don’t have to worry about verb conjugations as they might when navigating Spanish or French. However, they must be able to meet donors where they are — speaking their language is key to furthering any philanthropic relationship.

“Fluency lets you individualize the campaign’s overarching message to bring deep relevance to any funding priority and to awaken the motivations that are unique to each donor,”
says Doug Diefenbach, vice president, strategy and brand for Foster Avenue (State College, PA), a fundraising campaign communications agency supporting clients in education,
healthcare and cultural nonprofits. “Fluent volunteers stop relying on their brochures as a crutch,” he explains. “They start talking from the heart and playing the passionate
ambassador role only they can fulfill.”

To become “fluent” in an organization’s fundraising language, one must go beyond simply memorizing bullet messages. “We realized, to equip fundraisers with the tools
needed to succeed in big campaigns, we needed to do more than just deliver brochures — we needed to help them understand and really own the message underneath it,” Diefenbach says of how Foster Avenue’s fluency training program came to be. Today, his agency helps fundraising teams learn how to deliver the organization’s message to appeal to donors with varying philanthropic goals. It starts by distilling the campaign message into something that’s easy for anyone to understand and then explaining a funding priority in a way that is relevant to each donor’s particular motivations.

“When your fundraising team achieves fluency, you see the payoff in donor prospects who embrace your campaign as real, urgent and imperative because they hear personalized,
resonant messages from every corner of your organization,” Diefenbach reiterates. Here he offers first steps for organizations seeking to achieve team fluency:

1. Conduct fluency training before solicitation training. “This will give your team a chance to learn the campaign’s ‘why’ before its ‘how,’” Diefenbach shares.
2. Nuance training by audience. Create customized sessions for staff, trustees, volunteers and leadership so everyone is able to effectively adapt the organization’s message through their own role and perspective.
3. Integrate role-playing. Make training interactive by offering scenarios so participants practice fluency.
4. Understand what donors want. Teach the knack of deconstructing each funding opportunity in terms of its underlying donor rewards.
5. Use real-world examples. Encourage participants to share stories that humanize and personalize the campaign.
6. Create a reference document. Publish an insider’s fluency pocket guide as a handy desk reference for campaign messages.

Fluency should always be viewed as a team goal. Pursuing training like that offered by Foster Avenue is one step toward achieving it.