Mercy Ships UK
Tanya Stepens, Philanthropy and Finance Administrator, Mercy Ships UK
Video transcript: One of our biggest challenges is lack of resources and that can be time, tools, people to actually do the proper prospect research and it can be quite time consuming. So, I would say that is one of our biggest problems.
Then it would be to make that first contact the right approach to spark their interest and you know, make it not seem out of the blue.And then once you make that connection, how do we keep things fresh? How do we make it new and creative ways to keep them engaged so it doesn’t look repetitive or routine.
First focused on our current pool of warm donors, you know, prioritizing them that way, and then slowly working our way down the list on who we can approach and slowly get in touch with. Because if they’re warm, they already know us, they trust us. So, then we can maybe look into their interests and play more into their personal side of things and their networking.
So that’s what we found really refreshing is that, you know, it’s not just the individuals, everything that they aligned with, their philanthropic values, their networking and their interests. So yeah, that’s how we’ve been developing it.
Altrata has been really helpful because it’s made it less time consuming. We’ve got 100 people that we were able to put down into mid level giving because we found that they’re not very, they’re not high net worth. So that was one thing that was really helpful from Altrata.
The second thing would be, we were able to, find a lot of ultra high net worth and very high net worth individuals that we were unaware of because of doing this research, we were able to now cater our engagement differently and you know, make our approach about listening instead of asking.