After conducting a Gap Analysis to determine why you need a co-source partner, the next step is to hold your departments accountable and determine where resources are lacking to achieve your high-level strategic objectives.
Accountability Audit
What source is not pulling their weight? We must identify our sources, assign goals, and hold everyone accountable. Within any organization there are 5 “places” from which we can get our donors that are quantifiable and attributable:
- Sponsors - Our sponsors or drive coordinators are a huge contributing factor. Most centers have incredibly reliable projection accuracy, but don’t get to the appointment level. Make your sponsors enter appointments in your CRM so you can track them!
- Bedside - Giving your collection staff the right tools and setting goals is a great way to reduce recruitment costs, increase annual frequency, and provide a 56+ day forecasting tool.
- Donor self-scheduling - At any given time, your marketing team is sending emails, texts, producing social media content, and even producing radio and television ads all with the intention of driving in donors. Make sure their efforts are actionable and drive results. Quantify self-scheduling donors and hold your marketing team accountable for hitting a monthly goal.
- Tele-recruitment (TR) - TR goals are easy to track. Calls made = productive donors. For most centers, TR accounts for 30% of total collections and to break that down even further, it is usually somewhere around 50% of fixed site collections and 10% of mobile collections.
Strategic Forecast
Sometimes you have no gap, everyone is pulling his or her weight, and yet you have a goal that is just out of reach. Perhaps it’s a new territory, maybe you want to bid on a new contract, but can’t without extra inventory. Or maybe it’s a new method of contact that you aren’t able to do on your own. We are seeing as high as 8% increases in collections when you combine the use of sponsored Facebook posts with tele-recruitment, but your team just doesn’t have the resources to test it in your area. In any case, there are times where you feel like everything is under control, but you want to try something different with little to no risk.
Your company’s gaps, accountability issues, and strategic objectives all factor into the decision to join forces with an outside provider. Co-sourcing can be as little or as much as you need, once you identify your 'why.' The right partner will encourage you to keep your core competencies in-house, and then use a partner to supplement your internal efforts.
Donor recruitment is changing, and more than ever we need to be nimble and offer a wide range of communication methods. By deciding to co-source now, you will put yourself in a position to make decisions just in time to boost inventory levels for the summer.