You Don’t Need to Name Giving Levels!

03 Mar You Don’t Need to Name Giving Levels!

4 March 2025

By David Allen, Development for Conservation

Before I start in on this week’s topic, I want to ask for your help in gathering data for a future blog post. I’ve heard back from 12 groups now, and I’d like to get to at least 20 before I feel comfortable with the data. Before COVID, I had nearly 40 groups participating.

If you are willing to participate, here’s what I will need from you:

• Isolate the members and donors you have who made first gifts to your organization at some point – any point – during the calendar year 2020.
• Now add up everything those donors gave to your organization – as a group – since then (1/1/2020 through 12/31/2024).
• Send those two numbers to me – the number of donors and the total amount they have given. The email address is David (at) DevelopmentForConservation (dot) com.
• Any kind of narrative you might be willing to share from your experience recruiting members during COVID would be welcomed as well.

If you would like to understand more about what I am doing and how the data you provide will be used, see last week’s post here: How Much is a New Donor Worth?

Thank you! in advance.

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When I was a novice fundraiser, working for The Nature Conservancy, I had a brilliant idea. I would name the various levels of membership after the Linnaeus Series. For those of you who may have forgotten, Carolus Linnaeus was a Swedish naturalist who created the nomenclature for naming organisms.

My thought was that TNC was a science-based organization. Giving levels should be named for biological classification levels:

• Domain
• Kingdom
• Phylum
• Class
• Order
• Family
• Genus
• Species

Student would be Species. Individual would be Genus, which made a certain level of sense. Family would be Family, which made a lot more sense. And so on, all the way to Domain, which I would use to substitute for Benefactor. (Who wouldn’t want to climb the Linnaeus ladder every year and eventually be a “Domain” member?) It was pure genius.

You can guess what happened. “Order” sounded vaguely religious. “Class” sounded elitist. And “Phylum” sounded like something you didn’t talk about in public. In short, the experiment failed because no one was inspired to give more so they could be a member of a level whose name was meaningless.

I’ve seen other organizations use names of local mountains or state endangered species – one woman in Florida gave $499 because she wanted to be a Manatee and not a panther – but most organizations use some variation of Individual, Family, Benefactor, Patron, and so on.

Since then, I’ve gotten a lot smarter. I’ve come to realize that a) the names are not branded sufficiently to carry any real marketing value, and b) by naming all of them we are weakening the marketing value of any of them. In short, we shouldn’t be turning philanthropic into transactional. We should resist leaning into the notion that to give more, you need to get more in return. In other words, it’s not the trinkets that drive increasing giving.

If the names are not working, if they are not inspiring people to give more by themselves, if they carry no marketing value – I suggest that we stop using them. Just like I stopped using the Linnaeus series.

We can still keep all the levels; just don’t name any of them.

On the other hand, when none of the levels are named, and we create a name for just one of them, it stands out in a much bigger way. And if there’s something evocative, or cute, or socially attractive about the name, that by itself might inspire people to increase their giving to that level.

For example: Everyday Stewards ($365), Bluffland Guardians ($1,000), or the Grand Peninsula Society ($10,000).

And then if we build up the branding around the level by:

• Assigning a “host” for the group, so that invitations to “join us” come from a specific person who is leading the way, instead of invitations to just “give more” coming from the organization.
• Providing social “proof” for the concept by including a list of all current members in the solicitation and renewal letters. These lists are not published. But they are shared with current donors and prospective donors to support the request to join or renew.
• Hosting a special event each year (such as a dinner, a breakfast hike, an opening of a preserve that is normally closed, and so on) to which only current level donors are invited.

If we do all those things, well then, we might not miss having to explain what a Phylum is.

Cheers and Have a Good Week!

-da

PS: Your comments on these posts are welcomed and warmly requested. If you have not posted a comment before, or if you are using a new email address, please know that there may be a delay in seeing your posted comment. That’s my SPAM defense at work. I approve all comments as soon as I am able during the day.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay