Relationship Management
Relationship management is a corporate philosophy (way of thinking) that should serve as the basis for the organization’s strategies (way of doing business). It is not a one‐off initiative or a strategy unto itself.
Relationship management means getting to know your customers whether those are partners, potential partners, companies, donors or prospects or donors or individuals you’re trying to engage as advocates or volunteers.
More and more United Ways have adopted relationship management strategies, tools and tactics, but we need to apply them to more than donors. Putting relationships at the center of United Way’s work with constituents has the power to transform giving, advocating and volunteering from a transactional process to one rooted in the needs and interests of real people. Relationship management is a way of doing business that tailors opportunities to give, advocate, volunteer and partner to the interests of individuals and organizations in order to forge lasting relationships. It offers tools and principles that strengthen constituents’ experience on early grade reading issues, but it entails an organization-wide transformation.
Learn more here about United Way Worldwide’s tool to develop, implement and maintain relationships with individuals and institutions. This is not a marketing, IT or resource development task; everyone at United Way should be thinking about how to get closer to our constituents.
But don’t stop there. Draw on relationship management principles by building a plan with a cross-functional team to link investments to early grade reading strategies and produce higher value for those who give.
Selling the Work
Like any other new, cross-functional work, this requires deliberate, ongoing efforts to bring together individuals from different departments as well as supporting processes and technology. It also requires an ongoing effort to learn more about our constituents to make interactions with them more targeted, personalized and relevant. Get to know whether early grade reading and other impact priorities interest various constituents. Learn and note the types of giving, advocating and volunteering experiences that they find meaningful. Engage them with opportunities that tailor to these interests and help them to get the most from the United Way brand experience. This will help you to generate long-term and deeper relationships with constituents.
Plan and implement an investment strategy that links to community impact goals. If you can effectively communicate your community work you will see growth. United Ways will attract new resources if they can frame their community impact strategies as a suite of products and have them readily available to link to donor interests and aspirations. Some of our key donors are companies and individuals we access through the Workforce Campaign, high net worth individuals (especially our Million Dollar Roundtable members and Tocqueville Society members) and institutions and foundations.
A key first step is to call together a cross-functional team to develop a strategic investment plan that links to early grade reading strategies. Community impact and education teams can work with resource development to identify current or potential early grade reading initiatives that investors are willing to support. Resource development and marketing can work with the community impact and education teams to understand and communicate the importance of these initiatives better to constituents. Draw on the insight of all teams to strengthen the investment strategy and develop a positioning statement that highlights it for success. Build in ways to communicate the results of these early grade learning initiatives back out to investors and community members.
Investing in Relationships: One Individual at a Time: This tool can help you build relationships with individuals.
