Lynne Wester

Understand how to better steward your biggest and most important gifts to encourage future giving. Learn a process for developing creative and customized stewardship plans for your highest-level donors. Lynne will discuss how you can learn unique information about your donors and use it to form a stewardship plan that creates meaningful moments and encourages subsequent gifts. She will lead you through:

• Implementing strategic and customized donor relations
• Developing opportunities around eight areas of engagement
• Using a template to create a customized stewardship plan

The concept behind speed dating is to meet as many people as possible as quickly as possible—and 99% of them you’ll never see again. Actually, that’s not too far off from the statistic that 80% of donors never make a second gift.  So what can you do to develop a successful donor relations program, what works and what doesn’t, and how can you improve your retention rate?  Learn how to form a lasting relationship with your donors.

Lynne Wester is a frequent conference speaker and well known resource for donor relations and fundraising expertise. She has been featured in The Washington Post, CURRENTS magazine, The Chronicle of Philanthropy and other industry publications. Wester also created the website and blog www.donorrelationsguru.com where she shares her expertise, opinions, and collections of samples on a variety of topics as well as hosts a monthly webinar series. It is her personal philosophy that the goal of any great fundraising operation is to use strategic communications and interactions to foster the relationship between the organization and its constituents and friends. Using her expertise and hands on approach, she works with many organizations to help them keep their focus donor driven, technologically savvy, strategic, and always with a splash of good humor. She received her undergraduate degrees from the University of South Carolina and is a loyal Gamecock alumna, donor, and fan.