HBH Consultants

Site visits by prospective donors can be stressful.  Here are 10 tips to make your next site visit successful.

1. Before the visit, ask the visitors if they have special areas of interest or questions they wish to be addressed.
2. Schedule the visit at your agency’s best time of day — a time when there are programmatic things happening that you know will interest the prospective donor.
3. Be sure to inform staff and volunteers that a prospective donor will be visiting.
4. Offer a tour at the beginning of the visit.  (Make sure that the facility is clean and neat.)
5. Involve a member of your board of directors in the site visit.  Also include staff, volunteers and those you serve in the site visit, as appropriate.  Brief each in advance.
6. Review your proposal carefully in advance of the visit and share a copy with others who will have significant roles in the visit.
7. Provide updated information.
8. Tell stories to make your case.
9. Be prepared for hard questions, but remember that it’s okay to get back to the visitors with answers quickly if you need to gather information.
10. Ask a few strategic questions of your own.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011 at 4:17 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.