From Acquisition to Abundance: what gardening can teach us about cultivation

If you’re anything like me, you know the promise of getting back into the garden can help you weather any winter. You know that adding new seeds to your garden each year can help every plant you tend to thrive. And you know the steps you take today to ensure your garden’s success will serve you well come harvest-time.

That’s cultivation, baby, and it’s top of mind for many of us fundraisers in the spring.

Indulge me here while I share a little about my garden: if you spend enough time with me, you’ll know it’s one of my great joys. My sanctuary. My learning lab. It begins each winter around January, once I’m through the year-end push of holidays, fundraisers, and events. I carefully comb through the Seed Savers Exchange catalog, searching for my tried-and-true favorites, the varieties I’ve come to depend on, plus a few new treasures I think will add to the whole and create the conditions for the others’ success. I put my intentions out there, place my order, and then I wait. And I wonder,

• Will they like it there?
• Will they disrupt the balance?
• Will they help the garden thrive?

There’s a lot I don’t know about these new members of my little plant community, but there are steps I can take to answer those questions. It’s a process called cultivation. And here’s how it shows up in the fundraising year:

Here at GiveMN, we believe good fundraising is all about relationships. And in any relationship, we have to get to know one another to see if we’re a fit. We exchange information and values. We come to understand what’s at the heart of our connection and shared aspirations.

We use a tool called the Donor Cycle to help our partners see the different phases of a donor’s experience with an organization.

• The cycle starts with Acquisition, which is when and how supporters show up on your radar, whether they sign up for your newsletter, visit your space, or attend a performance.
• Once they’re there, you get to know them, and help them get to know you, too. That’s Cultivation.
• Cultivation can be meeting for coffee to have a conversation, inviting this person to a special event, sharing a copy of your annual report or newsletter. It also might mean getting curious and asking lots of questions, whether one-to-one or in a larger group.

Why do we cultivate relationships, in a world where everyone is inundated with information, and we know we’re working toward a monetary transaction anyway? Well, because:

• It helps us build authentic, transparent relationships with members of our community who share our passion for our shared work.
• It helps us test our assumptions and build understanding.
• It helps us to get clarity, and get consent to proceed through the donor cycle.
• It gives us a chance to answer questions, so that when it comes time to ask for support (that’s Solicitation, by the way), everyone knows what to expect, and we don’t have to work so hard to explain ourselves and case.

In a human-first organization like ours, it’s also the right thing to do by and for one another. We’re people before employees. Neighbors before numbers. Empathy in action.

When should we be practicing cultivation? Well, the Donor Cycle and annual fundraising calendar give us a pretty good idea:

• The Donor Cycle shows us that Cultivation comes after Acquisition, and before Solicitation. So, Cultivation should happen after our organization “meets” someone, but before we ask them to make a donation.
• A lot of organizations may be doing Acquisition campaigns and activities right now. That means May and June are ripe for cultivation activities, especially getting to know your people face to face (learn about and purchase our two Learn-Alongs this year on planning your yearly fundraising efforts and strategies for acquisition). Late spring is also a great time to dig into your data, review what you do and don’t know about your donors, and make a plan to invite their support later in the year.

Isn’t it interesting that May and June are also a great time to get planting here in Minnesota?

We talk often at GiveMN about the Why behind what we do, and how. That’s where I’ll leave it for now—we cultivate relationships for the purpose of sustaining our work and our missions. Because when we care for a garden, it sustains us in return. And when we care for our communities, the reciprocity and abundance we create knows no bounds.

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Jenna Ray is GiveMN's deputy executive director for community impact.