Success Story - the large ask

Exciting things are happening around staff supportraising work -- and the Supportraising Learning Module folks are leading the way. Every week I receive calls from the leaders of the peer accountability groups and I have been hearing reports like this:

"Chrissy made 25 phone dials, had12 actual conversations, got 1 new monthly and 1 new quarterly!"
and
"Laura had a dessert with 18 people there!"
and
"Bekah had 4 phone conversations and two face to face meetings!"
and
"Sean met with 12 people during his two supportraising trips!"
and
"Maxine got two new supporters!"

This is exciting stuff! Keep at it! We are setting a tone for the entire organization as we continue to set and pursue our goals with the help of our accountability partners.

I know we are focusing on our learning module class, but I thought this story would be worth sharing. At the end of September Patrick Emery, 2nd year CCO staff person at Geneva, wondered if it was time to ask a particular supporter for an increase. He got some feedback from the SR Training team and his AD and decided to go for a big ask of $5,000 for this year.

How did he go about making such an ask?

Patrick wrote, "I spent some time working on a script, called him up (to find out he was eating lunch in Las Vegas), and asked him to increase his gift to $5,000 annually. He could probably tell I was reading from a script, but it would have definitely been a disaster if I hadn't written it out. I was very disarmingly honest, and it felt really good to say some of what I was thinking to him. He said he would talk about it with his wife and I'm calling him this week to get his answer.
Of course, I hope he says yes. But even if he doesn't, it was still really good to make a huge ask like that. That's definitely more than I've ever done before.
I'll let y'all know how it turns out.."

I was going to finish the story right now, but on second thought why don't you check back in on Tuesday and find out what happened.