Be Our Guest: Jennifer Houlihan

Our latest guest is Jennifer Houlihan, who recently joined The Long Center for Performing Arts (TLC) in Austin, Texas. Jennifer has over twenty years of development and advancement services experience, including positions with the Alaska Repertory Theatre, Los Angeles Theatre Center, Good Samaritan Hospital, University of Southern California, Loyola Marymount University and as a management consultant to a long list of non-profits. Jennifer did her undergraduate work in speech communications at Northwestern University, her Masters in Psychology at Pepperdine University and is a professionally trained coach via The Coaches Training Institute. She has also given numerous presentations at every sort of fundraising conference you can imagine!

Thank you Jennifer for taking part - enjoy her answers and provide your thoughts on her comments and her question for the group.

What is the biggest challenge your fundraising efforts currently face?

Our organization has only been open for two years, so our biggest opportunity is filling the pipeline. Our facility opened on time and under budget with both an endowment and an operating reserve, and is debt-free, so we have a great management story to tell in addition to our creative one…and we have some very loyal and generous founders. But Austin is a young city without a significant history of philanthropy, and a lot of global tech companies that aren’t necessarily interested in the local exposure that we can offer as donor benefits. So we have a lot of outreach and education ahead of us. We also need to be careful to respect the boundaries of the ballet, opera and symphony – our founding resident companies, and each a very worthy non-profit in its own right.

What are you doing to overcome these challenges?

We are working closely with our marketing and ticketing offices so that we are almost in lockstep as we convert single-ticket buyers to subscribers to members and donors. Having a small team is a great advantage at the moment, as it allows us to be nimble and seize opportunities without having to run it through a bureaucracy. We have a very active and powerful young professionals group, Catalyst 8, that offers leadership development and networking opportunities as tools to raise funds for the organization, and we know that will be our city’s next generation of leaders, so we take very good care of them in terms of staff support. And we are partnering with a local nonprofit, ilivehereigivehere.org, that is committed to raising the profile of philanthropy in our community. Finally, we are developing our first strategic plan for the long-term sustainability of The Long Center and have engaged our resident companies as full partners in the process.

What is the most successful change/program implementation you have made in your current role?

Some were pretty basic, but had an impact – switching annual memberships to a rolling renewal system, so that we are renewing a manageable pool of donors every month and can give them more personalized attention than renewing them all at once. Cutting our weekly staff meeting to an hour. (More Donors Comment: Woo-hoo! Well done!) Adding pitches for membership to curtain speeches and subscription brochures. Showing up at staff and board meetings that development never attended before. And killing the separate donor category for people who gave $1.

But my favorite is a pre-renewal piece we just e-mailed, called TLC (also the initials for The Long Center). We asked our members to send us notes of support that we could pass on to two of our main constituent groups – under-served children and families, who get free tickets through our Long Reach for the Arts program, and the new and emerging artists who use the Rollins Theatre, our black-box space, and get subsidized rent through the Catalyst 8 BOOST program. Some of the notes that have come in are beyond heartwarming. I can’t wait to compile them and make them available to the kids and to the performers and watch their faces as they read the words of encouragement from total strangers. And I can’t wait to see how it affects the response rate to our last big renewal piece, which drops in two weeks.

Where do you see social-media’s best application for fundraising?

Relationship building, though everything from ticket giveaways for the most re-tweets of a message, to communicating news about the organization – like the recent story about the Long Center on CNN (embedded below) The better the relationship, the easier to get an appointment to cultivate, solicit, or steward.

What book / blog / twitter feed would you suggest fundraisers pay attention to?

I’m a big fan of The Likeability Factor and Love is the Killer App by Tim Sanders, which focus on the benefits realized – personally and professionally – by having a civilized, humane and positive workplace. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m also a Tom Peters junkie, and that I adore Gaping Void and Seth Godin. And of course, the MoreDonors site, FB page and Twitter feed. (More Donors comment: Thanks Jennifer!)

What question would you find most useful for readers to answer?

In the face of worthy competing demands, what would inspire you to make a gift to a performing arts center?

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