The Porch Is the Office

It is the second Tuesday in June, and the development office has gone quiet.

The spring gala is behind you. The fall ask is twelve weeks out. The director has, with a clear conscience, gone to four o'clock yoga; the major-gifts officer has scheduled three lunches for September and is beginning, by the small fluorescent light of her desk, to call this a slow season.

Meanwhile, on a small white porch in Stonington, Connecticut, the donor who is going to write a seven-figure check the second week of October is pouring iced tea for her sister Margaret, who has driven up from Bethesda for ten days. The fan is on. The dog is in the patch of sun by the steps. There is a half-finished crossword on the wicker table and a small Post-it next to it that says, in Catherine's handwriting, call Helen about literacy.

Catherine is at her desk. You just don't know it.

What the sector has agreed to call slow

The development calendar treats June through August the way a school treats July — empty, ornamental, a time to clean out the supply closet and update the gala website. The annual appeal is behind you. The year-end push is on the horizon. The middle is, by polite consensus, a holding pen.

This is the most expensive misreading of a calendar in your fiscal year.

What is actually happening in those twelve weeks is that your donors — finally, for the first time since November — are home. Not in the airport. Not in the conference center. Not in the back of a town car between Tuesday and Wednesday. They are sitting on porches in towns named after early-twentieth-century industrialists, with people they love, with a slow and unstructured afternoon in front of them.

This is the only time of the year they are, in any meaningful sense, available to think.

Where the gift is actually decided

The seven-figure October check is not decided in October. It is not decided in September, on the day you finally get the meeting on the calendar. It is not decided in the small handsome conference room above the donor's husband's law firm.

It is decided on a porch.

It is decided in the soft second half of a Sunday in July, when Catherine refills Margaret's tea and says, we should talk about what we're going to do with mom's money this year, and Margaret looks at the fan and says, I've been thinking about that too. It is decided at 7:48 on a Thursday evening in the back garden, where Catherine and her oldest friend Eleanor are watching a hummingbird at the feeder and Eleanor, who has known Catherine since the Wellesley class of 1971, says quietly, do it. You'll be glad.

You are not in either of these rooms. The CRM is not in either of these rooms. The case statement is not in either of these rooms.

What is in those rooms is the donor, the people she loves, and a small accumulating residue of every careful thing your organization has done in front of her over the last eighteen months. The summer is when the residue becomes a decision.

What summer is, structurally

If fall is the season of asks and winter is the season of gifts, then summer is the season of composition. It is the season in which donors quietly write the next chapter of their philanthropic life, in pencil, on the back of a porch napkin, with a sister or a husband or an old friend sitting across the table.

The asks happen in autumn. The composing happens in June.

A development office that goes dark in the summer is, in effect, choosing not to be in the room while its donors are doing the most consequential work of their giving year. It is shutting the door on the only twelve weeks of the calendar in which the donor's brain has the slack to consider it in the first place.

Then the office reopens in September, brisk and cheerful, and is genuinely surprised when Catherine — who has been thinking warmly about the literacy program in seventeen separate slow moments since Memorial Day — says, kindly, I've already committed for the year, but next time.

You weren't on the porch. Eleanor was. Margaret was. You were at yoga.

What "being there" actually looks like in July

Being there in the summer is not louder fundraising. It is softer fundraising, executed with patience, on her schedule, with no quarterly target in mind.

It looks like a handwritten note — not a card, a note, on the cream paper your executive director keeps in the bottom drawer — that arrives on Catherine's porch on a Thursday in late June with three sentences in it. Catherine — I drove past Stonington last weekend and thought of you. I hope the summer is gentle. Tell Margaret hello if she's up. That is the whole note. No ask. No newsletter. No PDF.

It looks like a phone call, in mid-July, from the executive director, who has remembered that Catherine's granddaughter is starting her sophomore year and asks how she is. Not a check-in. A call.

It looks like not sending the August newsletter. The donor on the porch does not need a newsletter. The donor on the porch needs a small handwritten signal that you are real, and warm, and paying attention, and not on a content calendar.

The summer touches are quieter, fewer, and harder to count. They are also the only touches in your entire year that arrive while the donor is composing.

The cost of the dark months

There is a thing development directors say in October, with a small note of grief, that goes: I don't understand, we did everything right in the spring and the renewal didn't happen.

The renewal didn't happen because nobody was on the porch.

The donor who renews at a higher level is, almost always, a donor who heard from your organization in a small soft way at least once between June and August. Not a campaign. Not a stewardship report. One warm specific human touch from a person who remembered her by name. That is the touch that compounds into the gift. Its absence is the silent reason the renewal slips.

The summer touches do not show up on the dashboard. They show up in the following spring, when the gift is forty percent larger than the one the model predicted.

Where a tool quietly helps

Rōmy cannot be on the porch. The note has to be in your handwriting. The voicemail has to be in your voice. The text has to come from a phone that has, somewhere in its history, picked Catherine up at the train station once.

What a tool can do is end the part of June in which the touches don't happen because the occasion is missing.

You don't write to Catherine on the second Tuesday in June because there isn't, in your mind, an obvious reason to. Her last gift was in February. The next ask is in October. The middle is a featureless plateau, and your brain — overworked, halfway out the door to yoga — has nothing to hang a sentence on.

Point Rōmy at the name and the middle stops being featureless. Catherine summers in Stonington — her late husband bought the house in 1994. Her sister Margaret typically visits in mid-June. Catherine's granddaughter Eliza is entering her sophomore year at Bryn Mawr studying Spanish literature — the same college Catherine's mother briefly attended. Eleanor Whitman, Wellesley '71, lives two streets over.

Now you have four reasons to write a three-sentence note. One of them — the granddaughter, the Spanish, the small line back to the literacy program Catherine asked about over soup in 2019 — is the one that will land on her porch on Thursday, and that she will read twice, and that she will mention, on Sunday, when Margaret refills her tea.

The tool didn't make the gift. The tool made the summer touch possible — and the summer touch is what makes the October decision possible.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, take ten names off your list. Not the top twenty — the eleventh through the twentieth. The donors you almost certainly will not see again until the fall.

Find, for each one, one small specific true thing about their summer. Where they are. Who is visiting. What the granddaughter is studying.

Then write, in your own handwriting, on the cream paper in the bottom drawer, one three-sentence note per person. Ten different. Mail them on Friday so they land the following Tuesday, when the donor is, for the first time all year, sitting still.

Don't ask for anything. Don't attach anything. Don't sign it warmly. Sign it the way you would sign a note to a neighbor — because, as you may already have noticed, that's what she is.

Catherine is on the porch. Catherine is always on the porch in June. Pull up a chair, with love. ♡