The Recognition Issue

Donor walls. Naming opportunities. Annual report listings.

Talk to most any development professional about donor recognition and these are the things that will likely come up. Traditionally thought of as a “best practice must do” item to be completed at the end of a campaign, thinking and conversations about donor recognition have tended to reside solely in the realm of the tactical.

But many leading fundraisers are arguing that’s not enough anymore, saying that donor recognition is no longer (if it ever should have been) about checking off a box on a checklist. Arguing that this approach, with its sense of finality, misses the opportunities that recognition offers to charities for developing deep and long lasting relationships with donors.

Rather, they say that we should be adopting a long term, ongoing mindset when it comes to recognition, using it as one of a number of tools to build better relationships with our donors and bring them closer to us. And so, there is a sense that the time is right to reimagine and redefine recognition, acknowledging that limiting the discussion to tactics takes too narrow a view in Canada’s ever evolving and maturing philanthropic landscape.