A Complete Walkthrough of a Sample Donor Stewardship Matrix

Author: Patrick Schmitt, Co-CEO of FreeWill

The start of a new year is an ideal time for nonprofits to tackle two valuable tasks that will pay dividends down the line: evaluating outreach processes and bolstering relationships with donors, especially those who gave during the year-end season.

For many organizations, there’s a lot of overlap here, as effective donor stewardship hinges on effective communication. 

When not backed by the right outreach practices, your efforts to strengthen donor relationships can quickly become disorganized and less effective. 

After all, so many factors are in play—types of outreach, the purposes of your messages, their cadences—not to mention the work of tailoring your outreach to different audiences. Add in specific fundraising initiatives you want to support, like securing more DAF gifts, finding more legacy gifts, or starting an endowment, and you’ve got a complicated job! It’s no wonder many nonprofit teams eventually fall back into one-size-fits-all messaging.

How do you mitigate all this complexity and build a sustainable stewardship outreach strategy that’s both easy to maintain and improve upon? We recommend creating a stewardship matrix for your team to follow over the coming year.

What is a stewardship matrix?

A stewardship matrix is a resource that compiles and visualizes your strategy for stewardship outreach. By clearly defining the types of messages you’ll send, when, and to whom, a matrix becomes an invaluable tool for keeping your stewardship strategy organized, effective, and easy to sustain. 

Here’s an example stewardship matrix from FreeWill’s guide to creating a stewardship plan:

This stewardship matrix includes a few essential elements:

• Outreach purpose. Types of outreach are grouped by their purpose, including acknowledgment, recognition, reporting, and ongoing engagement.
• Type. The matrix includes general message types an organization might send, like thank-you letters, invites, impact updates, and more.
• Timeline. This column defines when each type of outreach should occur—either a set amount of time after a donor takes a specific action (like donating) or in a standard annual/biannual/quarterly cadence.
• One-time/recurring. This column helps nonprofits designate whether each outreach type should occur once or on a recurring basis.
• Donor segments. Here, each outreach type is either checked off or left blank for four example donor segments (new, loyal, monthly, major, and planned gift donors). 

When completed, a stewardship matrix gives you an easy-to-reference playbook for communicating with strategically important segments and quickly determining when specific outreach actions should occur for individual donors. As a source of truth for your fundraising and marketing teams, this resource takes the guesswork out of what to say and when.

How do you create a stewardship matrix?

To develop a stewardship matrix for your organization, follow these steps as you fill in your own chart:

1. Identify strategic priorities you want to support with stewardship. While thanking donors and encouraging general engagement should be the primary objectives of your stewardship strategy, you can also use targeted messaging to promote new events, programs, or fundraising methods. Define these priorities in advance, since they’ll help shape the following steps.
2. Define your donor segments. In the example above, the donor segments include new donors, loyal or retained donors, recurring, legacy and major donors. Exactly how you define these donors may vary for your organization, but these go-to segments will help cover your bases. The example also includes planned gift donors as a strategic priority. Donors you identify as strong prospects for recurring giving, planned giving, stock donations, crypto gifts, and more could make for valuable segments for targeted outreach.
3. Define the purposes of your stewardship outreach. Acknowledging gifts, recognizing donor contributions, sharing updates, and fostering general engagement are all standard purposes that will keep your stewardship efforts focused on strengthening relationships.
4. Define the types of stewardship messages you’ll send. These may vary widely depending on the intended scope of your stewardship strategy and what you want to accomplish. Choose types of outreach that will be easy for you to execute and drive value (i.e., will be actively appreciated by donors). Don’t overextend yourself and create an unnecessarily busy outreach calendar at first—as you learn more about what kinds of messages best resonate with different segments, you can add, remove, and adjust your messages over time.
5. Consider the logistics and timing of your messages. Next, fill in your matrix’s “timeline” and “one-time/recurring” columns. When will messages be sent, and how frequently? Will they be triggered by specific actions? Decide on the cadences that will create the most effective donor journeys, then ensure that you have the appropriate internal tools, reminders, and schedules in place to stick to them.Also, take a look at your processes and see what can be done in an automated way, or does your message have to be created manually? 

6. Fill in your stewardship matrix for each segment. Consider each segment and the communication stream you want to establish for them. Check off the types of stewardship messages that will make up that journey, and you’ve got an easy-to-repeat outreach plan for the coming year!

How should you use your stewardship plan?

To make the most of your nonprofit’s new stewardship matrix, here are a handful of best practices to keep in mind:

1. Immediately begin using it as a roadmap.

To get traction and build momentum with your improved stewardship plan, begin using your matrix as soon as possible. There are several first steps you can take:

• Draft templates of outreach messages for evergreen occasions, like a welcome letter for first-time donors or invite packets for potential members of your legacy society.
• If you use a dedicated CRM that integrates with emailing tools, set up automated triggers to send appropriate materials when certain actions occur. For example, most modern platforms allow you to easily set up automatic donation thank-you and welcome emails.
• If you don’t need some materials yet, make a schedule for when you’ll draft them.

If sticking to a consistent stewardship plan has challenged your organization in the past, the key to succeeding with your matrix is to get started soon. It’s easier to stick with consistent, well-organized outreach when you can see your progress and results quickly.

2. Ensure your segmentation process works correctly.

As you put your stewardship matrix to work and begin sending outreach messages, take note of your segmentation process. Can you easily create mailing lists based on your segments? Are you satisfied with the criteria you’ve selected to create them?

Remember, nothing is set in stone—you can adjust your segmentation approach over time if you identify improvements or need to make corrections. 

Just be mindful not to change your segments too much in a short time span. One major benefit of using segments to organize your outreach is that it allows you to easily see the effectiveness of your messages with different groups and make correlations. However, adjusting your segments too quickly or frequently can muddle these insights.

3. Know when to deviate from your stewardship plan.

You may find that you need to deviate from the outreach schedule or send extra messages in addition to those listed in your matrix, and that’s fine! 

Understanding the common times when ad hoc outreach and stewardship efforts may be warranted will help your team better recognize them. For example, if there is an emergency situation, you may wish to do some wellness outreach.. Or if you receive a large gift from a donor or prospect, you should make sure that they are immediately thanked, potentially departing from the plan in the stewardship matrix. The letter may follow the thank you call or thank you email. 

You can also develop mini stewardship cadences for more specific instances. For example:

• Event follow-up. Create a quick process for thanking and recognizing event attendees, sending updates or additional messages, and then funneling them into your overarching stewardship plan to keep them engaged.
• Capital campaign gift recognition. Major campaigns bring their own distinct recognition practices, like involving key donors more deeply in the campaign or creating public displays of gratitude through digital or physical installations.
• Major, special or legacy gifts. When you receive a major gift, stewardship should be handled by a gift officer in a highly personalized way that will naturally veer away from the preset cadences of your matrix. The same goes for any donors who make especially meaningful or strategically significant contributions, like a large bequest commitment.
• Recurring campaigns and giving days. Any recurring fundraising efforts, like your annual campaign and Giving Tuesday, will also likely have their own stewardship steps. Follow them and then fold those donors into your larger matrix to keep them engaged over time.

4. Revisit your strategy as needed and at designated checkpoints.

As you roll out your stewardship plan, get feedback from your team and donors. Are there issues with any workflows? What is automated? What takes a manual process? What is outsourced/ What is done in-house? Are donors satisfied with the frequency of messages? Are they engaging with your messages? 

If any immediate issues require quick fixes, jump in to make them. For example, technical problems with your segmentation strategy or email tool should be resolved as soon as possible.

Over the long run, finding ways to record engagement with your outreach will be critical. Emails are fairly straightforward if your email tech integrates with your CRM. For one-on-one outreach, ensure that gift officers have clear-cut processes for recording their touchpoints and any notes.

At regular intervals, like quarterly or biannually, use all this information to review the effectiveness of your stewardship practices. Identify problem areas and develop solutions, whether that means improving workflows, using a new tool, refining your segmentation strategy, or replacing one message type with another.

Consistent stewardship doesn’t have to be an overly complicated task. Using a matrix, you can more easily organize all the moving pieces of an effective stewardship strategy and lay the groundwork for stronger relationships in the year ahead.

Patrick Schmitt, Co-CEO of FreeWill

Patrick Schmitt and co-CEO Jenny Xia founded FreeWill at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 2016. FreeWill’s charitable giving platform makes it easier for nonprofit fundraising teams to unlock transformational gifts, and to date has generated over $6.6 billion in new gift commitments for thousands of nonprofit organizations. Patrick hosts FreeWill’s popular webinar series, educating thousands of nonprofit fundraising professionals each month about planned and non-cash giving strategies.

Before FreeWill, Patrick was the Head of Innovation at Change.org, where he helped grow the organization to 100 million users in four years. Prior to that, he ran email marketing for President Obama and served as Campaign Director for MoveOn.org.