Road-Ready: How to Travel Like a Pro Fundraiser

Andrew and Rhen are back with another practical, how-to episode — and this time, they're hitting the road. That's right, fundraisers travel. A lot. And since most of that travel revolves around meeting donors face-to-face, knowing how to plan well can make the difference between a productive trip and a exhausting one.

In this episode, Andrew and Rhen share their recommendations for planning strategic, efficient work travel in your role as a fundraiser. How do you decide who to meet and when? How many meetings can you realistically fit into a day? And which meetings are worth prioritizing when you're on the road? They cover all of that, and they also discuss the value of spontaneity and flexibility when cancellations happen and gaps appear in your schedule.

Whether you're an experienced road warrior or just starting to build your travel rhythm, this episode includes with best practices to help you make the most of every trip.

Is there something you wish Andrew and Rhen had covered? Send an email to [email protected] and let them know — they'd love to address it in a future episode.

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

01:31.42 Host Well, howdy, everybody. Welcome back to the Petrus Development Show. I am Rhen Hoehn with Petrus, and joining me today is Andrew Robison. How's it going, Andrew?

01:40.50 AROB Hey, Rhen, it's going great.

01:42.62 Host Excellent. Good. You've been on the road quite a bit this spring, maybe compared to recent years.

01:49.72 AROB Yeah, we've got a lot more capital campaigns that Petrus is doing, so I'm doing meetings with prospective ministries. If we're doing feasibility studies, I've been on the road doing interviews and setting those up. And I've got a great team of consultants that manage most of the capital campaigns, but certainly I'm traveling to some extent to be there. And then I was in Phoenix for the Theology of Gift conference, and we've got our own Raise One-Day Workshops this year. We've got a couple coming up in Texas in February, then I think Midwest in March, then East Coast in April, and then California in June. So yeah, just kind of getting back and exercising some of those travel muscles that maybe had gone a little bit dormant post-COVID.

03:00.73 Host When you were fundraising as a Director of Development and such, did you do a lot of travel for donor meetings in those days?

03:08.66 AROB Oh, yeah. So when I was in College Station, either at St. Mary's or at the A&M Foundation, a lot of our alumni and parents that I would be meeting with don't live locally.

03:21.18 AROB Some do, but most of them would live in Houston, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio, some out in West Texas, some in South Texas. So I was on the road a lot. In fact, when I was at the medical school, part of my evaluation was whether I was out of the office 40% of the time, which basically equates to two days a week I was in one of those cities meeting with donors. So yeah, quite a bit of travel when I was fundraising for any of those groups.

03:40.87 Host Oh, interesting.

03:53.24 Host Excellent. Well, that's what we want to talk about today — doing that travel. Now, depending on your nonprofit, you might have lots and lots of donors locally, or you might not. You might need to get out and go to some other cities to meet donors, or you might just have some pockets of donors in other places and need to go visit them, and kind of need to figure out what the logistics are of making that happen. I know myself, working at the Campus Ministry of Michigan Tech, we're in the Western UP. Almost all of our alumni and donors are from the Detroit area, which is the same state, but a nine- or ten-hour drive away.

04:27.64 Host And weather was never good enough to rely on the planes here, so I usually ended up having to drive. But lots of travel to meet them, and yeah, it's a whole process in and of itself to plan that out and make it happen.

04:42.10 AROB Yeah, it is. But when you do it and you get good at it, you can learn a lot of ways to make it more efficient.

04:54.55 AROB A lot of it just comes with experience, either having those lessons learned the hard way, or hopefully we can give a couple of bits of advice here to help people that are either experienced travelers looking for ways to maybe get a little bit more efficient, or that are new to work travel and looking for strategies for how to do it well.

05:19.61 Host Yeah. All right. So let's start maybe from the beginning. You know that you need to get away from town, go travel, and meet some donors somewhere. How do you even decide where to go?

05:32.02 Host You know, pick a city that might have some donors in it.

05:35.51 AROB Yeah, so as I mentioned, being in College Station, I had really kind of three major areas. If you group San Antonio and Austin together, and Fort Worth and Dallas together, then Houston was its own.

05:48.16 AROB So I had three major metropolitan areas. I would imagine with your experience in the UP, you had one primary place — Detroit.

05:59.64 AROB But then you also had folks in the Twin Cities and Minneapolis.

05:59.99 Host Yeah.

06:03.39 Host Yep.

06:03.40 AROB Maybe you had some in Chicago. So the first part is really just to look at where your donors are congregated in the heaviest places.

06:05.30 Host Yep.

06:15.58 Host Right.

06:15.77 AROB Then once you do that, I will always use an approach, a philosophy that I just always called "commit and fill." What I mean by that is I would go through my calendar usually about once a quarter — it wasn't as precise as this, but I'd try to get out ahead of it and stay ahead of it. I would look at my calendar and pick dates weeks in advance, up to three months in advance. And I would say, "OK, this week on Monday and Tuesday, I'm going to be in Houston." And then the following week — "All right, we've got somebody coming to campus on Monday, so I'm going to go Tuesday and Wednesday in Dallas."

06:58.90 AROB So no meetings yet — I'm just putting these on my calendar as travel dates. That's the "commit" part.

07:04.76 Host Right.

07:06.65 AROB Then as it gets closer and I'm making phone calls, sending emails, sending text messages, trying to get these meetings scheduled — that's when I might say, "OK, I've got meetings for Houston that week, but the following week I planned to be in Dallas. I don't have any meetings yet."

07:23.12 AROB And somebody from San Antonio that I was trying to call said they could meet that day — I'm going to switch it. So I'm going to switch those dates.

07:28.85 Host Right.

07:29.68 AROB But now that I've got a meeting in San Antonio in those weeks, I'm going to do everything I can to fill that time, fill that trip to make it the most effective use of that time.

07:40.60 AROB So that's the commit and fill. I commit to those days on my calendar and then I fill it with donor meetings.

07:47.35 Host Is there a process to how you fill it with donor meetings, if that makes sense? How many should you look for in a day? And then how do you prioritize who goes on there?

07:54.58 AROB Sure. So the first thing you want to do with a trip like this is lock in an anchor appointment. An anchor appointment is somebody who — for a lot of different reasons — qualifies as such.

08:12.96 AROB Maybe it's a high-level donor that you're ready to make a solicitation to. You get a meeting — boom, that's your anchor appointment. Maybe it's somebody that you've been trying to get in front of for a long time.

08:25.44 AROB They're very difficult to schedule, but lo and behold, they said they could meet next time I'm in Dallas. I get that date locked in — boom, they're my anchor appointment. Maybe you're traveling with your pastor.

08:37.62 AROB Maybe you're traveling with your dean or principal, and they have somebody that they want to meet with. That's an anchor appointment. The point is that anchor appointment is a high enough quality appointment that if everything else fell apart and I couldn't get another meeting scheduled,

08:56.70 AROB it's still worth a trip to go and see that person.

08:58.36 Host Yeah.

08:59.82 AROB So that's an anchor appointment. That's how you should really start your planning for any trip — get that anchor locked in.

09:06.97 Host Yeah, that was always my goal — get one anchor appointment for each day that I was in town. There are some anchor appointments that are worth going to by themselves.

09:11.67 AROB Yeah. Yeah.

09:15.49 Host Like you said. We had one donor in the D.C. area who was a very major donor, and we had basically no other donors out there. But we got to a point where we would send our priest out there once a year to keep up with this gentleman. We'd kind of combine it — if he was flying to a retreat somewhere, he'd make a stop basically on the way home in D.C. to make sure to visit that donor. There weren't too many like that, but sometimes they're out there.

09:42.74 Host Other times you're looking for an area that has a concentration of donors. I actually made a heat map of all the zip codes of everybody in my database who had donated and kind of saw where they were congregated, and started planning around those towns and getting ideally an anchor appointment for each day.

09:53.76 AROB Yeah.

09:59.42 Host And then — okay, I know what days I'm going to be there for sure. Now I can fill in my time as much as possible with other potential donors.

10:08.92 AROB Exactly. And that's the next step — you get your anchor appointment locked in. "All right, I'm having lunch with the Sullivans on Tuesday at this restaurant when I'm in Houston." All right, so now what I want to do is fill the time before lunch and after lunch. I'd love to get an evening — maybe a dinner, maybe meet somebody for a cocktail. The second part of it, after you get your anchor, is to fill it with more people that are on your prospect list or in your donor portfolio. But at a certain point, you should feel licensed to call literally anybody in your database that you haven't met with, or that you want to meet with, because you want to fill that day and fill those trips as much as possible.

11:02.62 AROB I usually — and this isn't a hard and fast rule — but five appointments in a day is a really full day. Appointments take travel time, right? If you're driving from this office to this restaurant to that office, five appointments is about your limit logistically. But then also just psychologically and emotionally.

11:09.92 Host Mm-hmm.

11:27.27 AROB Like, you just... my wife tells me all the time — when I was fundraising, she'd say, "You have such an easy job. You just go and talk to people about what they love."

11:37.88 AROB "It's so easy." And I'm like, "Okay, yeah, it is pretty easy." And then she would be there talking with a donor — maybe at an event or whatever.

11:48.64 AROB And it's like one person. Afterwards she leaves and she says, "Oh my god, I don't know how you do that — that is so exhausting!" So yes, you get used to it, and with the right temperament it doesn't drain you as much. But even for the most extroverted, enthusiastic person, at a certain point you just hit a limit of how many words you can say and how much your brain can process. So five was usually a good number, and it also kind of works out to meal times — you could get a breakfast, a coffee, a lunch, a late coffee, and then a dinner.

11:58.26 Host Yeah.

12:23.23 AROB And that's five. You can work people in all around that, but that's a pretty good rhythm.

12:28.31 Host Yeah, as a massive introvert, I always like to plan in about an hour in the middle of the day where I could go walk around a park or somewhere quiet and not talk to anybody, and kind of recharge for the second half of the day.

12:35.13 AROB Yeah, there you go.

12:39.03 AROB Yeah, smart.

12:40.02 Host Yeah, good. So about five — that was a full day. How far ahead of time would you start calling these donors to ask for meetings? Maybe we kind of skipped over that.

12:51.48 AROB Yeah, so generally — I don't want to say a cutoff date — but I would like to have an anchor appointment locked in usually three or four weeks ahead of a trip.

13:03.24 AROB Ideally further than that, if I'm organized enough. The reality is I usually wasn't organized enough to do that.

13:03.48 Host Yeah.

13:10.50 AROB But three or four weeks — I want to have an anchor appointment locked in. So then I know, "All right, now I can book my hotel. If I'm renting a car, I can rent a car. If I'm flying, I can book the trip." All of that.

13:20.70 AROB But that's kind of the goal for anchor appointments. And then for the rest of the appointments, ideally a week ahead of time I've got my schedule full. But the reality is there are a lot of trips where I go into it seven days out, I've got an anchor appointment and one more, and I'm like, "I've got to fill this." And so then I just start calling and dialing and emailing to try to fill it. And sometimes it's the day of — somebody finally responds and says, "Oh, are you still going to be here this afternoon? Because I can get coffee with you." "Oh yeah, absolutely."

13:55.53 AROB So you've got to be agile and flexible — you've got to be okay with that. But the ideal would be a couple of weeks ahead of time.

14:00.40 Host Yeah.

14:03.35 Host Yeah, I always found that when I was more than four weeks out, I would have a hard time getting people to commit. They would say, "Why don't you call me back in a couple of weeks and I'll have a better idea of my schedule."

14:09.24 AROB Yeah. Yeah.

14:12.79 Host But with anchor appointments especially, I would try to get them on there early. Or if I was going to have my pastor there with me — if I knew it was kind of a weightier meeting, like a second or third meeting where he's making the time to come — I'd try to get those scheduled earlier as well. And like you said, there's really no date that's too late to call. I would always have a list of people in the area that I didn't have a meeting set with, with me when I was on the trip. Because you would get somebody who would cancel at the last minute or whatever. I think I've told this story probably a bunch of times on the podcast. But I remember one couple — we had a cancellation the day of, so we had a free dinner slot in the Chicago area.

14:56.09 Host And so I just called down the list — "Hey, who wants to have dinner tonight?" This one couple accepted and said, "We'll take you out, come to this place." And they had been $100-a-year donors for a long time. At this dinner, we find out that they only lived in Chicago a few weeks of the year — they had a house there, but the rest of the year they lived overseas. And he oversaw the building of nuclear reactors for a foreign government. And we're like, "Yeah, we should probably ask them for more than $100 a year." And they became $10,000-a-year donors — all from a last-minute phone call the day of.

15:25.05 Host So you never know. Always be ready to call down that list when things change at the last minute, even the day of.

15:31.48 AROB Yeah. And a lot of times those last-minute calls don't have to be cold calls, right?

15:32.16 Host Yeah. Yeah.

15:36.57 AROB Over time you start building up people that you know well enough. There were many times that I might be in Dallas and it looks like a full schedule, but I've got an opening. And there's a couple — nothing is planned, they had a gift, maybe they're paying on their pledge, they're well stewarded — and it's like, "Hey, I'll reach out and say, I've got a free afternoon. Are you possibly available? Want to grab coffee?" And so those kinds of meetings

16:09.43 AROB just help build and reinforce that relationship without having to be really strategic about it. It's like, "No, I'm just here. Any chance you're free for breakfast?"

16:21.11 AROB "Yeah, actually, that'd be great." "Cool, where do you want to go? Let's meet up." So those casual calls and outreach can be just as effective as, like you said, having a list of cold calls to make at the time.

16:35.96 Host Love it. All right. So you've got your meetings set, you're scheduled out, you're packing up in your office and about to head out on this trip. What are the main considerations — things to pack, things to bring, and so on?

16:42.93 AROB Yeah.

16:46.65 AROB So you want to go through each of these trips and figure out what's your purpose, what's your desired outcome, and what do you need to make that happen?

16:56.75 AROB Then make sure that you have everything you need for each individual meeting. So, you know, if your organization does a newsletter, I pretty much put a newsletter in the hands of every single person I'm meeting, just because — "Hey, I don't know if you got my recent newsletter. Some great pictures in there."

17:11.17 Host Hmm.

17:14.60 AROB "Oh yeah, cool. Great." So that's kind of an easy one. And if you have new swag that you want to hand out, maybe grab a handful of pens, maybe a couple of mugs.

17:25.96 AROB So go through each meeting and say, "What do I need for this one?" For some of them, it's going to be a solicitation packet or a proposal. For some of them, it's going to be pictures of the building that they helped fund,

17:42.01 AROB and you're going to show them updated pictures on your laptop that you took.

17:46.32 Host Okay.

17:46.65 AROB So from the trip planning standpoint, you want to make sure you've got all the important things sorted. Where are you going to sleep? Get a hotel if you're staying overnight — or an Airbnb or someplace to stay. How are you getting there? Are you driving? Do you need to rent a car? Are you taking your own car? Does the organization have a gas card you're supposed to use? That kind of stuff. Do you need to book a flight? And then meal-wise — if you have dietary issues, you're strategizing around, "All right, where am I going to get food that I know is gluten-free and is on the way?" Whatever that looks like. So you just look at the whole trip at a high level, then go granular through each meeting and say, "What do I need for each of these?"

18:43.68 Host Yeah, I always found it useful — I would put my meetings in my Google Calendar. You've got the location, the time,

18:51.01 AROB Hmm, yeah.

18:51.81 Host and I can just tap on it, click navigate, and there we go. But I always thought it was also necessary to type up all of those details and have them on a sheet with me just in case. You lose your phone or you lose reception,

19:03.02 AROB Yeah.

19:03.30 Host you can still find your way around. And I always like to bring a little bit of cash with me. I think I've talked about it a couple of times — even in places I wouldn't expect. I was in Milwaukee once and the restaurant didn't take cards, only cash.

19:18.74 Host And it's pretty awkward sitting there thinking, "I hope the donor offers to pay because I'm in trouble right now."

19:20.89 AROB Yeah, really.

19:27.89 Host So it's always good to have a little bit of cash just in case for things like that.

19:31.76 AROB Yeah, I agree. I used to print out maps. I don't print out maps anymore when I travel — I use my phone for navigation. But even though I don't print maps, I always go through the progression of my trip on Google Maps beforehand.

19:49.42 Host Yeah.

19:49.64 AROB So I know, "All right, from this person to this person, this meeting to this meeting — it says it's a 15-minute drive at that time, so I need to make sure I leave enough time and get out of my first meeting so I'm there on time." So even though I might not print anything out — now, if you're going to a pretty rural or remote place, you either need to open up those routes on your phone so it downloads them in case you don't have service, or you need to print them out.

20:20.15 AROB But definitely planning out your travel ahead of time is key.

20:29.21 Host Good. Anything else to consider when you're in the city visiting donors? It kind of comes down to getting your notes recorded. Because this is usually a case where you're batching a dozen, two dozen —

20:49.21 Host well, maybe 10 or 15 meetings in the course of a week, right? In rapid succession.

20:52.80 AROB Yeah.

20:54.61 Host Just get those notes recorded right away after each meeting, or at the very least when you get back to the hotel that night — because they're all going to become a blur in your head by the time you're back in your office.

21:04.15 AROB Yeah, totally. I usually find that if I'm going overnight and traveling somewhere, the evenings — once I finish work, whether it's with clients or donors or whatever, and I get back to the hotel and get some food — I can usually be pretty productive during that evening time at the hotel, because you know, I'm not at home having to put the kids to bed and things like that.

21:29.91 AROB But I typically need to make a list of things I'm going to do in that time, so that when I get there I don't just think, "I'd love to sit on the bed and watch Netflix for the next four hours and then fall asleep."

21:47.68 AROB If I made a short list of things I wanted to get done — whether that's recording donor visit notes, meeting notes,

21:50.39 Host Mm-hmm.

21:55.56 AROB or, you know, I have a newsletter due next week and I want to use this time to edit the copy — planning out that evening time makes it more effective.

22:09.31 AROB Otherwise, if you don't have a plan and you think, "I'll just come up with something," your willpower can lose out to a nice comfy hotel bed and everything TV has to offer pretty quickly. The other note on that as well is that it's really easy — well, maybe for me when I was at the medical school, going somewhere two days a week — that becomes your routine. Every week I'm going somewhere. In fact, Houston was where most of my people were, so I'd go to Houston probably twice a month.

22:51.70 AROB And then I had a good amount of people in Dallas, though not as many.

22:55.44 AROB So I'd go to Dallas once a month. I'd go to Austin once a month, and every other month I'd kind of rotate into San Antonio or Brownsville or something like that. But going back to the same places pretty regularly, just because there are a lot of people there.

23:11.64 AROB When that becomes part of your routine, it's really easy to let other things you really want to do fall apart or not get done. Some specific examples — if you're at a point in your life where working out is something you really want to stay focused on, if you don't plan it into these trips, you will not do it.

23:33.78 AROB Same with eating healthy — if you don't plan out where you're going to get healthy food, you won't eat healthy food. That's just the reality when you're traveling. You tend to devolve to whatever is least inconvenient at that moment. Personal goals, professional goals — they can fall apart pretty easily if you get into the habit of traveling a lot. You have to be intentional about that stuff as well.

23:33.98 Host Yeah.

23:51.49 Host Yeah.

24:01.91 Host Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Good. I feel like that hits all the high points, though there are probably some other details we could work in. Anything else you would add?

24:15.45 AROB I think we hit them all — at least the high points. You can certainly get really detailed on specifics, like what's the best way to rent a car, or if you do end up traveling a lot, make sure you've got your loyalty programs set up for your rental cars, your hotel chain, all of that. Because it's a grind when you're traveling a lot, and if you're going to be putting in that work, you might as well earn some perks along the way. And if you're a manager who has somebody on your team that you want on the road a lot, be mindful that it can get really exhausting. Allow them to earn perks along the way — bonus hotel nights, credit card points, things like that. And also give them permission to say, "I know you're traveling, and I know you've got this marathon coming up in two months. I want you to know that I expect you to make time to get your training runs in."

25:25.50 AROB You're on the road and you're doing this work, but I want to make sure you're still mindful of what's important to you. Those little gestures, I think, go a long way.

25:38.03 Host Excellent. So if you look way back in the Petrus Development Show archives — I'm going off the top of my head here — I believe it was Patrick Williams, episode 77, that we had on.

25:49.86 AROB Oh, Patrick Williams.

25:50.52 Host And he did kind of a master class on planning out donor meetings, especially when traveling.

25:50.81 AROB That's great.

25:56.98 Host So if you want some more tips there, you can look back at that episode.

26:02.75 AROB What episode number was it?

26:03.05 Host I can't be certain — 77, if my computer is correct, which you never know.

26:05.83 AROB Great.

26:12.06 Host But that was from several years ago. I think he was at Texas A&M, and I remember that being a good episode on planning out donor meetings. So yeah.

26:21.62 AROB Yeah, Patrick's great. I remember that — great conversation, good tips, good advice.

26:28.70 Host Excellent. Well, the key with all of this is to make the phone calls, get out there, meet the donors, and just see what happens, right?

26:35.86 AROB 100%. Absolutely. Good things happen when you go see your donors wherever they are.

26:40.92 Host Love it. Great. Well, that's what we wanted to cover today, and we'll pick it back up in a couple of weeks. All right.

26:47.38 AROB All right. Thanks, Rhen.

26:48.41 Host Have a great day, Andrew.

26:49.89 AROB You too.