“People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”

Google tells me Theodore Roosevelt gets the credit for this quote. He was right. This is true for our children, but it is also true for other people in our lives. In my context, this is true for employees, alumni, and donors. Meaningful relationships are built through intentional personalization.

In a culture and society that is obsessed with mass production, maximized efficiency, and all things related to “scale,” this is a counter-cultural concept.

How do you mass produce handwritten note cards? How do you efficiently spend 1 on 1 time with the masses? How do you scale a private conversation with depth, emotion, and trust?

Easy answer: You Don’t.

You take the time for individuals, you battle the hand cramps of writing notes, and you practice patience and active listening even while your emails stack up and meetings run long.

With our kids, it would be insane for me to treat each one the same expecting the same results. They have different motivations, interests, and desires so they need to be treated accordingly. Why do we think that changes when people enter the work force or join our team?

Employee Personalization

Check out this article on Employee Personalization from Segal, a Benefits and HR Consulting Company.

As a leader of a team, it is important to spend the time it takes to truly get to know your teammates. Doing this allows you to foresee potential issues and creative opportunities that will be meaningful to each individual and increase productivity, collaboration, and engagement. That is what we all want anyhow, right?

Alumni Personalization

Here are some ways we have worked to personalize the experience of our alumni while trying to provide a broad array of opportunities for involvement that fit many different lifestyles and contexts.

This element of personalization consists of listening to the ideas and needs of alumni and then working to implement those ideas and fill those needs. Several of the opportunities for involvement have come from this practice. While the listening aspect of the process is based on one-to-one interactions through in person conversations and email discussions, the opportunities for involvement can then be selected based on the desires of each alum.

Donor Personalization

This final aspect of personalization in my context is solely focused on building meaningful relationships. In our context at Evangel, we believe it is the Lord who brings the resource to the University. As Development Officers, it is simply our job to build authentic relationships with people who are interested in learning more about what God is doing on campus. As such, the Lord will lead us to what He wants to do through their generosity.

This means we must be intentional with building meaningful relationships. Knowing birth dates, favorite restaurants, family members, and generally what is happening in each individual’s life is as personalized as it gets. It sounds exactly like what it is, doing the things you would do to build a relationship with someone about whom you care.

The rationale behind why personalizing in these different contexts is important is both simple and yet deeply profound.

People are important, and they are worth our time and effort in getting to know them.

If the creator of the universe saw fit to spend time in getting to know us and meeting our every need, we can follow his example and build authentic relationships with those individuals He brings to us.