Offer to visit The most effective cultivation technique is meeting a donor in person. Mostly, these will be times when you want to ask for a larger gift, but every so often, you should meet with a donor in order to get advice, tell them about what is happening in your organization, or simply to drop off an Annual Report or a premium such as a mug or a T-shirt. Things like birthday cards, congratulatory notes, get well cards, are not necessary. If you are the type of person who remembers things like that, then do them. If this is not something you do for your own friends, then don't.
Cultivation only works when there is a genuine desire to know the donor better.
Many of us find that we become friends with some of our donors, so we treat them like friends. If I were in charge of re-inventing all the words that would ever be used in the context of fundraising, I would never choose the word cultivation. I think it is a difficult word to truly humanize, and I still find that I don't use it very often. To me the word adds a sense of something that I, as a development director or board member, do to the donor in order to get the donor to do something for the organization. Some of us give a lot of money and some a little.