Fundraising 101: The Basics of Identifying Donors
There’s something I say frequently to clients, at speaking engagements, and other places. And it hits people in pretty weird ways. I say it like it’s great news, but most people say it sounds like bad news:
“Not everyone cares about your cause.”
Wait, what? But Kelly, my cause is so compelling, and I love it and I’m passionate about it. How can you be so unfeeling to tell me that not everyone cares about my cause?!
I usually follow up that statement with a story about me and my brother-in-law. Before we start, I LOVE my brother-in-law. He’s an incredible guy. I can’t imagine my life without him. But we’re also wildly different people—like if he wasn’t my brother-in-law, I don’t know that we’d be friends, we’re that different.
First off, he’s a sports guy. And I don’t like sports. Not a bit. I’m a recovering theater nerd and former ballerina.
You see, sports were integral to my brother-in-law growing up. They are what made him the wonderful man he is today. By contrast, my mom signed me up for soccer in 1st grade, and I still remember running away from the ball in terror, straight to my mom, and begging her to take me back to dance class.
So if you’re a sports-based nonprofit, I hate to tell you this, but I don’t “believe” about your cause.
Just kidding, I said that to be provocative.
Now I explain: Intellectually, I understand that sports can be great for young people and that sports-oriented nonprofits play an important role in society. When I say I don’t “believe” in them, what I mean is that the work doesn’t resonate with me. I hated playing soccer, and I don’t emotionally connect with anything involving sports. So…I won’t be donating to you, no matter how many great stories you tell me or how many awesome stats you feed me.
And it’s not because I’m a horrible person, I just have other giving priorities. Organizations whose work I deeply believe in and that are pursuing missions that align with my values.
But here’s the great news, my brother-in-law would LOVE you!
By contrast, if you’re an arts organization, do hit me up! (But leave my brother-in-law alone, okay?)
You see, there are very few organizations for whom both my brother-in-law and I would be good donor prospects…even though we are both people who care deeply about our community and have the money to be philanthropic.
Your job as a nonprofit leader is to figure out which of us you need to reach, and how!
Knowing your audience is key to fundraising effectively and efficiently.
Knowing your audience gets rid of the problems and complications that I know so many nonprofit leaders struggle with. It provides obvious answers to questions such as:
What social media platforms should we be on?
What should we post on said social media platforms?
What kind of donor events should we host?
How will we reach our audience?
What do we say to people to convince them to give?
I see too many nonprofits trying to be everywhere talking to the general public.
“We have to draft a case for support EVERYONE will resonate with!” → No you don’t, you just have to write a case for support that your ideal donor will resonate with!
“We have to post content to every social media platform in existence!” → No you don’t, you just have to be on the social media platforms that are most relevant to your audience, posting content that will be meaningful to them–and them alone.
“Let’s copy the gala of that really wildly successful organization that has a mission that has nothing to do with ours.” → Don’t do that! Do something that is authentic to your organization and will resonate with your people.
Starting with a fundraising tactic and working backwards to figure out a target for it is letting the tail wag the dog. Instead, you start with your audience, and build your program from there.
The Donor ABCs
You may have heard of the Donor ABCs before, but you probably haven’t heard MY donor ABCs. Usually it stands for Ability, Belief, Connection…but in that paradigm, we’re prioritizing ability to give before anything else. Not on my watch!
My ABCs stand for:
A - Access
B - Belief
C - Capacity
Access
For most small, local, community-based nonprofits, I say start where you have ACCESS. Call your friends. Have them call their friends. Network. Meet people. Get off social media and actually get social. Turn off your computer and go meet members of the Chamber of Commerce.
Figure out your six-degrees-of-separation to that big business owner in your town, and work the relationships till you get in the door. Table at community events and gather email addresses; you’ll increase your email open rate because your name will be associated with an actual face when it hits their inbox.
Belief
This is where my story about me vs. my brother-in-law comes in. If you’re a sports nonprofit, you’re going to want to target people who love sports…so maybe you want to table at a local Minor League Baseball game (a lot of these teams LOVE letting nonprofits table at their games). You’ll connect with a lot of people who love baseball (and therefore sports). If you’re a small arts organization, tabling at an arts festival might be a good route to identifying audiences with disposable income who can fund your mission since they are there to, ya know, spend money on art.
If you want to find people who believe in your cause, you have to engage with them in the communities where they hang out. (And when you’re a small nonprofit, these offline efforts are a million times more effective than any amount of ad spend that you can afford on Meta.)
Capacity
After I’ve figured out where I can create access and how to find people with the same beliefs, THEN I worry about Capacity. And I always tell my clients, “Let capacity tell you how to fundraise, not who to fundraise from.”
If you look at A and B and realize your audience could consist of major donors, awesome…build that strategy. If the As and Bs of your audience make you realize that your audience is more likely to be in the $50-$100 gift range, then you’re going to want to go for the “more donors, smaller gifts” route of a peer-to-peer strategy.
A client of mine once raised $3,000 in a week, with the average gift size of $5, in a single effort—an Instagram-based rap battle among their program alumni. It was awesome. (And was more than they netted at a gala the year before, where they spent $20,000 and only raised $11,000 because they didn’t have the audience to run a major gifts campaign. They got the C of their audience wrong.)
It’s NOT about Demographics
Also, keep in mind that it’s not at all about demographics when you think about who your donors are. Because, fun facts, my brother-in-law and I were only born five days apart, grew up in really similar families, in really similar parts of the country, and have the same level of education. We both studied abroad; we both have one child; we both now live in the DC Metropolitan Area.
Demographically, other than gender identity, we’re pretty much the same person on paper. But, as I said, IRL we’re very, very different.
So don’t tell me that you’re targeting “millennials” as your donor audience…because as I said, you’re not going to appeal to both me and my brother-in-law (and we’re both millennials).
Back to Basics: Identifying Donors
If you want to find your donors, you have to think first about your ABCs. Who do you have Access to that Believes in what you do, and what is that person’s Capacity?
Get a picture of them in your head… Can you build a donor persona?
Now ask yourself these questions:
What websites are they using?
What social media platforms would they be on? What kind of content are they looking for on those platforms? Who else would they be following?
What businesses in my area do they frequent?
Where do they spend their leisure time? What kinds of community events would they likely attend?
Do I already know people who fit our ideal donor profile? Do I know people who know our ideal donor?
That’s where you start. I’ve seen organizations run Meta ads for weeks and get nothing but grief from trolls. I’ve also seen those same organizations go to an arts festival, table for 2 hours, and get 40 new email addresses…and raise $500 from those new subscribers a week later. I’ve also seen organizations based in other countries fundraise effectively via word of mouth marketing in select communities in the United States.
But to be successful, they had to do a deep dive into who their likely donors were and where they would find them. So start there.
We’ll talk about cultivating them next week.
