Slice Up Your Audience: Using donor personas to target.
Spring has sprung, and with it the spring season of fundraising is in everyone’s sights. From Scratch has a multi-week series for you to help you prep, implement, and follow up on your spring campaign. If you have one in the works—or even if you don’t—you can follow along. If you do the homework each week, you should be well on your way to an excellent campaign.
Last week, we covered the basic question: How much can we expect to raise? If you did your homework, you should have a sense of what you’re aiming for.
Now we need to think about who you are fundraising from. Too often, we write appeals that would really resonate with ourselves or our board members, but we don’t really write them with the donor or the audience in mind. So this week, we’re going to talk about that.
Do you resonate with any of the following?
I write fundraising appeals based on what I know the ED/Board Chair/Leadership will sign off on, not what I know the donor need to hear.
I frequently am at a loss for what to write about in my appeals.
I don’t think our fundraising appeals are effective. We get very little response.
We can’t seem to get traction with our donors; we don’t have a very engaged or loyal donor base.
Any and all of these issues, a donor persona will help with.
What is a donor persona?
A donor persona is tool that you use to zero in on your audience to figure out what will and won’t resonate with that audience. It’s essentially a profile or biography of someone that is representative of your generic “audience” (or a slice of your “audience” that you are targeting) so that you understand their motivations and what they need from you.
I like to think of the donor persona like a profile or a biography. I have seen “donor personas” that look like this: male, 35-50, art enthusiast.
WHAT? Okay…sure. But how does that help? We might as well just write something 100% generic at that rate.
Here’s what a donor persona looked like for one of my clients:
Name: Henry Ramirez
Age: 42
Household: Married, two kids (girl, 7, and boy, 5)
Job: UX designer for a FinTech company
Connection to mission: He faced a lot of challenges growing up, but around 13 years old, he got connected to an arts organization that helped him get excited about learning again after considering dropping out of school. His teachers and mentors helped him see his talent for design, and encouraged him to go to school. He graduated and went into UX design. Every day, he thinks about his teachers and is grateful for the experience. He found out about ORG through a friend, and it reminded him of his experience. He donates to ORG to pay everything forward.
How’s that for a persona? My client and I joke that we worked with “Henry” for so long, he’s like a close personal friend. Joking aside though, “Henry” helped us take generic appeals to super-focused appeals.
Why do I need a donor persona?
If you think about fundraising like baking (we certainly do), you’re thinking about who will be eating your baked good (…or appeal…). Is it your best friend’s birthday that’s motivating you to bake? Well then, we’ll probably be baking a cake. That cake should be designed with your best friend in mind. Do they like vanilla or chocolate? Do they like sweet or semi-sweet frosting? Do they have any allergies? We ask all these questions when making a baked good for a friend. And yet, when we go to write a fundraising appeal, we just say what we want to say? Nope. Not anymore, my friend!
Let’s take the Henry example above. Before we came up with Henry, my clients were writing appeals that they knew their ED (who was also the founder) would sign off on. They told the founder’s story from various angles, and while it was a GREAT story, it wasn’t going to resonate with the audience they were targeting. When we looked at who was actually on their email list who they wanted to convert to donors, it was past participants in their program, their family members, and their teachers. Knowing that, we came up with a donor persona…we came up with Henry.
After that, their appeals got so much more targeted! There was so much more heart. They told stories that would matter to and motivate their donors. In short, Henry changed the game for that organization.
How do I write a donor persona?
Start by looking at the audience you want to target.
Already have a email list or audience? Then you want to think about how those individuals got on your list. Who are they? Why did they sign up for updates from you? Have they donated before? What is their connection to your mission?
If you’re using this campaign to go look for new audience, then think about what kind of person would be out there and excited to learn about an organization like yours. Think beyond demographics; what are the life experiences they’ve had that make your mission compelling? Where will you find them? How will you reach them? How will you bring them in?
Do you have multiple audiences? Then you can write multiple personas so that you can understand all of them. (The org where we came up with Henry had three audiences. We had former students, family members of former students, and public school teachers and administrators. We eventually wrote personas for all of those audiences, and we wrote different appeals targeting the different audiences.)
Your Homework Assignment
Look at your target audience. Think about who the members of that audience are and how they connect to your audience.
Take a look at this Canva template I made for you. We’ve got Henry’s biography there for you. Make your own copy and fill it out for yourself…complete with a stock photo so you can literally see who you’re writing to.
Now try writing an initial email to that person. What are you going to say? Where are they on their donor journey—did they just meet you? Or have they donated before? What are you going to say?
So now you have your campaign target and you have a picture in your mind of your audience. Next week, join me right here…same time…same place…and we’ll write a campaign plan for you!
