Sick of “spraying and praying” when it comes to finding new donors? I’m dishing my best tips on targeting your ideal supporters in this solo episode.
I’m tackling the common mistakes I see nonprofits make, from failing to define their audience to not optimizing existing channels. Expect straight talk on the pros and cons of various donor acquisition strategies out there – no hype, just what really works!
The key is getting specific. I’ll share how to create detailed donor avatars, survey existing supporters, and use that intel to craft outreach that truly resonates. This clarity attracts great donors and repels those not aligned with your mission.
Want my exclusive advice on messaging that converts the right prospects? I’ve tested this stuff in the real world, so you know it’s legit.
This episode is just a sneak peek at the P in my signature SPACE fundraising methodology I’ve used as the framework for my revamped Big Asks Gifts Program to transform your Processes.
We’re launching the 6 month BAG program right now to help you take their fundraising to the next level over 6 months. I only work with a limited number of EDs and DoDs each round, so check it out at rheawong.com if you think we might be a good fit!
Can’t wait to connect and chat all things donor acquisition. Let’s take your outreach to the next level!
Important Links:
https://go.rheawong.com/big-ask-gifts-program
Episode Transcript
Welcome to Nonprofit Lowdown, I’m your host, Rhea Wong.
Hey podcast listeners, Rhea Wong with you once again with Nonprofit Lowdown. Happy 2024 friends. This is yet again another solo episode. I think I’ll be doing more of these because I think that they’re really fun. if you are enjoying them, let me know. I’ll do more of them. And if you hate them, let me know too.
And I can get more guests on. Anyway, I want to talk today about the perennial topic that everybody always asks, which is where do you find new donors? there’s so many places to begin here, but the thing that I really want to impress upon you is a couple of different things. When people say that they don’t have enough donors, the first thing I ask is, what is your retention rate?
Because what I see nine times out of 10, when people are looking for new donors, it’s often because they have what I call a leaky bucket problem, which is that they are often pouring in new donors, but not doing a good job of retaining them. Usually retaining them at less than 50%, which means that for every donor that they’re pouring in they’re losing one out of the bottom of the so called leaky bucket.
My first thing is make sure that you actually solved your leaky bucket problem before you go on a big donor acquisition. push. There are a couple of things that I just want to talk about here. Oftentimes, when I see nonprofits talk about donors, it’s very unspecific. what they usually say, we need new donors.
And I will say who is your audience? Who were you talking to? Who are the donors that you’re trying to reach? And they’ll say it’s everybody. Well, If everybody is your audience, then nobody is your audience. There’s nothing in the world out there for every single person, except for maybe. Air and water and food, right?
From a product standpoint, if we think about our nonprofits, there’s not a single product on this planet that is for everybody. And by the way, even large organizations that have a lot more money than you do, like Apple and Coke and Nike. Aren’t able to get every single person on the planet. So as a nonprofit, given the fact that you are resource constrained, either through your budget or through your staff, my thought here is that it’s really a question of getting narrower and really specific rather than broader and trying to hit everyone with the machine gun, and just spraying everything around. Now, a lot of times people will say what about a small grassroots or small grassroots fundraising? Like, you know, Bernie Sanders does it. The difference is your average nonprofit does not have a national brand or a national platform like a Bernie Sanders. I find grassroots fundraising in theory is great and I think it should be an engine that drives your fundraising in the major donor realm.
As a strategy, it is really hard. And takes a lot of effort, which is generally why I push people if they actually have a donor base to think about major gifts and always upgrading the gifts. if I were given, let’s say a dollar, I would spend 90 cents of that dollar retaining and upgrading current donors than I would going after new ones.
Okay. that being said. There are a couple of things I want to talk about here. when we say I need new donors, we have to think about where do new donors come from? How do people that we know in the world find out about us? I want you to think about people in two different ways.
There are people who know about you, and there are people who do not know about you. And then within the realm of people who know about you and people who don’t know about you, there are two main ways that we can engage with people. There is the one to one approach, and so one to one might mean, the direct meetings, direct emails, the DMs, the letters, and so forth.
That’s one to one, essentially. One to many would be if I, for example, posted something on my social media, or I would send out content, that would be a one to many. However, that content play only really works with people who already know you in some fashion, because think about the way that the algorithms work on social media. then the question is then how do I get people who don’t know me to get to know me? that’s where we think about things like cold outreach, cold DMs, sending out, cold emails. All of us have gotten a million random emails. That’s a cold outreach strategy. What about people who don’t know me?
That I want to reach at scale. That’s when we start thinking about a paid ad strategy. So that’s when I might spend money on Facebook or Google to try to get exposure to people who don’t know me. Now, that being said, I think that most nonprofits really need to think about the quadrant of their warm lead.
So people who know them. And reaching out oftentimes they will underutilize their existing strategy, their existing donor base. These are people who are on their email list. These are people who are introduced to them. These are people that they meet via networking events, et cetera, et cetera. what I see when people are often having a hard time getting donors is it’s a volume problem.
they’re actually not sending out enough communications to get in front of people to engage in a conversation. What I recommend is let’s say you have a list of 3000 people and you’re not getting traction on 3000 people. What about sending out an email to a hundred of those people every single day, an individual email.
To start to engage in conversations. Now, if you send out an individual email and you send out an individual text message or whatever it may be, and they’re not responding to you and you’d send it out to all 3000 of those people and not a single person response, then yes probably you have a messaging problem, but also probably that would be the time to think about a donor acquisition strategy.
Now, how do we think about content? truthfully speaking, I always used to think posting on social media was a waste of time. I think social media can be really helpful in order to start to bring people into a funnel, start to bring them into awareness of who you are. I don’t think social media is a great strategy for conversion, which is to say, I don’t think it’s.
Generally speaking, where I would see gifts coming in, or at least not major gifts. And by major gifts, I think that can mean lots of things to lots of people. Obviously a major gift for a small grassroots nonprofit is going to be different than a major gift for the Metropolitan Opera. But let’s just say for the sake of this conversation, it’s a five figure gift.
Chances are your five figure gift donor is not going to come through social media. You could do through social media or a content strategy. Let’s say someone lands on your website and you have a really helpful downloadable that gets them on the email list. Where I see this working is that you use social media or a content strategy, or let’s say you get a newspaper article written about you, or maybe you’re on a talk show, or maybe you’re covered by the local news.
I would drive people to the website onto your email list. Now, we’ve had a number of guests on this show who’ve talked about the value of an email list. Why is that? Email converts. Email, if you really think about it, is the most intimate form of communication that you get short of phone calls and personal text messages from friends.
I. don’t necessarily check my DMs. I don’t necessarily check social media every day, but I do check my email every day. I think email is really the strategy where you should drive people to. we’ve talked about people who know you and doing one on one outreach. We’re now talking about people who know you and that you’re going to reach through a content strategy to push them on your email list.
once they’re on your email list, then the question is, okay what do we do here? Now, again, the issue that I see a lot of folks run into is that they’re not communicating with their email list subscribers on a frequent enough basis. they’ll do it once a month or twice a month.
Now, again, full disclosure, I understand if you’re really constrained and once a month is all you can handle, but I think that you should be thinking at least once a week to keep things top of mind. Now when we think about what am I going to say to people, right? content is always a problem. The mistake that I see lots of folks making is that they often come from the place of being organization centric.
They’re thinking about, Oh, we’ll talk about our new staff member or a new program or this new gift that we got. And these are not bad per se. However, I want you to start thinking about content from the perspective of what’s in it for my donor or my email subscriber.
What’s the thing that is going to be interesting to them? Because it’s I don’t like giving my email address and ending up on a crappy newsletter, right? I will quickly unsubscribe to a crappy newsletter that does not add value to me. the question that I want everyone who’s thinking about how to engage people through their email list is what’s the value add for my subscriber?
What’s the thing that will either educate them, delight them, inform them, inspire them? Maybe they’re stories. Maybe they’re invitations to special events. Maybe it’s an interesting report. Come from the perspective of what’s in it for them, and they will be more likely to keep subscribed. They will be more likely to actually open the email, and they will be more likely to take an action.
I also want to talk about Jess Campbell. I was on this podcast who talked about, ask a question, open up a dialogue, make this a two way communication. Because again, if I’m on your email list, I’m already saying that I’m interested in some capacity. I’m already saying that I’m in your sphere. Help me to make a connection, make it a conversation.
Then my question is okay, Rhea, so I hear you, what if I don’t know what kind of content is interesting? And here is where I see the really great nonprofits take it to the next level. When we say that we need more donors, and in particular, when we say that we need more major donors. I think it is really important that you understand who you’re talking to and how they’re talking.
what I recommend is that you go to somebody, you create what I like to call a donor avatar for the perfect donor. If you could construct the perfect donor, and maybe that person exists in your current donor base. So let’s just say for example. You have a donor who, if you had 10 more of those donors, you would be so psyched.
Who is that person? What do they look like? Where were they educated? Do they have kids? Where do they live? get a list of all the demographic information, but then take a step deeper. What is the psychographic? In other words, what are the thing that they care about? What do they value?
What do they want in the world? How do they talk about the work? What are the words that they say to explain why they are a donor to you? what you’re going to do is create this avatar as a hypothetical for who this person is, and then you get to test that assumption. imagine. A donor who has been giving to you at very generous levels receives a phone call, and it’s not a phone call to ask for money.
It’s not a solicitation. You’re asking them for an interview. You want to understand the mindset. You want to understand the words that they’re saying. You want to understand why they continue to give to your organization out of all of the organizations in the whole world that they could give to. Why does it matter to them?
And then once you’ve identified. Their perspective, and you might want to do three of these interviews so that you can get enough sense of the folks across different spectrums. Then you hone your messages, then you hone your website, then you hone your communications in to attract that particular type of person.
Now I hear what you’re saying. I know I’m already hearing, Rhea, if we’re too specific, we’re going to turn other people off who are not those people. That’s okay. In the world, specificity is going to win, and especially in a very noisy world. And let’s say, face it, 2024 is going to be very noisy, especially here in the U.S. where we’re facing presidential elections this year. I am going to read a message that seems very tailor made for me, or I’m just going to stop paying attention. On average, I think People spend about two seconds on a website, so if you’re not able to communicate something compelling to me within two seconds, I’m out of there.
I want to talk about websites for a second too. So when we talk about websites, pet peeve of mine, I end up on websites and there’s a lot of words. And the words don’t necessarily mean anything to me as a lay person. So oftentimes what I see on websites is that they’ll use lots of fancy jargon, they’ll use words like impact, they’ll use words like systemic change.
I don’t know what that means. Assume that you’re talking to a fifth grader. when I land on a website, above the fold in the top part of the website, I want three questions answered for me. I want to know, what do you do? How do I know you’re any good at doing it? And what’s in it for me? So the, what do you do should be in very simple terms.
We build wells in Africa. we send kids from under resourced communities to college. We clean the oceans. I don’t know, whatever it is you do, but. Through the lens of you’re talking to a fifth grader and you’re talking to someone who’s distracted. I don’t know about y’all, but when I’m on the computer, I may also be checking texts on my phone.
I may be having a conversation. You need to hit me in the face with what it is you do. Then you might add something that demonstrates competency. How do I know that you’re any good at what you do? a hundred percent of our kids have graduated from college. We’ve cleaned X number of miles of ocean, et cetera, et cetera.
And then the last bit is what’s in it for me. I want to talk about Maslow’s hierarchy for a second. As we know, as humans, we have basic needs at the very bottom, but as we go up the hierarchy, so there’s Maslow’s hierarchy of need. I get to. human needs such as belonging and self transcendence.
as a marketer, as a fundraiser, I am thinking about how can I help give people these higher level needs, like belonging to a community, joy, inspiration, having a sense of purpose, giving someone a sense of having an impact bigger than themselves. I really want to think about the psychology of the donor and what’s in it for them.
Because at the end of the day, we all tell ourselves stories about who we believe that we are. And when I lay my head down on my pillow at night, I want to be able to believe that I am a certain kind of person. And by reiterating for me or giving me a sense of validation of the kind of person I am, if I believe I’m the kind of person that sends kids to college, I’m the kind of person that believes in.
I’m the kind of person that believes in saving the dolphins. How can you help me on my journey of my belief and the story that I tell myself about who I am as a person? what I think that we do is that we often come from a place of A, oftentimes too much knowledge and B, not enough empathy to think about putting ourselves in the shoes of the other person.
What is it that they want and how can we help them achieve what they want? I think about Zig Ziglar He said, you can get what you want by helping other people get what they want. And I think that’s absolutely true.
I know that there’s going to be some pushback here around donor centricity. What I’m presenting to you here as an idea, time tested marketing and sales tactics that has stood the test of time. Now, I am not suggesting that we have a towel to people. I’m not suggesting that you let donors dictate program.
I’m not suggesting that you put yourself in a subservient position. Quite the contrary, I am saying that you are able to present yourself as a partner in the work, that together, we might achieve something greater than either of us could achieve alone. And that is such an empowering place to stand. the way that people are going to win in this game.
Is clarity and specificity of mission. And again, I’m going to harken back to my friend, Emily Hayward. She was saying good marketing attracts great marketing repels what I want to see on an average nonprofit website is a clear point of view, a clear call to action and clarity about who it is they’re talking to.
So if I land on a site and it’s very clear right away that it’s not for me. That’s a great thing because then you don’t waste your time talking to people for whom it’s not for. Conversely, there’s going to be somebody out there who it’s going to be for. it’s virtuous cycle where as you hone in on your messaging, the people for whom it is for We’ll start to find you and then you can do a better job of sourcing.
Okay. Where do those kinds of people hang out either online or in person? How can I show up at those things? How can I then see the things that are going to interest them and attract them into my world? anyway, that’s a little bit of a tidbit there. And I just want to say that for those of you who have been listening for any amount of time, I want to let you know, I am relaunching what was called the fundraising accelerator is now relaunching in 2024 to big ask.
gifts program, which is fun. We’ve made some huge improvements. One of which is that it is now a six month program. It used to be an intensive nine week program. I’ve responded to a lot of the feedback that we’ve received and we’ve been seeing some great results. if you have ever wanted to work with me, we’re accepting applications now until the beginning of February, we start the program on February 15th.
if you go to rheawong.com, you can check out all the details and we can talk about it. And we can explore working together. So the question is, who is this for? This program is specifically designed for organizations that are between 250, 000 up to about 2 million to 3 million. Specifically, we want to work with people who have some evidence of an individual donor program.
I’d like to work with executive directors or development directors, but primarily executive directors who are looking to take that organization to the next level. if you are an executive director or development director who has never received formal training, who senses that there’s potential, but that you need a guide to help you get to that next level, I’d love to see your application.
check it out. It’s rheawong.com. And let me know what you think if you like this, I will do more of them, but I am really focused on helping to. Spread the word. Thanks so much. Have a great week.
Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nonprofitlowdown/support
