Identify and Cultivate Power Fundraisers

What are the most profitable and loyal fundraisers? We like to call them power fundraisers. Power fundraisers are individuals who have stepped up to raise amazing amounts of money for the nonprofits they support. These fundraisers are especially important during the rocky environment of 2020.

How can you find these power fundraisers? One approach that could help many nonprofits is to employ predictive analytics to identify specific donors and constituents who are most likely to become power fundraisers to recruit them for your peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.

Let’s unpack how you can identify and cultivate power fundraisers for your nonprofit.

Identifying your next power fundraisers

For many years, nonprofits have used prospect research and wealth screening services to determine a donors’ propensity and capacity to give.

These services provide research and data to help nonprofits identify prospective major gift donors, annual fund donors, and planned gift donors.

Savvy nonprofits, seeking to develop a clear profile of their major and planned donors, and identify additional such prospects in their existing donor pool, have gone a step further and have engaged in predictive analytics.

Predictive analytics goes beyond reporting and list building. It requires applying a sophisticated process of data weighting, algorithms, and more. Instead of tackling this yourself, I recommend working with a firm specializing in these types of services, such as DonorSearch or Windfall Data.

Learn how you can modernize your wealth screening with Neon CRM & Windfall Data

While the power of predictive analytics to super-charge major and planned giving programs is long proven, I see another opportunity for nonprofits — applying predictive analytics. Using predictive analysis helps you identify people who are most likely to become your next power fundraisers so you can target them for peer-to-peer fundraising opportunities.

These types of firms can build a model that looks at the data of current power fundraisers from your CRM system as well as other donor prospect and wealth screening data to create a profile of typical characteristics of a “power fundraiser.”

Next, you can compare the profile with your prospect lists to give you a list of donors and other constituents who have the greatest likelihood of becoming power fundraisers for your organization.

Cultivating more top fundraisers

So, what do you do with potential top fundraisers once you’ve identified them?

One of the best approaches is the same approach you would use for donor cultivation — an email series or “drip” campaign.

An email series or “drip campaign” is an ongoing series of targeted, personalized emails promoting your peer-to-peer campaigns, highlighting top fundraisers, and (most importantly) explaining the impact of the funds raised on your mission.

Producing and sending an email series of this sort might sound daunting — especially if you’re operating with limited time and budget. But technology can help.

For example, marketing automation can make efficient work of an email series.

Marketing automation allows your staff to set up targeted emails that include personalized content driven by data in your CRM system. This, in turn, lets your team focus more time on the content of the messages being sent and less on the mechanics of sending the messages.

Marketing automation also can (and should) be used to keep in touch with peer-to-peer fundraisers after each campaign or event.

Continually keeping in touch with all peer-to-peer fundraisers can help encourage those who raise modest amounts to raise more and can motivate top fundraises to keep coming back — campaign after campaign.

Learn more

There are many ways to use data and technology to drive a positive impact on your fundraising and other efforts. Learn more about how nonprofits find quick wins to solve immediate problems and use technologies to facilitate their work.