Finding new donors is a lot like making new friends. You need to know what type of person you’re trying to reach, give them reasons to engage with you, and continue nurturing the relationship both before and after they make their first gift.
Donor retention is crucially important for sustaining a thriving nonprofit. But so is finding, attracting, and acquiring new donors. In this article, you’ll find a ton of practical steps you can take to build a sustainable donor acquisition strategy that helps your nonprofit grow its reach and impact.
The First Step to Finding New Donors
When you’re looking to attract new donors, you should start by doing everything you can to meet new people and convert them to your cause, right?
Not yet! The first step to finding new donors is to understand your current donors. What motivates them? How did they find you? What do they find interesting? What compels them to give?
Once you know what motivates them to give and stay connected with your organization, you’re better equipped to find more people like them who are most likely to become donors.
Here’s what you can do to understand your current donors better.
1. Conduct a Data Analysis
If you’ve got a comprehensive donor management system, you can collect all types of information about your donors—where they live, how old they are, where they work, which campaign prompted their first donation, and more. Analyzing this data can tell you the type of people who are most likely to get involved with your organization, and that allows you to create helpful donor personas. Those personas can guide you as you plan what messaging you’ll use and on which channels.
2. Segment Donors Based on History
Donor segmentation is powerful. It can help nonprofits communicate more effectively with supporters and build stronger donor relationships.
By segmenting your donors based on their donation history (or their other activities, like event participation or volunteering), you can learn a lot about which types of donors tend to give most consistently, which events are most popular, and more.
What trends and patterns do you notice? Which donor preferences stand out? How can those insights guide you as you plan to reach new supporters?
3. Nurture Current Donors with Personalization
You don’t want to simply convince a new donor to give one time—you want to welcome new donors in a way that nurtures a long-term connection with them.
Recognizing the value of donor retention is an important precursor to finding new donors. When you understand who your current donors are and what motivates them to donate, you can develop a deeper appreciation for their loyalty and build an onboarding process that will also keep future donors engaged.
You can nurture your relationship with current donors through personalized communication: tailor your communications to individual donors’ giving history and personal details, regularly say “thank you,” consistently send updates about your nonprofit’s impact, and seek your loyal donors’ feedback as your organization grows.
How to Find New Donors for Your Nonprofit
Your organization’s best donor acquisition strategy can vary based on factors like your target audience and budget. Here are some tips to find new donors and some helpful ways to analyze your data using both qualitative and quantitative research.
1. Go Online
Whether on your nonprofit’s website or your social media presence, the internet can be a great place to find new donors.
Developing an SEO strategy will help potential supporters find your website, as will staying active on social media. But new donors won’t just magically find and follow your social media profiles (unless by chance or you’re running ads)—you’ll need to create compelling content that your followers want to share and consistently engage with people through comments.
Whatever you do, remember to include persuasive calls to action on both your website and in social media posts. This will give people a clear next step and help you turn website visitors and social media followers into newsletter subscribers, blog readers, and (eventually!) new donors.
2. Identify Data-Backed Opportunities
As you look for opportunities to build your donor base, you’ll want to collect and analyze as much information about your current supporter base and other important nonprofit KPIs as you can. Why? Because your best bet for successfully finding new donors is to use your existing data to identify these opportunities.
A great CRM solution should provide you with an at-a-glance view of your organization’s current performance. For example, Neon CRM’s Mission Control dashboard pulls system data to give you an overview of your nonprofit’s performance. You can use that data to customize your dashboard by adding widgets that show you things like specific campaign performance, retention rates, average gift size, etc.
Having these numbers readily available can provide you with the additional insights needed to evaluate your donor acquisition activities and tweak your approach if you need to do so.
3. Translate Numbers Into Insights
When you’re working on finding new donors, your nonprofit’s data can confirm what has worked in the past and hint at what might work in the future.
Consider this example. You’ve pulled your data and found that, a month ago, you experienced a significant spike in your new donor acquisition rate. What happened one month ago? Your organization hosted an on-site event where potential donors could meet with staff and hear constituent testimonials. This shows that the event inspired new people to invest in your mission!
Analyzing spikes and dips in your donor acquisition stats can give you a deeper understanding of what works to find and acquire new donors, while can make deciding on your next steps much easier. Keep a close eye on this data to discover how to best engage your supporters.
4. Ask Questions
In addition to data, good old-fashioned questions and answers have their place. This is where in-person conversations or donor surveys come in handy. Reach out to your donors—first-time donors, long-term donors, recurring donors—and find out what compelled them to donate the first time. This is a simple act (though “simple” doesn’t always mean easy—creating engaging donor surveys is an art and a science!), but it can be another way to learn which donor acquisition efforts are worth repeating.
5. Create Donor Personas
We alluded to this earlier, but what is a donor persona? And how does it help you find new donors?
A donor persona is a fictional representation of a particular segment of your audience. Personas are built using the insights gathered from your qualitative research and can be supplemented using quantitative data. If you want a deeper dive on donor personas, here’s where you can read more about them.
So, how do donor personas help with identifying potential new donors?
When you look at your donor base, you’ll start to notice different kinds of people who tend to support your work. You can build personas based on things like someone’s donation history (what kind of person tends to make recurring donations? What appeals do they find compelling? Where do they interact with you online?) or their demographics (if you want to attract younger donors, what shared characteristics do your existing younger donors share? How would you go about reaching other people like them?).
Once you understand the types of people who support your work, you can use those personas to inform your new donor acquisition activities. If you notice that your recurring donors tend to be people who have supported your organization a couple of times, give around $35 per month, and engage most frequently with you via email, that can inform your next monthly giving appeal. If you notice that your youngest donors tend to be very active on social media and are also interested in volunteering, you may choose to run a volunteer day, promote it on social media, and nurture those relationships for a little while before making an ask.
6. Build Strategic Partnerships
Getting a new job or making new friends often comes down to who you know. And, similarly, your existing network can help you find new donors.
There are several ways strategic partnerships can be a catalyst for finding and engaging new donors.
First, you could collaborate with other nonprofits whose missions intersect with yours. You don’t need to compete over donors; instead, find a way to accomplish more together!
You can also use the appeal of corporate social responsibility to establish corporate sponsorships with businesses in your community. Remember to highlight the mutual benefits of working together, including things like an improved reputation for the business and a way for your organization to reach new people.
7. Host Events
Hosting a public event can be a great way to meet people who are interested in your work and find ways to get them involved. Even if you restrict your events to existing donors or members, you still meet new people by giving them the option to invite friends, family, and colleagues.
Whether you host online events, fundraising events, or educational classes, planning engaging events is a great way to meet new people who may be interested in supporting your mission. You can use these events to share your success stories and impact, educate attendees about something interesting,, spotlight or interview long-term donors, or simply give people information about your nonprofit.
Turn New Donors Into Long-Term Donors
If you’re working to find and recruit new donors, combining your knowledge of existing supporters with insights from your CRM will give you a great head start.
After looking through your data, you may even identify people in your database who haven’t become donors yet. In-person or online event attendees, volunteers, and even newsletter subscribers are potential new donors, too!
Before you find those new donors, you’ll want to have a comprehensive donor retention plan in place. You’ll be putting a lot of time, effort, and resources into acquiring new donors—you’ll want to have a plan to keep them!
That’s why we’ve put together a moves management guide to help you develop a strategy to move new donors to deeper levels of engagement with your nonprofit.
