Donor acquisition is the process of acquiring new or potential donors by segmenting, building relationships, marketing, fundraising, and more. It can be difficult to navigate the sea of information out there about donor acquisition, so we’ve compiled a list of the best techniques for you to craft the perfect donor acquisition strategy. Read on!
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Donors are everything for nonprofits. Whether you’re an experienced fundraiser or just getting started, the task of finding new donors will always be one of your biggest hurdles. Donor acquisition requires patience, creativity, and strong strategy – all things that we’ll discuss in this article!
We’ll share 15 techniques to increase your donor acquisition without stretching your team. These techniques are perfect for new and seasoned fundraisers alike.
Want a quick look at five strategies to help you connect with more donors? Listen to Episode 34 of the Nonprofit Podcast!
When you have a better understanding of your donors and what is important to them, you can connect to them in a meaningful and relevant way.
To simplify this process, many organizations choose to create donor profiles or donor personas to help them visualize typical supporters. A donor persona represents a typical donor that incorporates their demographic information, goals, passions, and preferred communication style.
To understand your donors:
Where are they located? What’s their average age?
What’s the best way to reach them? Which of your supporters prefers to donate online? Which of them are recurring donors? How do they like to be addressed? What’s their communication style?
What do they care about? What drives them and motivates them?
Once you’ve created your donor personas, share them with your entire team. Use them when acquiring new donors.
Always have them in mind when releasing any kind of communication to your donors.
Consider editing these personas along the way, especially when you get more data or grow your donor base.
Donor segmentation is the process of categorizing donors based on similar characteristics such as demographics and interests.
Donor segmentation can look similar to building donor personas, but it doesn’t have to. You can segment your donors according to a variety of characteristics, depending on your nonprofit’s mission and size:
And more. In the ideal world, nonprofit fundraising professionals would be able to personalize marketing efforts. However, individualizing marketing per donor is an impossible task.
What is possible instead for most nonprofits is to make marketing feel personal. The right segmentation strategy can help you achieve that.
Donorbox’s donor management features can help you properly segment! Sort your donors with a variety of filters and store additional information about each donor so you never lose valuable data.
Building relationships with donors isn’t something you do only for donor retention. Although relationship building with donors is the basic tenant of donor retention, a donor relationship starts from the very first interaction.
Your systematic cultivation of prospective donors should aim to move people from the outer circle into the middle circle, and from the middle to the inner circle.
Becoming a donor-centric organization is a pivotal step your nonprofit needs to take in order to boost donor acquisition and online fundraising results.
Stewardship is not only about sending out ‘thank you’ cards and e-mail newsletters. It’s about connecting with your supporters around the cause you’re all passionate about – which is usually your mission.
Furthermore, open a conversation with the prospective donor to learn about their values, current situation, and future philanthropic goals. It’s not about what you want them to do; it’s about what they hope to get. Asking questions designed to get to know the supporter is of utmost importance to build relationships and acquire donors.
Every nonprofit wants to acquire new donors. However, simply saying “We want more donors” doesn’t suffice as a strategy.
To successfully acquire new donors, your nonprofit needs to set donor acquisition goals.
Donor acquisition goals will vary significantly from one nonprofit to another. However, a good step to take first is to pull data from the past five years and review your donor acquisition and donor retention rates.
Additionally, pull out the goals of your organization for the next year (and three and five years), as well as any mission and vision statements.
Look at how many donors you need to acquire and how much money you need to raise this year to progress towards your mission, and balance that out with results from the past.
Goals can be as simple as “we want to improve acquisition conversion rates by 10%, retention rates by 15%, and upgrade rates by 20%.” Make sure to set a timeline for these goals.
Of course, goal setting can get more advanced. You can start targeting not just a quantity of donors but a certain quality as well. An advanced goal could be gaining a smaller number of new recurring donors rather than a larger number of one-time donors because, in the long term, they are more valuable to your organization.
Goals set a benchmark for your nonprofit. After setting goals and implementing relevant strategies for goal achievement, it’s incredibly important to measure and evaluate the success of your strategies and activities.
As you put your strategies into practice, create metrics (KPIs) related to your goals. These metrics should be key indicators of goal achievement and can be either quantitative, qualitative, or both. They are how you’re going to know whether you accomplished your goals or not.
Based on the timeline you created when you created your goals, consistently measure and evaluate your progress.
Doing this tells you whether your strategies are the right ones for the goals you’re trying to achieve.
If not, don’t panic – this is what the next step is for.
Rome wasn’t built in a day – and you won’t increase your donor acquisition rates overnight. The important thing is to meet your goals and try to constantly improve and reach new heights.
Implementing changes based on the results of your evaluation is one of the most essential practices you need to implement in your nonprofit if you want to acquire donors and reach your fundraising goals.
Evaluation often happens after the timeline of activities is complete, but it can be very helpful to measure and evaluate what worked and what didn’t work in real time.
To help you evaluate in a way that provides a clear direction to move in for improvements, download our free Rose, Bud, and Thorn Worksheet. This well help you evaluate what worked, what didn’t work, and what opportunities you have for improvement moving forward.
In today’s day and age, your organization might as well not even exist if it’s not present on main social media networks like Facebook, TikTok, X, or Instagram.
Social media allows your nonprofit to interact with your supporters, build up your brand image, increase exposure, and get donors to sign up for your email list.
When it comes to creating a social media strategy, it’s important to note that social media isn’t free. There is the cost of staff time and resources, which takes away from other aspects of fundraising and the organization. There’s also the cost of targeted ads and boosting posts.
Consider these costs in your donor acquisition strategy. If you expect returns on that investment, proceed with creating a social media presence. This will help you connect with millennial and Gen Z donors, too!
Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways for nonprofits to build awareness, acquire leads, convert supporters, and retain current donors.
This is because email subscribers are generally individuals who have a higher degree of interest in what your nonprofit does (compared to social media followers).
Email marketing is free (or very affordable), and emails are easy to send, quick to deliver results, and proven to increase brand visibility.
You cannot showcase your impact without measuring it first. And although often a difficult and daunting task, measuring social impact matters. This is especially the case for nonprofits due to their often limited resources. Furthermore, measuring social impact includes measuring complex concepts, such as “increase in the self-esteem of an individual” or “increase in overall well-being.”
By measuring impact, you gather data and stories to use in your marketing and communications. Showcase these quantitative and qualitative data points prominently on your website, in your impact report, and on social media.
Making a difference is one of the key reasons people donate, so successfully showcasing your impact is a great way to connect with new donors.
Peer-to-peer fundraising is a crowdfunding strategy that utilizes your donors’ existing networks. It encourages supporters to reach out to their peers, friends, coworkers, and family members for donations using a personalized donation page.
Peer-to-peer fundraising is one of the best donor acquisition strategies since it allows your nonprofit to reach a pool of supporters that would have otherwise been inaccessible.
Firstly, it builds on relationships and utilizes your already existing donor base. Secondly, it’s cost-effective since your supporters and evangelists fundraise on your behalf.
Donorbox Peer-to-Peer makes it easy to get started. Choose to invite your supporters by email or allow anyone to sign up to fundraise on your behalf, the way Samos Volunteers did below.
Launch Your Peer-to-Peer Campaign
While online fundraising may be the norm now, don’t be quick to dismiss traditional fundraising methods.
Here are the three most common techniques considered to be traditional:
Nonprofits will need simple-to-implement hacks to effectively leverage the traditional methods in this age of everything digital. That’s exactly why you should listen to this podcast episode where Donorbox converses with Joe Leach, the President of AppealMaker, to learn some direct mail hacks.
You’ll have a hard time acquiring new donors if your online donation experience is lacking. Creating an attractive, informative donation page with a quick checkout will help convert more of your website visitors into donors.
Your donation page should include a sleek donation form that’s designed to match your nonprofit’s branding. Plus, make your donation form easy to find with a Sticky Donate Button that anchors to the side of the screen while someone scrolls through your website, making your donation form a click away. And ensure these prospective donors complete their donation with a Giving Reminder that gently encourages them to finish their transaction.
Chispa Project uses a Sticky Donate Button that pops on their website. This can help increase donations by up to 50%.
This means that as someone browses their website, donating through their pop-up donation form is only one click away.
Perfect Your Donation Experience
We are hardwired to listen to and get captivated by stories. The most successful nonprofits today use stories all the time: on their websites, in their newsletters, on their social media, and wherever else they have the opportunity.
Storytelling demonstrates your impact in a way that connects with your audience’s emotions. This can attract new donors to your cause!
Pro tip: If you’re telling stories about your nonprofit’s work, you need to consider how to gather those stories ethically. Check out our guide to ethical nonprofit storytelling to learn tips and guidelines to make storytelling work for you.
Donor acquisition cost is the price you pay to convince a potential donor to make a gift to your organization.
You can think of this as simply all the expenses attributed to acquiring a new donor. This can include expenses to third-party vendors, postage, staff salaries, and other fundraising-related costs.
If you are a small nonprofit (less than five staff or small revenues), you are better off calculating your donor acquisition cost without including salaries or overhead costs. If you are a large nonprofit (larger staff, larger revenues) you should calculate donor acquisition costs both ways, with and without salaries and overhead costs.
It’s very important for nonprofits to stay mindful of the donor acquisition cost as they implement various fundraising strategies.
This is because when you acquire a donor you want to know not only which channel they came through, but also what the expense was to acquire them. That way, when you calculate your donor lifetime value, you’ll be able to determine which fundraising activities are worth investing more in and which are worth moving away from.
If your organization has an in-person component, whether you have a headquarters space or regularly attend community events, a donation kiosk is the best way to boost donor acquisition. People interacting with your organization in-person are more likely to be interested in your mission – but they can only give if you have an easy way to accept their donation.
The Donorbox Live™ Kiosk app turns a tablet and card reader into a powerful donation magnet. Accept gifts with cards, smartphones, and smartwatches, making giving quick and easy in our increasingly cashless world.
Plus, donors have the option of sharing their name and email addresses, allowing you to steward that relationship and turn one-time donors into long-term supporters.
Get Started with Donorbox Live™ Kiosk
Acquiring donors isn’t as simple as it sometimes seems. Generating positive impressions and progressing towards fundraising goals can be difficult, especially when the pressure is high and deadlines are tight.
The core of donor acquisition is understanding your audience, sending out a convincing message, providing value, and building a donor-focused approach.
Remember that, to acquire donors, you need to ensure their donations are processed smoothly and efficiently – so don’t forget about a donation management system!
If you want to learn more about fundraising, visit the Donorbox Nonprofit Blog for more tips and resources. Subscribe to our newsletter for the best of the blog delivered to your inbox every month.
Ilma Ibrisevic is a content creator and nonprofit writer. She’s passionate about meaningful work, sustainability, and social movements. If she’s not working, she’s obsessing over coffee or cooking. You can connect with her on Linkedin.
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Ilma Ibrisevic