Donor Engagement Strategies to Help Your Nonprofit Retain Support
What is Donor Engagement?
Donor engagement is the way we choose to build and maintain relationships with donors. Effective donor engagement is essential for boosting retention rate and maintaining a sustainable attrition rate.
Retention rate is the percentage of donors that your organization keeps over a set period of time. High retention rates lead to reliable long-term support and an engaged culture of aligned supporters.
Attrition rate is the percentage of donors that your organization loses over a set period of time. High attrition rates signal that nonprofits have to work twice as hard to reach and attract new supporters.
Reaching new donors can be a challenge. As nonprofits, it’s easy to think the big hurdle is getting our message out. If only people knew about our work, they couldn’t help but support it…
There’s a certain amount of truth to this thinking. Reaching more people certainly improves your chances of reaching more aligned and inclined prospects. And from there, you’re only a few well-placed communications away from securing donations and a handful of new supporters.
Mission accomplished, right?
Unfortunately not.
Reaching new supporters ought to be a part of every nonprofit’s communications strategy, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of nurturing current supporters.
Eventually, donors who don’t feel appreciated begin to trickle away, and you have to put that much more time and effort into reaching new people when it would have been simpler to retain those you already had.
Below, we’ve included a few ideas for ways you can connect with supporters and improve donor retention, all while building a more engaged and positive culture at your nonprofit.
Tip #1: Segment Your Donor List
Your supporters aren’t all the same. They come from a wide range of age, wealth, and social demographics, and their interests and motivations are similarly diverse. So why do we communicate as though they’re all the same?
Sending everything we have to the same list of people without any attempt to personalize it can start to feel like junk mail: impersonal and irrelevant.
Before you can begin personalizing communications, however, you have to know the various groups you’re talking to. That’s where donor segmentation and donor personas come in handy.
Imagine having the ability to serve your supporters with personalized content that aligns with their individual means and interests. When it comes to communications, relevance trumps frequency.
To segment your donor list, begin by compiling the following list of donor signals:
Donation history (frequency, term, amount)
Donation method (online, direct mail, etc)
Communication preferences
Events attended
Hours volunteered
Email subscription status
Email open rate
Email click-through rate
Social media following status
Social media interactions
Look for patterns in this information, and use those patterns to begin segmenting donors into groups. Once you’ve done this, it can be helpful to distill each group’s characteristics into individual personas that give you a clearer picture of whom you’re speaking to.
Check out this post for instructions on how to create donor personas.
Tip #2: Demonstrate Your Impact to Donors
One thing that all donors are interested in is your impact. They care about the work you’re doing, otherwise, they wouldn’t have donated in the first place. Many of them think of their donations as investments, and your impact as a form of return.
Donors like to be assured that their money is being used for the purposes they intended, so by communicating impact, you’re helping build trust and engagement.
A monthly newsletter is one simple and effective way of doing this. By sharing relevant stories, photos, and information about the work you’re doing and the people you serve, you’re providing donors a window inside your organization, allowing them to feel more connected to the work you do.
Newsletters can also be a good place to begin generating thought leadership content, as well as periodic calls for volunteers and/or donations. Be thoughtful in how you integrate these calls-to-action into your newsletter though; you don’t want it to wind up competing with dedicated fundraising campaigns and compounding donor fatigue.
Tip #3: Give Donors a Reason to Engage
Communicating impact is important, but if you only focus on impact, you risk leaving your audiences with nothing to do. Be sure to remind them from time to time that you are an organization with specific needs that they can help with. We find that transparency helps build trust while providing critical context for future donation requests.
Consider drafting an annual case for support that communicates the importance of the work you do, your impact, as well as what you need in order to maintain and/or expand your organization’s impact in the upcoming year. This can also be a great resource to share with new and prospective donors.
Tip #4: Create Opportunities for Donors to Get Involved
Studies show that people who volunteer at an organization are 66% more likely to donate than those who do not. There are a lot of potential reasons for this, but one is the fact that volunteering creates a tangible bond between your supporters, your work, and the people you serve.
Consider hosting volunteer days or other engagement events that give donors an opportunity to strengthen their connection to your organization and improve the likelihood that they’ll continue to support it in the future.
Tip #5: Prioritize Community
Communities get things done. Wherever people invest in one another and a cause, incredible things are possible. In addition to creating an enhanced sense of belonging and purpose, community also introduces an element of social capital that can be a powerful motivator for donors.
There are many ways to promote a sense of community among supporters: Facebook groups, volunteer days, fundraising events, luncheons, galas, informal meetups … It could be as simple as a weekly callout on social media.
Building a community doesn’t have to be its own separate agenda. Rather, think of community-building as an important dimension of everything you do, from email to fundraising to mission implementation. Your goal should be to find ways of activating the community mindset as much and as often as possible.
Tip #6: Show Donors and Supporters Your Appreciation
This ought to go without saying, but while each nonprofit may have their own way of showing gratitude to supporters, very few have implemented comprehensive systems for doing so.
Email automations are a good place to start—this is an easy way to make sure every person who makes a donation receives a note of gratitude. You can make them more personal by having slightly different messages for different donor levels. But wherever it’s possible, there is still a lot to be said for a personal touch.
A handwritten note, postcard, or even a phone call can leave a lasting impression on donors. Depending on the volume, however, these kinds of tasks can be daunting for most directors. Consider having board members help with some of this work.
Another donor appreciation idea that leverages the concept of social capital is having a donor wall, club, or society which entitles members to exclusive events or materials.
All About the Details
There are dozens—if not hundreds—of ways to engage with donors, and utilizing them strategically will make a drastic impact on your nonprofit’s donor retention rate.
In an ideal world, donors would continue supporting organizations for the work they do alone, and some certainly do. But you don’t want to miss out on all of the others just because you didn’t engage them on the back end. Focus on showing your appreciation and you will build a culture of support that endures for years to come.
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