How to Achieve the Fundraising Trifecta

It has never been more important to make the transition to digital fundraising. If you embrace our current reality and make the necessary adjustments, you have an enormous opportunity to grow your fundraising efforts faster than ever. But if you grasp onto the way things were, you risk being left behind with a dwindling donor base and poorly attended events.

For most nonprofits, making the transition to digital fundraising is much easier said than done. It’s an entirely new skillset presenting many unique challenges to tackle. After six years running a digital fundraising software company, I’ve made it my mission to share the principles for successful online fundraising with as many fundraising professionals as possible to aid in this transition. Trust me—if I can learn how to do this, so can you.

My company’s origin story might sound eerily similar to your nonprofit’s story. You probably know the recipe—passionate person, problem to solve, and just enough naivete to jump in head first. At twenty-five years old, I started Gladitood because I knew a problem existed, and I wanted to help solve it. There was one hang-up though—I didn’t know a thing about fundraising. I didn’t have a single ounce of real-world experience, and had only read one book on the subject. Now, six years later, we’ve helped nonprofits around the country raise millions online.

After working with hundreds of nonprofits, we uncovered a formula for digital fundraising success. Over the last year, we’ve modified this formula to create a system we use with our clients to help them build a donation generating machine. This system’s purpose is to align strategy, messaging, and stewardship to achieve the Fundraising Trifecta—when you’re simultaneously growing your donor base, increasing your average donation, and improving your donor retention.

The principles laid out in this article act as the foundation for this system. They will provide you with a consistent, repeatable process for profiling donors, telling your story, and building better donor relationships. Using these principles will help you build your own donation generating machine. If you want a step-by-step guide to build that machine, you should register for my webinar on November 10 at 2 PM EST.

Principle 1: Build Your Donor Personas

All effective fundraising should begin with donor profiling. Most nonprofits never take the time to profile their ideal donors because they operate with a donor base that functions primarily off of personal relationships. As in-person events continue to be postponed, friends and family of board members and corporate sponsors are less engaged than ever, making that personal relationship strategy a huge vulnerability.

When you want to appeal to an audience digitally, you need to build out your ideal donor personas first. Every donor persona is made up of three main ingredients: Profile, Place, and Promotion.

Profile consists of age, education, likes, dislikes, income, etc. Place consists of geography, as well as where they’re spending their time, attention, and money. And Promotion is knowing where to deliver your message and what to say, based on the persona’s Profile and Place. 

To provide an example, a few years ago Gladitood was tasked to help the St. Louis Zoo raise money to build a breeding facility for an endangered snake species in Armenia. Immediately, we recognized there were a couple very specific donor personas who would be interested in supporting such a cause.

We named our first donor persona Sammy Snake, a 25-65-year-old who had a real affinity for reptiles, especially those in the wild. That was Sammy’s Profile. We knew we’d be able to find Sammy on Facebook (Place) by targeting people who liked reptile affinity groups, and would have to use messaging focused on the species (Promotion). 

We named our second donor persona Armenian Ally, a 25-65-year-old whose family immigrated to America from Armenia. We knew we’d be able to find Ally on Facebook by targeting zip codes densely populated with an Armenian population, and would need to use a message focused more on the country than the species.

After 30 days and barely $100 spent, the St. Louis Zoo reached 101 donors who cared specifically for endangered snakes in Armenia. The campaign was a success, and we owed it to our donor personas.

When you put together informed donor personas, you’re creating a foundation for success for all future campaigns.

Principle 2: Tell Your Story Effectively

Now that you have your donor personas created, you can deliver a message that will feel personal to them. Remember, when you try to speak to everyone, you end up speaking to no one. By customizing your message for each donor persona, you're increasing the odds that your story will resonate with your donor and compel them to take action. Most nonprofits don’t take the time to create custom messaging for each donor persona, so this is a real opportunity to stand out to your donors. Here’s how you do it.

For each donor persona, you need to understand their frustrations, wants, fears, and aspirations. You want to understand these things not only in the context of your cause, but also in the context of their daily lives.

Once you have this understanding, you’re able to weave a story together that touches on each of these things, finally ending with a clear vision for the world they aspire to see, and how their participation brings you one step closer to that reality.

For example, when coronavirus hit our city of St. Louis, MO, the St. Louis Community Foundation sprang into action to create an emergency response fund to help keep critical area nonprofits funded with the resources needed to serve the community through this pandemic.

Our donor persona was straight forward—middle to upper class donors in St. Louis—but our messaging was more difficult. We needed to tell a story that would encourage people to support this new emergency fund instead of giving to their favorite nonprofit. For a city that has felt split-in-half for years, we wrote a video script compelling people to come together to support our community, and we got notable St. Louis celebrities to deliver the message. At the end, Jon Hamm even mentioned how this is what Stan Musial, our city’s most beloved baseball hero, would want. The fund went on to raise several million dollars, and we saw a 40X return on investment with our Facebook ads.

Take the time to create messaging customized for your donor personas. You’ll be glad you did.

Principle 3: Nurture the Relationship

The average donor retention rate on new donors is 45%. Without a plan in place to retain your donors, you will always feel like you’re playing catch-up. Most lapsed donors are due to a total lack of follow-up. The good news is, thanks to marketing automation technology, all your excuses for not following up with your donors have been eliminated.

To knock your stewardship strategy out of the park, you’re going to want to apply what you learned about donor profiling and storytelling in the first two principles.

Our Donor Stewardship system runs through an ever-repeating cycle of reaching out, reminding, and reconnecting.

First, you need to reach out to your donors where they’re most likely to be reached. For donors from 30-60 years old, that could be Facebook or email. For donors under 30 it could be Instagram or text messaging. And for donors over 60, it could be direct mail or a phone call.

Second, once you’ve reached out and have their attention, you need to remind them why they’re getting your message. This is especially important for new donors you acquired as a result of a personal relationship or through an event. This is as simple as “Hi Ryan, I’m reaching out because you made an important donation to our cause last year.”

Lastly, once they understand why you’re communicating with them, you need to reconnect to their emotions. When we donate, even when it’s because of a personal relationship, there’s always an emotional pull at play. You can usually pinpoint it by reviewing the frustrations, wants, fears, and aspirations connected to their donor persona.

When you’re able to create a campaign where all three of these principles are working in unison, wonderful things begin to happen for your cause.

When autumn arrived in St. Louis in 2019, flash flooding came with it, which caused enormous damage to the habitats at The Endangered Wolf Center. They needed to raise $30,000 quickly to repair the habitats, but they couldn’t reach out to their most loyal donors because they had a planned appeal coming up in just a couple weeks.

By working with Gladitood, they were able to pull two lists of prospects—one for lapsed donors, and one for visitors who had never donated before. We created specific messaging for these donor personas which would remind them of their involvement with The Endangered Wolf Center and reconnect to their emotions. After the first 24 hours, we raised $7,000. Over the next six days, the fundraiser would go on to raise more than $38,000 from 406 donors, and over half of those donors were brand new to the organization.

So there you have it, the principles of digital fundraising. It’s not Internet magic. Just good, old-fashioned fundamentals. If you want to learn how to apply these principles to your nonprofit and build your own donation generating machine, please join me for our webinar with GrantStation on November 10 at 2 PM EST. I’ll be providing worksheets to everyone who’s registered and following up with a free, 1-on-1 strategy session over Zoom to dig into the specifics for your nonprofit.