Track These 5 Donor Insights to Guide Your Next Nonprofit Fundraiser
By Dave Martin of CharityEngine
From personalization tips to fun event ideas, there’s no shortage of fundraising guidance for nonprofit leaders. However, the key to maximizing fundraising revenue is understanding donors’ motivations, meaning your team needs a unique approach that prioritizes what you know about your supporters.
Because your constituents are unique to your organization, delving into their data can help you personalize your messaging. Tracking specific donor insights can empower fundraisers to make strategic decisions, increase donor satisfaction, and boost contributions. While many data points can be analyzed, these five will give you crucial and actionable information.
1. Donation Frequency and Amount
Analyzing the frequency and average amount of donations can reveal the most and least engaged donors, and those two groups should receive very different messages.
Here are some key donation trends your nonprofit should monitor:
Recurring gifts: A strong recurring giving program is the lifeblood of a successful nonprofit because it provides consistent and sustainable income. Measure the number of recurring gifts your nonprofit receives to determine financial health and tweak your strategies as needed.
One-time donations: Tracking singular donations may help your nonprofit identify what motivated a donor to give. For instance, did a donor contribute at the end of the year? Perhaps your end-of-year giving campaign resonated with them, or they felt more charitable around the holidays.
Average donation amount: Monitoring the average donation amount will give you insight into how much your campaigns appeal to donors. A gradual decline might suggest a change in messaging or approach.
Year-over-year (YOY) donation growth per donor: This critical metric helps you evaluate donor retention and loyalty. If you see consistent growth, that donor is engaged, and your relationship is strong. If you see a decline, it might indicate donor dissatisfaction or disengagement, and you might consider targeted re-engagement outreach.
Tacking these trends over time gives your nonprofit insight into donor behavior. With this data, you can craft personalized appeals that align with individual giving patterns.
2. Preferred Giving Channels
Knowing which channels different donor segments prefer is essential for effective fundraising. Recognizing these preferences allows organizations to optimize fundraising campaigns for the channels where their high-level donors are most active.
You might connect with high-level donors through:
Your website: Highlighting impact stories and offering a clear path to donating can capture their attention and make giving easy.
Social media channels (even LinkedIn!): Particularly if your audience is younger, social media channels offer ways to share updates immediately and build relationships.
Direct mail: More traditional donors will appreciate personal letters or high-quality printed materials.
Exclusive events: Galas, auctions, events, and donor appreciation gatherings allow for meaningful connections and stronger relationships, leading to increased donor loyalty.
Segmenting your donors by their preferred channels for tailored communications and campaigns ensures your outreach feels relevant and personal, fostering relationships and increasing giving.
3. Donor Engagement Beyond Giving
Tracing non-monetary engagement offers insight into how donors connect with your mission and highlights those who might not have the resources to contribute now but are still engaged. Other types of engagement to track include event attendance, volunteer participation, and social media interactions.
For instance, CharityEngine explains that an all-in-one constituent relationship management (CRM) system can track non-monetary engagement, such as:
Advocacy: Metrics can include the number of petitions signed, advocacy emails sent, campaign shares on social media, or successful initiatives.
Events: Track event registrations, attendance, and feedback. Other metrics include volunteer registration and shifts worked.
Direct mail campaigns: Monitor response rates to direct mail, tracking responses to your call to action. This might be returning a card or envelope via mail or scanning a QR code to visit your donation page.
Email: Standard email metrics, such as open rates, click-through rates, and replies, indicate how your messaging resonates. Unsubscribes are a clear signal you shouldn’t ignore!
These tools provide insights into key types of engagement, such as email opens, advocacy participation, event attendance, etc. They allow nonprofits to identify trends and take action.
If your CRM offers dashboards, you’ll have the data at your fingertips to quickly identify trends. You can also compile this data in an “engagement scorecard” that captures/scores each donor's level of non-monetary involvement for a more comprehensive view of their loyalty.
4. Donor Demographics and Interests
Understanding donor demographics enables nonprofits to craft highly personalized messaging and content. Knowing your donors' age, location, or professional background helps you design campaigns that resonate with their unique interests and motivations.
This means that personalized outreach fosters stronger connections. The proof is in the numbers—consider these findings from Getting Attention’s marketing statistics:
72% of people report that they’ll only engage with personalized messages.
Segmenting digital campaigns produces up to 760% more revenue than non-segmented campaigns.
Emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
Donor demographics and interests support relational fundraising, a strategy focused on building long-term, genuine relationships with donors. To implement this concept, nonprofits can connect with donors individually rather than en masse. You can also design donor journeys that prioritize meaningful interactions instead of transactional appeals. Keeping it human can have a substantial impact.
5. Direct Feedback
Traditional fundraisers involve understanding donor preferences and creating a surface-level campaign accordingly. For example, do your donors like events? Traditional fundraising practices would urge you to host an auction or a raffle.
To stand out from the crowd and truly engage donors in your next fundraiser, your team needs a completely different approach. Knowing donor motivations enables you to craft messages and campaigns that resonate profoundly and develop genuine connections between the donor and your nonprofit.
Some donors are inspired by personal connections, such as knowing someone affected by your mission. Others may give for social recognition or tax benefits, or impact stories might be a motivator.
Conduct surveys or make post-donation calls to gather insights into donor motivations and satisfaction with their giving experience. You can ask them why they gave and what they value about your nonprofit, and you can use these insights to develop highly personalized campaigns that resonate with donors and help you build genuine connections.
Use nonprofit fundraising software to track these insights and generate reports about donor behavior. The right tool will offer a robust library of features that help your team interact with its donor data for more informed fundraising decisions.
This guest post was written by Dave Martin.
Dave Martin is the VP of Marketing for CharityEngine. He is a digital marketing expert with a unique combination of nonprofit and for-profit experience. Earlier in his career, Dave worked in global telecommunications marketing, product management, and product development both in the United States and Europe. Dave has a BA from the University at Buffalo, an MIA from Columbia University, and an MA from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Leuven, Belgium.
