4 Steps to Convert Crisis Donors to Loyal Mission Donors

From the war in Ukraine, to the COVID-19 pandemic to various natural disasters around the world — nonprofits react to crises. Though giving tends to rise around these events, nonprofits often are unable to retain these often one-time donors. If your organization doesn’t have a plan to steward these reactionary donations to make them become more commonplace, it should. This is an especially important focus as the number of donors, the amount of donations and donor retention rates are falling sector wide.

Earlier this week at AFP ICON, current — and former — team members from Detroit Justice Center, a nonprofit dedicated to creating economic opportunities, transforming the justice system and promoting equitable cities, presented the session, “Transitioning Crisis Donors to Mission Donors.” where they shared how the organization built a development department from scratch and worked to retain that influx. 

Keep in mind, these strategies may involve investments on your organization’s part, but it’s possible to do — even for smaller nonprofits and small budgets. For Detroit Justice Center, that meant a leader — Amanda Alexander, the nonprofit’s founder and executive director — willing find the funding to allow for an investment into fundraising for a return on 

“And it helped us grow as an organization in our founding year from a $300,000 budget to over $5 million in year five,” Regina Sharma, development director of the Detroit Justice Center, said. 

Here are the main steps the Detroit Justice Center took over the last two years to renew thousands of donors and grow the organization’s budget $4.7 million as a result.

1. Hire (or Expand) Your Development Team

If you don’t have fundraisers on your team, that’s an obvious first step. If you do, you may need to strengthen the team with new hires depending on your goals. For the Detroit Justice Center, which was founded in 2018, time was crucial since there were approximately 20,000 new donors — many of which might never give again if nothing was done.

"What we know and what the leadership knew at the time is that without a strong fundraising strategy we would run the risk of losing almost all of those donors and that’s where the vision came to hire the first development director,” Douglas Manigault III, CFRE, vice president of development at the State Innovation Exchange and former Detroit Justice Center staffer, said.

In March 2021, Sharma became that development director. She then built out her team over the next year to include an associate director of development, senior development associate and a contract grant writer. In August 2022, she also added a major gifts officer, or leadership gift officer as the Detroit Justice Center named the role.

2. Thank Your Donors

Tenured fundraisers know the importance of stewardship, but when a nonprofit is made up of professionals (lawyers in the Detroit Justice Center’s case) that might not be as obvious. Before the creation of the development department, the Detroit Justice Center staff was not thanking its donors — that is until the team coordinated the inaugural thank-a-thon in the summer of 2021. 

“As a result, we were able to call and send thank-you letters to hundreds of people,” Lejla Bajgoric, associate development director at the Detroit Justice Center, said. “We also, through our development team, produced a stewardship email that summarized the impact we had accomplished over that last year with [donors’] support, so everyone had some sort of touch point from the organization.” 

About 60% of the organization’s 30 employees, which were mostly attorneys with no nonprofit background, participated in the tactic that also served as a way to build a culture of philanthropy within the organization. In October 2022, the nonprofit did the same exercise, obtaining an 85% participation rate. 

3. Create an Annual Giving Communications Strategy

Since the development team remained small, the communications strategy needed to remain doable for its size, so the team created a content calendar that included a bimonthly stewardship letter and mission-specific appeals, among other tactics.

Instead of centering the donor experience, the team opted to use community-centric fundraising principles to avoid harmful effects to the community and allow the organization to have difficult yet necessary mission-related conversations with its donors. 

“We know this is really just a classic case of philanthropy, right?” Manigault said. “We weave in our work priorities with whatever national crisis is going on — be it a war, be it COVID, be it things that are going on in the government to showcase the importance of our work during that crisis.”

4. Build a Sustainable Giving Program

Of the thousands of acquired donors in 2020, 500 committed to a recurring donation. To expand that, the Detroit Justice Center made its biggest investment. 

“They were still crisis donors in the sense that during their philanthropy they were responding to a crisis, but they understood we would need to organize beyond the crisis,” Bajgoric said. “They sort of pioneered this deeper investment that we were hoping to replicate across our one-time donors.”

To do that, the team launched the DJC Freedom Dream Sustainers, its program for recurring donors in March 2022. The program has a tagline, logo and various engagement perks, such as discounted fundraising event tickets and first dibs on volunteer opportunities. 

“Leveraging this program has actually been our No. 1 most successful tactic so far in winning back those lapsed crisis donors,” Bajgoric said.

The team labeled existing sustainers as “founding members” and developed a welcome campaign email series and package, which features a letter, impact report and giveaways. Those elements are now used to welcome all of the nonprofit’s new sustainers. In addition, the program is promoted on its website, in staff email signatures and via a membership drive. Though the membership drive occurred two years after acquisition, it renewed 42% of lapsed donors, with a median gift of $21.28.

"That 42%, that number, what it represents is nowhere near the thousands and thousands of people who came on [as donors] in 2020. but this experience was really enlightening for us, and it did revive our hope and affirm that we do need to continue making the effort to reach out to that group,” Bajgoric said. “There were some people in there who were still really listening and interested. We just needed to find the right channels to re-engage them. When we did, we were finding that they were supporting us and actually they were supporting us at even higher levels."

5. Develop a Major Gifts Program

Aside from transitioning donors to become sustainers, the nonprofit also wanted to upgrade donors in other ways. Within 2022, The Detroit Justice Center, hired its first major gifts officer, began using wealth screening software and created major gift portfolios. 

“Utilizing wealth screening and prospect research helped us to confirm our demographics, which were that our donors were predominantly Gen Z and millennial donors,” Sharma said. “And what we already know about Gen Z and millennial donors … is that they want to invest in the work in a different way. Simply asking for a leadership or major gift isn't enough. We need to identify creative ways to engage with them.”

“Having donors feel part of a movement — not just [feel like] donors to an organization — is so crucial to the process,” she added.