How Audience-Centric Fundraising Boosts Results

By Kalie VanDewater

For years, nonprofits have used donor-centric and community-centric strategies to elevate their fundraising efforts. Now, this has evolved into an audience-centered strategy, according to Nosa Adetiba, deputy director for donor marketing and production at the ACLU.

“It really just means, as the name implies, that you're structuring your fundraising strategy around your donors, around audiences that you choose,” Adetiba said during a session at the Nonprofit Fundraisers Symposium, hosted by Direct Marketing Association of Washington (DMAW) and The Nonprofit Alliance, in Washington, D.C. “It could be as big an audience as your recurring donors, your planned giving donors — or you could go really niche, and look at your new young donors.”

During the session, entitled “Audience Versus Channel: A New Paradigm for Structuring Your Fundraising Team,” Adetiba and Kim Goldsmith-N'Diaye, chief development officer at Orbis International, shared their insights on audience-centered fundraising to help nonprofits evaluate the utility of the fundraising model for their organization and how to implement it.

Audience-Centered Versus Channel-Centered

First and foremost, Adetiba clarified that using an audience-centric approach does not mean channels are unimportant.

“I don't want you to think that what we're saying is that you should not pay attention to your channel performance,” she said. “You absolutely should; still very important. You need to know how your audiences that you've chosen to focus on perform on your different channels. That will help you know where to invest, where to reinvest, where to move investments around.”

An audience-led approach focuses on understanding your donor groups and how they want to be engaged. This is different from a channel-centered approach, where the goal is to maximize performance within each channel.

Additionally, in an audience-centered model, you want to tailor your strategies to the various donor segments instead of specific channels.

At its core, the audience-led model encourages building budgets and channels around your donor segments, rather than building your budgets around channel goals.

“In practice, this really means that the audience needs are focused on audience segments regardless of the channel — and that's how it works for us,” Adetiba said. “Whatever your audience is, all the channels fall under your purview. It means that [audience managers] are responsible for the budgets, for directing on your channel, investments depending on performance, and they're keeping a close eye on all your [key performance indicators] — the [lifetime value], the [return on investment], cost per thousand — and how quickly you break even on each channel, especially for acquisition.”

Why Move to Audience-Centered Fundraising

For Goldsmith-N’Diaye, the biggest reason to follow an audience-centered model is to ensure the donor remains a priority.

“The donor is a key stakeholder,” she said. “It's not to say that other stakeholders aren't important. It's just that this one really is in the center, and whenever you're thinking about messaging, or you're thinking about the channel or trying something, you're thinking about the donor and does this work for the donor?”

Additionally, structuring your fundraising team to focus on your audience can help eliminate silos in your team and drive collaboration, as well as support marketing effectiveness and promote operational efficiency.

That’s not to say this is the right fit for every organization. As Goldsmith-N’Diaye explained, there are both good and bad reasons for aligning to an audience-centered fundraising model.

Goldsmith-N’Diaye cautioned against changing to this fundraising model to fix larger problems — such as boosting lackluster fundraising results or addressing management style or culture — or bringing donors closer to your community. However, moving to this model may be a good fit for your nonprofit if it’s driven by one of these reasons:

Rolling out a new strategy.
Trying to reach new audiences.
Pursuing greater efficiency and trying to lower fundraising costs.
Scaling up or down.
Incorporating new functions.
Pursuing specialization on your team.
Skilling up.
Instituting a new operating model to mobilize resources.

What to Consider When Implementing the Audience-Centered Model

Once you’ve decided to go through with restructuring your fundraising efforts to an audience-centered model, there are several key considerations to evaluate.

One thing to consider is how quickly you plan to implement changes. For some, a progressive change may be best, while Goldsmith-N’Diaye has found it best to do things quickly.

“I'm an advocate of a quick cutover,” she said. “A quick cutover meaning: You announce for a month, and then you get people into their new jobs — the people that are going into new jobs — and you cut over. It can be fairly harsh, especially if an organization has never experienced it. But what it does, it gives you time down the road to bring people along into their new jobs, and to get them really working together with the organization.”

Tying into this, it’s crucial for the people in your organization to get behind the idea. The best way to do this is to emphasize to your staff the importance of their new roles — and to do so continuously.

“You begin to see the fruit about six to 10 months out,” Goldsmith-N’Diaye said. “Because it's a structural change, it will seem chaotic when you're in it, and it will get better as you move through it. You can't go over it. You have to move through it. … You have to just slowly move through it and take people with you.”

Another important factor in switching is making sure your data is in order.

“I think we've all gone through that struggle where your offline database does not talk to your online database — you don't know what's happening,” Adetiba said. “So, it's very hard to look at and measure your new strategy and implement it if your data is just not working. So you have to make sure that your legacy systems either catch up or you find other ways to work around it. … The most important piece — and if you hear nothing else that we say today — do not make any move until you have data-backed decisions, and until your data is in place.”