Fundraising Lessons Learned From Haiti

FS: How can fundraisers keep new or first-time disaster-relief donors, who might not have donated normally, engaged?

SM: One of the things that we've looked at in the past — even prior to the Haiti earthquake — is what we term "episodic giving," where it's an emergency, a disaster and you bring in a tremendous amount of new donors because of the attention, people wanting to help out, but maybe they weren't a traditional donor to any of these organizations. What we've found with episodic donors is typically some of these organizations are able to retain them for two to three years following one of these major events, but a lot of nonprofits struggle with retaining that episodic donor long term for a variety of reasons.