Generalizing Your Mission Won’t Help Fundraising

Fundraising to support nonprofit missions is about describing a need in the community, making a case for the validity of your nonprofit’s solution to that need and sharing the information in a way that compels people to care. 

Nonprofits with missions that exist to serve very specific or unique populations include organizations that: 

• Deliver supportive services to people who are blind or have low vision
• Focus on health concerns that almost exclusively affect people of a specific race
• Offer counseling services to people who are nonbinary
• Have a sole purpose to spay and neuter feral cats. 

To fundraise to support a specific mission effectively, your organization must first define its audience.

Closed and Open Constituencies

When considering who might be interested in supporting your specific mission, first determine whether your supporters constitute an open or closed constituency. This delineates how broad or narrow a group or audience may be interested in something. 

An open constituency is one where almost anyone could be interested in the mission. An example of this would be the Red Cross (many countries have their own branch of the Red Cross). Most people on Earth are at risk of experiencing some form of natural disaster — a hurricane, wildfire, earthquake, flood or some other calamity. The Red Cross responds with aid in the aftermath of all such disasters. But it also responds to help families who’ve lost everything in housefires. 

Additionally, the organization teaches CPR and other health- and safety-related classes, and, in some regions, provides support services to military families and facilitates blood donations. There is even an international Red Cross group — the International Committee of the Red Cross — that delivers aid specifically in war zones. You can see that almost anyone could have experienced, or know someone who has experienced, the need for one of these services. So the Red Cross has a very open constituency.

A closed constituency has a much narrower audience. For example, a private college preparatory school in a specific county and state in the U.S. that charges admission fees is likely to have far fewer people who have an organic interest in supporting its mission philanthropically. Fundraising for such a school is likely to focus on parents, grandparents, alumni and businesses whose target client matches the profile of the families whose children attend the school. You could also argue that the community where the school is located sees financial benefits from the business and tourism the school generates. 

The big difference is that almost anyone could be interested in supporting the Red Cross, but far fewer people are likely to want to give philanthropic gifts to the private school. It is important for your nonprofit to understand who your audience is and whether it is a closed or open constituency, and to then target your messaging accordingly. 

Truth in Fundraising

Nonprofits that have a very narrow or closed group of people who are likely to use their services also means that they are more likely to have a narrow or closed group of people who are interested in supporting the mission philanthropically. 

My advice to those organizations is to own it. Know who your audience is and commit to centering your communications on them. Boards of directors, nonprofit executives and development professionals can sometimes feel compelled to find as many people as possible who might have even the remotest interest in their organization’s mission. Driving this thought is the idea that the more people they reach, the more money they will raise. In fact, the opposite is more apt to be the case.

If your nonprofit serves a very small and specific group, put your effort and resources into communicating in the best way possible with the people who have some connection to or interest in the mission. 

I’ve encountered organizations that try to broaden their reach by blurring the lines of their mission. For example, instead of saying, “We deliver life-improving supportive services to people living with multiple sclerosis in Athena County,” they try to expand interest by saying something like, “We help make the quality of life better for all people in Athena County.” 

If you think that those are two very different things, you are right! In an attempt to widen their fundraising audience from a closed constituency to an open one, the organization has watered down the truth about who they serve and what they do so much that no one will actually understand what they’re being asked to support. 

Trying to be everything to everyone eventually leads to not being enough for the people you really exist to help. Don’t sugarcoat it; if you serve people of color between the ages of 12 and 24 in Arizona in some specific way, then say that! 

Nonprofits bring art to the world, they help conserve the environment, and they provide the social safety net that many people need to survive. All of those things are noble and important, so when your organization is telling your story in effort to secure philanthropic support, make sure you’re addressing the right audience and use language that describes what you truly do. Don’t generalize or water it down. Find the people that have, or could have, a connection to your mission and focus on telling your story well. 

The preceding post was provided by an individual unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of NonProfit PRO.