Prioritize These 4 High-Yield Individual Giving Strategies to Address Threats to Your Nonprofit

In response to uncertainty, organizations often react unwisely. As a result, everyone — the organization, constituents and beneficiaries — suffers. To effectively weather the storms threatening nonprofits today requires a thoughtful, proactive stance. Avoid these reflexive reactions:

1. Hunkering down in your little hole in response to a feeling of overwhelm. You’ll short-change your constituents and dig a bigger and bigger hole. Many organizations that tried this during the COVID-19 pandemic still haven’t dug themselves out. 
2. Doing less in a frenzy of cost-cutting. Instead, focus on growing revenue. Alas, marketing and fundraising are often the first budget items to go, yet these are actually revenue — not cost — centers. Hope for the future, not a hindrance. As Jeff Brooks wrote, “Cutting fundraising is the worst possible action. It will prolong your financial pain and decimate your long-term viability.” 
3. Doing everything in a mad rush to juggle too many balls in the air. As the inimitable Seth Godin recently wrote, “Attention doesn’t scale, no matter how hard we try.” 

So, what should you do?

Thoughtfully Reframe Your Approach 

People seek those who can lead them to a better, more optimistic, more purposeful place. It’s time to dedicate yourself to your fundamental role as a philanthropy facilitator. It’s mostly not about money, but about “philos,” meaning “love” plus “anthropy” meaning “of humanity.”

Philanthropy facilitation lifts people up. It doesn’t hit them up. People want to give and crave community and purpose -- especially during times they feel isolated or helpless. It’s one of the reasons they reach out to social benefit organizations. 

Related story: 3 Commitments Nonprofit Leaders Can Make in Times of Great Uncertainty

The philanthropic equation is synergistic. Don’t let fear drag you down. You have a mission and purpose. Donors can help you get there. Your donors are looking for purpose. You can help them find it. By fostering the symbiotic relationship through authentic, proactive communication, you weather any storm as an energized collective. 

With people who want to repair the world, there’s strength in numbers, so you do it together.

Prioritize Philanthropy Facilitation From Individuals

Though they are tracked separately, individual giving and bequests combined for 75% of all giving last year, according to Giving USA. While a slightly shrinking piece of the giving pie, no other income source came close to individual giving (lifetime and bequests).

There’s nothing more effective than growing the number of individual donors who will stick with you, in good times and bad. With individuals, you can build personal relationships — the foundation of sustainable philanthropy. A large and growing group of individual donors is not only a source of current income — it includes people who can uplift philanthropy to dependable monthly giving, high-dollar giving and bequests.

Starting now, shift emphasis (and budget) toward these four individual donor engagement strategies. These are listed in order of what will give you the biggest, most immediate return — and an even bigger long-term return. If you’re already doing these things, do them more. If you’re not, begin. With each strategy, be sure to: 

• Develop all the necessary skills (seek consultants, mentors, conferences and/or courses).
• Build a team (recruit or assign).
• Develop a written plan (goals, objectives, strategies, tactics and assignment of responsibilities).
• Ensure oversight and accountability.
• Budget to fulfill the plan. 

Otherwise, you’ll run across the Peter Drucker truism: “Plans are just good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” 

1. Major Gifts

Begin with the folks closest and most loyal to you — and ask them to give. They love you already, but can’t know your current situation and most pressing needs unless you tell them. While that’s always true, it’s never more so than in times of tumultuous change. 

Stop thinking of asking as an imposition. Asking may actually be one of the most donor-centered things you can do. Folks must be made aware, specifically, that you need their help now, how much you hope they’ll give and what the impact of their philanthropy will be. Otherwise, they’ll go someplace else that makes them feel needed and gives them a feel good opportunity to enact their highest values.

Don’t just mail appeals. Get personal. Set meetings and find a match between the values you enact and those they hold dear. People will be inundated with appeals right now. So, stand out by telling them they’re too important to you not to connect face to face. 

You’ve got to be able to read their body language, notice when their eyes light up, change course when they close down and fold their arms across their chest and just generally connect on a human level. If they’re amenable, lunch or coffee at your place or theirs is terrific. Video conferencing also works and enables you to meet with more prospects in a day. Don’t be shy about conveying urgency if you’ve experienced cutbacks or face crippling uncertainty. Let donors save you now, rather than send flowers upon your demise.

2. Mid-Level Gifts

Dig into your database to find donors who give above-average contributions for your organization with little to no cultivation. Too many organizations fail to take their loyal donors, nestled in the middle of their database, seriously. This causes these donors to fail to renew, upgrade or make a major or legacy gift. The amount of money left on the table is tantamount to fundraising malpractice. Both your organization and your donors get short-changed. 

Plan to help mid-level donors explore their already-expressed interest further. Fill up your major gift pipeline by brainstorming what you can do to make them feel special. Assure your donor love and loyalty plan is followed by putting a donor-centric staffer on this task, even if just part-time. 

3. Monthly Gifts

Ramping up monthly giving should be a no-brainer, since it naturally increases retention and average gift size. You need a dependable source of income to sustain programming to address problems that never go away; weather current anticipated and unanticipated storms; and plan for the future. Retention rates increase substantially as donors give more frequently. Retention among those who give two gifts is double that of single gift donors, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. 

Yet a majority of nonprofits, especially in the U.S., are quite passive about soliciting recurring gifts. Wrap some certainty into your funding outlook! Make monthly giving a prominent giving option. Present this option to donors on a regular basis, across multiple channels. You may not get the immediate impact as from ramping up major and mid-level giving, but over time it’s more than worth the investment.

4. Donor Retention

The individuals who already give to you are your best prospects. Prioritizing donor acquisition at the expense of retention (at a cost of roughly $1.25 to acquire $1), will drive you bankrupt. Over the past decade, on average, less than 20% of first-time donors renew, according to the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. If you don’t proactively focus on increasing the lifetime value of new supporters and creating a distinct strategy to secure a second gift, your fundraising results will always be three steps forward, two steps back.

I implore you to develop a gratitude-based donor love and loyalty program as a core fundraising strategy. Be thoughtful and methodical about this. If you don’t, you’re going to continue recruiting donors at a loss — so many, in fact, that mega-rich donors will not be able to replace the dollars lost by the decline in donor population. You can fix this, but you have to commit. 

The world is bending in a new direction. If you want to weather the headwinds, you need to be able to bend as well. Status quo fundraising and marketing is not going to set you up for success in the current environment. Now is the time to re-evaluate your primary fundraising strategies. Above all, develop trust through honesty in your communications and diligent follow-through. While you may not be able to control the external environment, you can control the way you respond. Be courageous; commit to hope. 

The preceding content was provided by a contributor unaffiliated with NonProfit PRO. The views expressed within may not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of the staff of NonProfit PRO.