For too many nonprofits, the search for hidden major donors often misses a large swath of potential revenue in the form of non-donors. These are people who care deeply about your cause yet have never given, but possess the wealth to give big. And the good news is, they’re already your ‘supporters’.
How can this be?
It’s quite simple actually. Not everyone who can give and who even wants to give has already given. Old-school methodologies like wealth screening and RFM largely depend on past giving history and whatever data they can scrape from public sources. Financial data is often outdated. And past history only exists for people who have given.
You may be sitting on a trove of untapped wealth among your existing ‘supporters’. These are people who deeply care about your cause but haven’t donated to support it… yet.
Research Confirms the Reality of Untapped Wealth
The 2021 US Trust Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy surveyed households with more than $1 million net worth – not counting their home value. It also surveyed people who make more than $200k per year. Look at these findings:
Wealthy people volunteer
The study found that 30.4% of high-net-worth individuals volunteer. It’s worth noting that the previous study, from 2016, found that 49.7% volunteer. The drop is likely due to the sharp decline in social participation during covid, so the earlier number is probably more aligned with reality.
Either way, that’s a lot of wealthy people giving up their time to help organizations they care about.
They volunteer with multiple nonprofits
Consider this group of wealthy volunteers. 46% of those who volunteer report volunteering with just a single organization. But look how many volunteer with more:
- 30.3% volunteer with two organizations
- 12.1% volunteer with three
- 4.0% volunteer with four
- 7.5% volunteer with five
These are astounding figures. This means a large number of wealthy people are giving their time to multiple nonprofits. Are they giving money to all these organizations too, or just volunteering?
One likely reason wealthy people volunteer at so many places is because they’re evaluating which causes and organizations they want to commit to long-term. And that includes giving money. Many of these people aren’t giving money yet – just time. They’re seeing how the organization operates, how effective they are, what the leadership is like, and how they partner with their community.
Do you have wealthy volunteers who haven’t yet donated? If your organization has a lot of volunteers, there’s a pretty strong chance that you have a few of these.
Wealthy volunteers give more
The study found that affluent volunteers give more than twice as much ($20,838) as those who do not volunteer ($9,047).
So if you have wealthy donors who aren’t volunteering, consider the potential of what your wealthy volunteers who aren’t yet donating might do if they started giving.
This is likely to happen if they remain engaged, because the 2016 version of this study found that 84.3% of wealthy volunteers give to the same organizations they volunteer with. And once again, they give 56% more than people of similar wealth who don’t volunteer.
The bottom line is obvious:
Your volunteers are valuable. And your wealthy volunteers are far more valuable – even compared to your non-volunteer wealthy donors.
So the question once again is, how many of your volunteers are wealthy? And how many of those wealthy volunteers aren’t donating anything even close to their wealth capacity?
Who Is More Likely to Give?
Think of it this way:
Suppose you have two supporters. One gives $100 monthly as a recurring donor. The other has been a volunteer for many years but has never given money.
Both these people are immensely valuable for multiple reasons. But which one is capable of giving a transformative gift?
The answer is – you can’t tell from this information. The only way to know is to engage them on a more personal level, and start collecting qualitative information – the kind of data the wealth screeners and RFM analyses can’t touch.
This is one of the most valuable outcomes of using MarketSmart’s engagement fundraising platform. See how the automation helps pre-qualify donors.
Places You Can Find Non-Donating Major Donor Prospects
Volunteers are just one type of supporter who can be a hidden major donor hiding in plain sight. There are numerous others. The question is: are you engaging all these types of supporters in such a way that you will be able to consistently identify and pre-qualify the major donors among them?
Most nonprofits fail miserably at this.
Consider these categories of supporters:
Email and SMS subscribers
Some people subscribe to your digital content for years and never give any money. Then, one day, they make a sizable gift to a campaign, or they show up at an event and give a couple thousand dollars.
Is there more where that came from? Can you find out without being pushy and driving them away?
Print subscribers
Print subscribers – especially those who have requested this type of communication – are likely people who want to stay in touch with your organization and know what’s happening. They care, and they probably read what you send more than email subscribers do, on average.
Are you doing anything more with them than just sending print newsletters each month?
Downloaders
When you make content available for download online, most people will not request it. It’s an act of interest to go out of your way to request content like special reports, exclusive videos, and stories of impact that require an email opt-in to see.
These are people who want to know more than the average person does. What do you do with them after they download your content? Anything?
Participants
Participants are people who show up. It could be a fundraising event, a community event like a race or a scavenger hunt, or a work party. This is different from volunteering, but the type of person who participates in these things comes from a similar mindset. They want to meet people, see what’s happening, and get involved.
Some of them are also capable of giving extraordinary gifts, but they’re holding back on that until they can evaluate your organization, and participating is a great way for them to do that.
Do you have any sort of follow-up process for participants?
Social media followers
Followers can be fickle. But you can also amass a lot of them, and if you post regularly, you can stay in touch with them from a distance. It’s likely you have a number of wealthy followers who are just checking you out for the moment.
Can you inspire them to a higher level of engagement?
Employees and staff
It’s easy to write off your staff as non-major donors because they work for you. And nonprofit employees aren’t typically people who have great wealth. But, there are exceptions.
And more importantly, they know people. They have families and friends. They might one day inherit wealth. However it happens, these people can find themselves with access to wealth, and your organization can benefit.
Advocates
These are people who do things like sign petitions, attend marches, write to political leaders, and serve at protests and rallies.
Is there a way to engage some of these people after the advocacy moment has passed?
Engage, Don’t Assume
Again, let’s imagine a scenario:
You have a passionate advocate for your cause who is now in her 50s. She has no kids, has volunteered, advocated, followed, and subscribed. But she’s never donated because she doesn’t have much wealth capacity.
But one day, her parents die and she gets a seven-figure inheritance. What will she do with it?
If you haven’t been engaging her with an eye toward major giving, you will likely never even know about her sudden influx of wealth. The AI bots and wealth screeners will completely ignore her.
You can play this same game with all types of people. Wealth isn’t permanent. It comes and goes. Businesses suddenly grow after years of middling success. A risk-taking entrepreneur finally hits a big deal and sells his business for a fortune. Years and years of training, education, and debt one day turn into big wealth and a long and stable career.
Wealth shifts.
People who don’t have it now will have it in ten years.
Are you engaging them? Or are you assuming they’ll always be who they are now, because they don’t show up on the RFM list?
Tech-Enabled Donor Discovery
The way to capture more of these hidden major donors is to engage more of your supporters using automated communications that they agree to receive.
MarketSmart’s system exists for this reason.
With a slow and steady approach, our automated platform sends surveys, interacts with supporters in a highly personalized individual manner, and conducts preliminary qualification to find potential major donors among your many supporters – including those who aren’t giving anything now.
With our system, your supporters will share qualitative information about themselves that helps you to know who is capable of giving a big gift, and when they’re open and interested in doing so.
You will catch more major donors, and miss fewer of them.
Want to see how it works?
Watch this video for a quick introduction
Related Resources:
- 6 Reasons Why Major Donor Prospects Ignore Your Outreach Efforts
- A Good Problem – What to Do If You Have Too Many Pre-qualified Major Donor Prospects
- The Smarter Way to Prioritize Your Major Donor Outreach: Let Prospects Reveal Themselves to You
- 5 Outcomes You Can Expect When You Reach Out to Major or Legacy Donor Prospects
