Major donor discovery and cultivation depend on far more than quantitative data like wealth capacity and giving history. In fact, it is the qualitative donor data that gives you the valuable personal insights into each individual supporter that enable you to deliver emotional resonance between the donor and your nonprofit.
This is how the biggest transformative gifts happen. Not because they can. Not for tax benefits.
The biggest gifts come when donors feel a profound sense of connection with your organization and that giving to your mission will help them experience rich, profound, emotional and cathartic satisfaction. They feel this most when you help them become the person they have always wanted to be.
Qualitative data is the path to outcomes like this.
What is qualitative donor data?
It refers to anything that isn’t numerical or quantifiable.
How do you collect qualitative data?
The best way is to engage donors and supporters enough to build trust so they divulge personal information – qualitative data – that enables you to go even deeper with them.
What you’re looking for is for them to discover the story they want to tell about their own lives, and that giving a big gift is an essential part of that story.
Here are many of the most valuable forms of qualitative information you can gather about donors and supporters.
Autobiographical information
This isn’t just about where they went to school, favorite vacations, or when they got married. Those things matter, but the most valuable autobiographical information you can gather from supporters is anything that reveals why they care about your organization, and especially how their life story intersects with your cause.
What moments and experiences in their life led them to you?
You can’t learn this type of information in one survey, or even in one conversation. You can start there. But it takes ongoing engagement, because most of the time the donors themselves don’t fully know or understand their own life story at this level. They need to discover it with you.
Who inspired them to care about your mission?
A key aspect of a donor’s story is the person or people who inspired them or influenced them to care about your mission. It could be a family member, a teacher, someone they met on a trip, and even a news story or someone like a nurse or mentor who changed their life.
Again, the donor needs to know this too, and they might not realize it until you engage with them in ongoing conversation – either in person or through fundraising automation like MarketSmart. Usually, you have to start with automation because you can do this at scale for thousands of supporters at various stages of their donor journeys.
Then, later on your gift officers can take over and make the conversation more personal.
Motivations for giving – what the donor wants
What lights their fire? Why do they want to give and help?
Do they want to see kids learn more or have better lives? Do they want to cure a disease, help turn around a community or a nation? Do they want to fight injustice? Or, are their motivations more personal like defining their public reputation or achieving a measure of immortality by being remembered for something?
Donor motivations are one of the most valuable types of qualitative donor data.
How they rank your organization
Winning major gifts is hard when a donor cares about multiple organizations. You need to know if you’re the only one in their heart, or if they support other nonprofits too.
More importantly, even if they do support others, how do they rank yours compared to the others. If they support five, but you’re number one, that tells you you’ve got the inside track on their biggest major gifts. But if you’re number three or four, you’re going to have a harder time winning their biggest gifts – regardless of their wealth capacity.
That’s one reason quantitative data is so limiting. You need to know more than just the numbers.
Desire to see your organization continue
How much does the ongoing influence on people’s lives through your nonprofit matter to your supporters? For those who strongly desire this, you’ll have a much greater chance of winning a big gift.
Aspects of your mission that resonate
Many nonprofits have many different programs, and not all of them resonate with all your supporters. They have favorites, the parts that matter the most to them for often very personal and powerful reasons.
You want to know what those are for each supporter so you can more effectively communicate and motivate them to continue engaging and eventually giving a major gift.
Timing for when to give
It’s very common for wealthy donors to not be able or willing to give at certain times. Maybe it’s a business owner who just invested in a big expansion or piece of equipment. Maybe they just paid for their kid to attend an expensive college. Maybe they’re just not feeling it right now.
The reasons don’t matter. What does matter is that you want to know when each donor is feeling open and ready to give. All the wealth capacity in the world doesn’t matter if it’s not the right time in the donor’s life to make a gift.
Types of gifts they can give
Major donors can give in numerous ways. There are many ways to give cash, from all the electronic options to simple checks and credit cards. But most wealthy donors can also give assets instead of cash, and usually, the value of their assets far exceeds what they have in their traditional bank accounts.
Knowing this type of qualitative donor data helps you propose gifts more appropriate and personalized to each donor.
One donor might have a traditional IRA and they want to give from that to soften the tax hit. Another might have company stock options and aren’t sure how to use them.
The point of all this is that different major donors have very different financial situations, and these play a very large role in how they can give, and how much. This is essential qualitative information to know. If you just go for the quick cash in the form of a big check, your nonprofit could be missing out on a much larger amount of money – and in a form that is more beneficial for the donor to give.
Career and retirement status
Another item of qualitative donor data to find out is the status of their career. Are they still working? What kind of career do they have? Or, are they retired, and if so, what are they hoping to do during their retirement?
Volunteer history
Many wealthy donors are looking for volunteer opportunities, especially retired wealthy people. Many already do volunteer or have in the past. Knowing this information enables you to understand your prospects better because it provides personalized insight into what matters to them, and how they prefer to make an impact in the world.
Business ownership status
Business owners are a category all their own.
Some are just getting started. These may be in debt or heavily invested in growing their business. Such people aren’t likely to give major gifts now. But, given time, if their business prospers, they can become very influential donors.
Other business owners are already successful, or are growing even more so, merging with other businesses, or selling their businesses. All these scenarios present different opportunities for the supporter to participate in your mission.
Property ownership status
Similar to business ownership, some people own multiple properties. Consider a landlord who has owned a dozen homes and has been renting them for a few decades. But now, he wants to sell a bunch of them to simplify his life. What’s he going to do with all those profits?
If you’ve been consistently engaging with this person, you will know about this because he will have shared it as part of your ongoing automated communication using MarketSmart. You’ll be positioned to talk about a major gift because you have the qualitative data regarding what’s going on in this person’s life regarding their property.
In other situations, the owner can donate the property directly to the nonprofit.
Experience with DAFs or family foundations
People who own Donor Advised Funds or run family foundations already have obvious desire to do something with philanthropy. They have the money, and they have already received the tax benefits. They’re just looking for opportunities to give.
Your first step is simply to know this qualitative data about them. If you know they have a DAF, you can make that part of the discussion. But if you don’t know it, you’re now relying on them to tell you when the topic of giving comes up.
Education level
More educated people tend to give more money than less educated people. One reason for this is because they often have higher net worth, though there are significant exceptions to this. Education level is another relevant piece of qualitative donor data.
Children
Supporters who have large extended families are in a very different position to give compared to ones with small families and only one or two living offspring. Supporters with no children are even more noteworthy because they have no obvious heirs.
This is information you want to know well before you begin discussing the idea of giving a major gift.
Interest in further involvement
Supporters like to participate in a variety of ways besides giving. People who volunteer, participate in events, join boards and committees, or help in other ways are people who care about your mission and who you can build trusting relationships with over many years.
These people can also become major donors, but that may not be their primary interest at this point. Knowing qualitative information like this allows you to meet supporters where they are and build from there.
But if you rely on quantitative data like wealth screening, you’ll find yourself presuming, or even worse, guessing, which supporters are ready to talk about giving big gifts.
Start Engaging Supporters and Collecting Qualitative Data
Supporters who engage and share information like this are people you can build deep, personal, and trusting relationships with. When you see the value of qualitative data, your goals shift from just winning gifts to winning engagement.
It’s more important to attract people to join your process so you can begin collecting valuable data and move them toward pre-qualification and beyond.
As you can imagine, engaging dozens, let alone thousands of donors like this would be very expensive and basically impossible if you relied on humans to do it. But with fundraising automation, you can do this, at scale, and for less than it costs to hire a single gift officer.
What you’d need dozens of gift officers to make happen, you can achieve with a single platform that helps you conduct what we call tech-enabled donor discovery.
That’s just a fancy term for qualitative data collection, or fundraising engagement. That’s the path to more major gifts from a greater swath of your supporters.
See video for how to do fundraising engagement
Related Resources:
- The 4 Habits You Need to Develop for Productive Major Donor Outreach
- The Secret to Major Donor Inspiration Lies in These 7 Challenges
- How to Deepen Your Major Donor Relationships
- How to Help Major Donors Give More By Knowing Their Own Motivations for Giving
