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Do low-dollar donors even matter?
It’s a sensitive topic considering the fact that the vast majority of revenue for nonprofits comes from major donors.
The answer, or course, is that they do matter, and you need to strengthen your efforts to develop good relationships with your mass market donors, and potential donors. The question is: How?
Before we answer that question, consider a recent report that surveyed nonprofit staff and leadership about a number of issues, and mass market donors relationships is one topic they addressed.
The study and report is called A Better Way – a national study of nonprofit leadership and fundraising in a rapidly changing world.
Across a range of issues, two findings kept showing up consistently:
- Too many organizations don’t have enough staff devoted to effective fundraising
- Not enough have systems in place that help them gain meaningful feedback from donors
And that includes mass market donors. Nonprofits just aren’t engaging with them enough—properly and cost-efficiently.
Why Mass Market Donors Matter
The primary reason low-dollar, mass- market donors matter is because not all of them will remain that way. Some will ascend and become mid-level and even major donors. And all of them can make a legacy gift.
The problem is you don’t know which ones. And if you spend too much money trying to acquire and retain low-dollar donors, it doesn’t take long before you’ve spent more than they will give in their lifetimes. According to the Fundraising Report Card, only 17% of first-time low-dollar donors retain and their lifetime giving is only $45.
But face it, eventually your current major donors will be gone. No one lives forever. Forging relationships even with mass market donors will result in some of them becoming lifelong supporters and advocates.
And that advocacy piece is another reason these donors matter. A low-dollar donor who never gives more than a couple hundred dollars per year can still become an influential advocate, and that work may attract the attention of someone else who does become a major donor.
What the Study Says about Mass Market Donor Relationships
56% of study participants said they think their organization needs to focus more on relationships with mass market donors. That means these supporters are being neglected.
And this was true of both leadership and staff. Both felt the focus of their efforts was often misdirected, but the same organizations continue to employ the same traditional methods. So, they know things need to change, but then they resist changing.
54% of participants said retaining and nurturing mid-level and major donors is more important than acquiring new mass market donors. And we at MarketSmart would agree with this. Major donors should be the priority. But that doesn’t mean you completely ignore the others.
How bad is it?
Only 8% said their organization is highly effective at nurturing relationships with their existing mass market donors.
And only 6% said they’re doing well at nurturing relationships with new, potential mass-market donors.
Just 11% said their organizations have a specific strategy for getting consistent feedback from mass market donors. And feedback is one of the most effective methods for deepening a relationship.
The good news is, with MarketSmart, you can send out targeted, personalized surveys even to mass market donors. And you’ll find the ones who will become lifelong supporters and advocates. We’ll talk more about that later.
How to Strengthen Relationships with Low-Dollar Donors
Despite what you may think, it is possible to develop relationships with your mass market donors without spending more money than it’s worth. And doing so can help you generate leads for major and legacy giving at the same time. Here are strategies you can use.
Send consistent non-solicitous communication
This is the most crucial component of all. Relationships are built on communication. You must continue to engage with your mass market donors if you want to build a relationship with them. But it must be value-oriented—for them. That means most messages should not include an ask. That annoys supporters. You know it’s true.
Instead, communication should take several forms, such as:
- Updates on projects and campaigns
- Impact of their gifts on your mission
- Informational and educational content that builds their knowledge and awareness
There are of course many more, but the idea is to remain an active part of their lives as a value provider—a giver too, not just a taker.
Asking sometimes is good, and you should do that. But always asking is a dangerous strategy. It means you will be sending out communications using your donors’ past gifts and doing little beyond that to forge a stronger, more trustful bond between your organization’s mission and them.
Turning smaller donors into mid-level and major donors depends almost entirely on trustful, value-oriented relationships. Without those, large gifts become a near impossibility.
Offer opportunities for personal engagement at scale
Go beyond one-way communication and start giving your mass market donors opportunities to get involved. Some of this can be done online with interactive tools, widgets, reports, webinars, and live chats. Now, they’re devoting some time to learning about something related to your mission.
And offering these kinds of engagement opportunities don’t have to cost much. If the presentation is from someone on your team, it’s mostly just time. So, you can get mass market donors involved in a much more personal way without spending cold, hard cash.
You can also offer in-person engagement opportunities such as live events, tours, and participatory fundraising campaigns like 5k races.
Promote volunteerism
Next, double down on providing volunteer opportunities. For any local mass market donors, in-person volunteerism is a great way to deepen the connection between them and your mission. And for donors who don’t live near your location, there may be other types of volunteerism they can help with. Good examples would be advocacy campaigns and petition drives.
Many major donors test organizations with small gifts in response to mass marketing. Then they look for opportunities to get involved more deeply. Make that easy and you’ll be laying down an offramp for them to move themselves from low-dollar giving to deeper involvement which leads to major giving (including legacy giving) for those with assets to share.
Show gratitude
No matter how much or how little someone gives, they should be thanked for it. Show appreciation for your mass market donors when they do make a gift, and they will reciprocate with continued engagement and possibly future gifts.
Use surveys
All the above strategies are great. And most don’t cost very much if anything. So, they work well for building trust among mass market, low-dollar donors and potential major supporters.
But let’s be honest. Especially for larger organizations, you might have tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of mass market donors and potential supporters. They aren’t all going to watch your webinars or volunteer.
Effectively designed, personalized surveys are the single greatest way to make each person feel known, respected, heard, and understood.
This is what MarketSmart’s system was designed to do. You can engage as many people in your database as you want – at scale – and nurture them individually. Our system uses AI technology to send email communications to each donor, and these emails are responsive to what the person shares in their survey data and other engagement. That makes communications donor-driven.
For example, if a person indicates interest in hearing more about how your mission impacts the world, the system might then send them an opportunity to read a special report you’ve already produced, but that will be new to this person. And the email might say, “I thought you’d enjoy this report after seeing in your survey that you wanted to hear more about our mission.”
This type of responsive email engagement uses surveys as a starting point, but it goes far beyond just questions and answers.
Don’t Send Surveys Unless You Will Respond Back
When you send surveys out but then don’t do anything in response to them, this has been shown to actually produce a negative effect – it hurts your organization to ignore survey results.
With MarketSmart, the opposite happens. The surveys drive future engagement and communication so it gets more personalized over time. And this is how our system cultivates and prioritizes potential major donors among your mass market donors, which is ultimately what you want to see happen.
Find out more about lead generation through MarketSmart
Related Resources:
- Don’t Just “Find” Donors; Build Relationships for Lasting Impact
- How Many Major Donors Are You Overlooking Right Under Your Nose?
- Major Donor Retention – What’s Holding It Back?
- Mass marketing, relationships and trust
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Feeling like your job is getting harder because donor expectations have changed and competition for the charitable dollar is growing?
Finding that the old orthodoxies and conventions espoused by so-called experts in online echo-chambers and at conferences don’t work anymore?
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Engagement Fundraising was developed from the perspective of a donor who discovered firsthand that the impersonal, spray-and-pray approaches of his beloved charity were not only offensive but also wasteful and ineffective. So he took action. And now, you can too.
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