To Find Your Best Fundraising Opportunities, Remember This

Jim Langley

September 06, 2024

A significant portion of donors are underwhelmed or dissatisfied with their giving experience, including yours. You may have assumed they are satisfied because they continued to give and to be stewarded.

Yet we so often fail to realize that few donors are dissatisfied with their personal treatment but are underwhelmed by:

• The lack of a compelling plan to more fully realize your mission promise
• The insufficiency of information about concrete, specific, sustainable differences being made
• The absence of major-gift-worthy ideas

Donors want to feel a part of something bigger than themselves but too often are met with small administrative concerns. They want to contribute to an organization that is attacking the root causes of societal concerns but too often are presented band-aid budget-balancing concepts. They want to hear from those who are delivering essential services and making incremental progress notwithstanding great challenges but all too often are treated with gauzy, rah-rah rhetoric from on high.

Too often we assume stewardship is about thanking and recognizing, but our research shows the vast majority of donors feel adequately thanked but under-involved in mission delivery and under-informed about mission impact.

So job one is to check in with your donors, find out what they feel is missing, and respond to their philanthropic yearnings.

You can then bring on more supporters by remembering the same lessons. A significant portion of donors at other organizations are similarly dissatisfied or underwhelmed, including those giving to prominent and seemingly successful organizations. You can dislodge and ultimately win over donors from those organizations if you provide what they are not getting at other organizations but only if:

• You put forward fundraising concepts that are society-serving, that demonstrate how to give through your organization not just to it for mundane needs
• You demonstrate how donors will be a part of the action and provided an inside view of mission delivery
• You establish the means of creating regular conversation with donors so you can learn from their most rewarding philanthropic experiences and avoid replicating their most dissatisfying and under-whelming ones.

The tactical imitation, lack of strategic imagination, and formula playing, albeit with the latest tech, that pervades our field won’t allow us to retain or optimize the potential of the donors we already have much less fetch new ones.

Jim Langley is the president of Langley Innovations. Langley Innovations provides a range of services to its clients to help them understand the cultural underpinnings of philanthropy and the psychology of donors, and with that knowledge, to develop the most effective strategies and tactics to build broader and more lasting communities of support. Jim has authored numerous books, including his most recent book, The Future of Fundraising: Adapting to New Philanthropic Realities, published by Academic Impressions in 2020. 

Related Resources:

• Webinar: 4-Step Process for “Reimagining Fundraising Operations”
• The Power of Building Relationships: Why Donors Need Good Fundraisers
• Don’t Chase Prospects, Look for the Willing
• Why what you do is called ADVANCEMENT
• Don’t Just “Find” Donors; Build Relationships for Lasting Impact

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