Are you making your donors feel good?
In most of us, there is a natural instinct to do good. To make someone smile, to help a stranger in need, to make the world a better place. This primal philanthropy is commonly overlooked by nonprofits, who often feel a need to ‘earn’ supporter generosity. As a result, they often miss what it means to fundraise.
“People want to donate. It makes them feel good.”The fundraising truth we forget
Most of the time, we view the act of getting people to donate through the lens of an emotionless funnel. We strip the feeling out of donating more than we care to admit, and attribute the outcome to science; telling ourselves it’s due to a piece of creative we launched, the journeys we implemented, the sophisticated lookalike segment we tested.
We view audience engagement through clicks and bounce rates, but while this is an important part of the journey, and an indicator of effective marketing, it’s not the full story. Because many donors already want to give; fundraisers simply connect them, through a trusted nonprofit, with a clear message, and a simple onward journey.
The emotionless funnel
Treats donors as traffic to convert, journeys as mechanics to optimise and generosity as an outcome to extract.
The human journey
Treats donors as people trying to do something good — and makes the path to action feel simple, meaningful and affirming.
It is our role, as fundraisers, to provide a service. To connect people, who want to make the world a better place, with the tools they need to do it. We can test, we can learn, we can iterate. But all of this is ultimately in service of finding the people who are ready to give, and making that experience intuative.
Donors are not conversion events.
A donation is not just a transaction to optimise. It is a moment where someone chooses to act on generosity, identity, empathy or hope. The job of fundraising is to make that moment feel clear, trusted and worth repeating.
Cost of Living Kindness
A time when this shone through for me was the cost of living crisis. At the time, I was working for a big nonprofit — and I will never forget the concern, on everyone’s faces, when we were told by our projection-wielding analytics team that most of our supporters were unable to give this year.
A data-driven nerd, who upholds the law of the Y-axis with the respect it deserves, I was ready for tumbleweed when we launched our campaign. For the ads to remind people of their active regular giving donations and for the cancellations to roll in. But what happened was the complete opposite.
While many of our affluent donors gave at lower rates, those who did, gave more. And while this still meant an overall shortfall of income from that segment, this gap was filled by those who we thought would be the least likely to give. People in lower income bands, who were turning up in greater numbers than we could have ever predicted to help their communities.
As a northerner with proud lower-class roots, the generosity of even those who are struggling shone a light on the kindness of humanity, and those wise words echoed truer than ever: “People want to donate - it makes them feel good.”
What the data missed
Generosity does not always follow affluence.
People give for reasons that are emotional, social and deeply personal. Income matters, but it is not the whole story. Sometimes the strongest response comes from the people closest to the need.
It’s our job to help our donors give
Find the people ready to give
Use data and insight to understand who is most likely to act now, but do not reduce that behaviour to a cold conversion score.
Make the ask feel clear
Tell people what is needed, why it matters and what their gift can make possible without overcomplicating the route to action.
Make giving feel good
Confirm the value of the donor’s choice. Thank them properly, show the impact and make the supporter feel part of something worth staying with.
So the next time your team mates make you justify why you’re going out to your supporter file for the second time this month, you can tell them, with conviction, it’s because you’re being audience-driven — that you’re launching a digital fundraising appeal because your donors want to give.
You can tell them that your supporters are on your file because they chose to support you in the first place, and that they probably want to support you again, when they’re in a position to. You can tell them that, in the States, nonprofits send far more emails to their supporter files than we, polite British folk feel comfortable doing - and in most cases, the unsubscribe rates stay pretty even throughout.
Because donating releases seretonin. And if we’re not doing our best to make our supporters feel good about themselves, how can we expect them to feel good about us as a brand - and support us, when they’re ready?
What fundraisers should remember
- Many donors already want to give; fundraising helps them act on that impulse.
- Generosity is not only predicted by income, wealth or previous behaviour.
- The best donation journeys feel clear, trusted and emotionally rewarding.
- Supporters should feel good about giving, not guilty, confused or processed.
- Fundraising works best when it respects both the need and the person choosing to help.
