Future Fundraising Now

4 ways to keep your donors

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by

Jeff Brooks
in
  1. Care what donors think, but don’t let a handful of complainers drive your policy. One person’s annoying junk mail is another’s welcome communication about something they care about. When you put the number of complaints an appeal generates against its number of gifts, you’ll usually find gifts outnumbering complaints by a factor of thousands.
  2. But respect the complainers. Give them what they want. If they want less mail, or no address labels, or never to hear from you again — just do what they ask. And do it quickly. This is how you can either keep them as donors or stop wasting money on them.
  3. Actively listen to donors. Ask them for feedback. Run surveys. Make it easy to connect with a human by phone or email.
  4. Be relevant. If your communication comes across as a stream of harassing appeals, you have a relevance problem. It’s time to rethink how you win people to your cause and motivate them to give.

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    The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It’s not about any technology, medium, or technique. It’s about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It’s already here. More.

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    Jeff BrooksJeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 35 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com. More.

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    The future of fundraising is not about social media, online video, or SEM. It’s not about any technology, medium, or technique. It’s about donors. If you need to raise funds from donors, you need to study them, respect them, and build everything you do around them. And the future? It’s already here. More.

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    About the blogger

    Jeff Brooks has been serving the nonprofit community for more than 30 years and blogging about it since 2005. He considers fundraising the most noble of pursuits and hopes you’ll join him in that opinion. You can reach him at jeff [at] jeff-brooks [dot] com.