Your donors are feeling disconnected from your mission. How do you reignite their passion and support?

Social sector is evolving and do is that of its stakeholders including donors. Donors' priority are changing. You need to understand the changing priority of each donor. You need to realign your outreach, efforts, communication with that of your donors, provided your organisation's objective and byelaws allows it. Speak to your donors regularly and ensure two way transparent communication. If a donor's priority has changes and not aligned with your priority, move on and find new and relevant donors.

Personalising outreach is important but more important is find relevant donor whose priority matches with that of yours. Unless, there is true alignment in priorities of both parties, artificial and superficial alignment will not last for long and it may not be value for money for your efforts.

Donors want to know their contributions matter. Regain their passion by sharing success stories that showcase the tangible impact of their generosity. Highlight specific achievements and positive outcomes made possible through their support. This transparency builds trust, reinforces the value of their investment, and motivates donors to continue being part of your success.

This is very important. We do and achieve more but share less specifically with relevant stakeholders and on regular basis. I have seen cases, NGOs have achieved very large outcome but the sector is not aware due to non-sharing of its success with relevant stakeholders. We should share project updates and insights with donors on regular basis. Internal and External evaluations may be done and result may be shared with the donors and other stakeholders.

We see and we believe. If we give opportunities to donors to visit project areas including remote field areas and if we give them opportunity to interact with communities, donors gets right perspective and they feel connected to impact created with their funds. This also helps in renewing their commitment to the project and to the cause. Sometime, they also offer valuable suggestions which increase effectiveness and scale of the project and program.

Engaging the Donors not only promotes the transparency but also increase the curiosity in both the Donors as well as the beneficiaries about the project activities and increase the bonding between the tri parties (Donor, NGO and the Beneficiaries). This will increase the trustworthiness of the NGO in both the Donors and beneficiaries.

Offering control to donor is fine but all perspective should be considered before that. One need to see compliance data protection laws, customs of the community, overall impact on program and on community, etc.

The donors are not the “Doers”, they are “Enablers”. It’s not their duty to “Control” the project, if they can do so, there is no role of another organisation to implement the project. Only in situation where the donors lost trust in the implementing partner, they may take over the control of the project.

Don't focus on you. Don't focus on your org. The tendency when donors have become disconnected is to do more outreach, tell more stories, try to show your impact. But instead: Engage in dialogue Ask a ton of deep questions and just listen Suggest non-financial ways for them to partner and get involved, so they're more than an ATM