Embracing the Golden Age of Donor Marketing
Shipping from Asia now costs as much as it did pre-pandemic. So does framing lumber. So are Zoom and Peloton’s stock prices. E-commerce is mostly back to its steady growth trajectory from 2000 to 2020 after an understandable spike when we were all locked up. Even inflation might be (knock on wood) reverting to a more civilized level.
And charitable giving is back to its two-decade-long pre-pandemic trend of fewer people giving more.
We’ve talked about the air coming out of the COVID bubble in 2022; it isn’t the recession/inflation fears so much as it’s a reversion to the general trend (not that inflation has done us favors).
This is fine for now because average gifts are up, and thus revenue is maintained.
But it certainly dims the future. Major donors are not born; they are developed. Bequests generally do not happen as the result of a deathbed conversion to giving but rather as the culmination of a lifetime practice. Even new donors are more likely to come from those who already give to others. Some donors die every minute, and some non-donors are born every minute.
In short, the problem isn’t the hurricane; it’s the climate change. It’s the systemic issue that could hurt us if we don’t arrest it.
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But how, in a time of tight budgets?
We need to embrace what is truly a golden age of donor marketing.
We can customize to the smallest degree based on unprecedented stores of data. We can do it in every addressable channel; digital printing makes paint into a canvas on which data can paint, and programmatic media gives us the opportunity to ensure people are getting the right video messages. And we can use new data systems to shift our view of who a donor can or should be, bringing new and emerging donors into giving.
In short, our new capabilities in data and media mean that we can reach new people with messages that are calibrated to touch their hearts. It’s a great time to be a fundraiser if we can move beyond what got us here to what’s going to get us to broad-based philanthropy.