The growing importance of meaningful connections
Tim Sarrantonio
Generosity Experience Design | Empowering nonprofits to build a community of generosity
Welcome to my weekly LinkedIn newsletter! Connected Fundraiser Weekly will be my way of providing easy-to-engage insights around donor behavior, fundraiser enablement, and technology. I hope you enjoy the content, and please share if you think someone would benefit from what I'm writing!
I read an interesting post by the Veritus Group this morning that asked fundraisers to think about how they measure meaningful connections with their donors. This question is critical, and things are rapidly changing faster than fundraisers are likely comfortable with as they address strategic and tactical needs for 2022 and beyond.
As the post by Veritus outlines, "First, a definition: simply put,?a meaningful connection is any interaction and communication with the donor that moves the relationship forward.?This can happen in any manner including text, LinkedIn, video, phone, traditional mail, and, yes, in a donor meeting."
I continue to see much centering the relationship with our donors around pre-pandemic channels - setting up meetings, putting on galas, sending out direct mail that isn't segmented.
We are going to rapidly see that the best fundraising programs will be the ones that understand that looking only at transaction data is only giving your organization half the story - these are lagging behaviors that show what worked after the fact. Recency, frequency, and monetary value are excellent indicators of intent for future giving perhaps. Still, fundraisers need to step back and look at the entire donor cycle, especially with some of the Fundraising Effectiveness Project data I've seen that will show an alarming amount of small-donor drop-off after year one.
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When looking at Data Axle's communication data from the beginning of the pandemic, our sector continues to see an evolving and omnichannel preference for donors receiving updates from an organization. Mapping out the ways that donors will receive, digest, and engage with an organization's mission and brand is going to be critical.
Fundraisers will need to invest in creating data-driven marketing experiences to stand out in a rapidly changing environment. Make no mistake - eCommerce platforms and other digital companies see value in alignment with "social good." Still, they will never have the real impact that a local community-based organization can have on helping people. We must not let our sector's potential for real change be co-opted because we refuse to change with the times.
The times show people want more connection and authenticity. I can assure you it is way more fun to deliver on that than relying on what worked in 2019.
Have you downloaded our newest donor behavior report yet? While you read through the 87 pages we put together, why not groove to some music that Neon One's audiophiles put together. Check out our Spotify playlist here.
Director of Operations, John’s Island Foundation
3 年Thanks for sharing Tim. I think in our quest to build stronger, sustained, connections with donors we can’t leave out the “community” aspect of fundraising. It’s more than just the 1:1 connection a nonprofit makes with an individual donor, but the connections those donors make with one another. Social influence is an extremely important driver. In my community and nonprofits I work with, the landscape shifted under Covid. Large events were replaced with smaller, more intimate ones. The quality and frequency of digital communications were ramped up. I see organizations shifting to more frequent, but smaller in person and social engagement opportunities in some cases. It remains to be seen if that trend will stick.
Director of Product at Neon One
3 年Thanks, Tim! This is so interesting to think about, especially in light of how much less reliable email open rates are becoming. It's only going to get more and more difficult to measure the success of a connection-building, non-appeal email communication. Finding ways to A/B test the entire donor cultivation pipeline might be part of the answer - taking a segment of first-time donors, all other appeals and communications staying the same, how do the retention rates compare for donors who receive a monthly e-newsletter vs. a quarterly print newsletter? Or who receive a thank you phone call for their initial gift vs. a handwritten note? It's so easy to obsess over the appeal itself because the ROI is obviously measureable, but we know that the appeal is the tip of the iceberg for building connections with donors.
Individual Giving Strategist and Keynote Speaker. "Philanthropy and Wealth are not synonyms, but donors are data and data is human."
3 年This is great, as always Tim Sarrantonio - excellent thoughts. And, can I ask? Is this another potential survey outcome where the question's phrased as "what channel do you prefer" but then actual behavior is potentially different? i.e. while many/most donors will say their preferred channel is email, the vast majority of reporting still shows print mail as a, or the, primary driver. As we've talked about so many times, we still need better data and tracking on who's responding to a print piece but taking action online. (I appreciate your "perhaps" on RFM - I still go back to Roger M. Craver 's take on this from, gosh, 2011: https://agitator.thedonorvoice.com/rfm-too-crude-for-fundraising/ and tend to agree)