One of the advantages that nonprofit organizations have is that often donors are looking for authentic personal connections with the nonprofit. Donors want to feel connected, like they are a part of something bigger, and feel like they belong.

As a nonprofit, one of the best ways to increase donor loyalty is by showing up. These days virtually can be almost as effective as in person. Donor loyalty is driven by human connection, which means personalizing your communications with them will ensure that your donors reach out to you again in the future.

This article will discuss how to increase donor loyalty by utilizing these 8 tools.

Challenges With Donor Loyalty Today

Put yourself in the shoes of your donors. You have finally selected a nonprofit organization whose mission and values align closely with your own. To begin, you choose to donate $100 to them. While your contribution may not be a massive donation, it’s still a significant contribution to the cause.

A week goes by following your donation, and you’ve received no response from the organization. Another week goes by, and still, there has been no response. You’re disappointed in the organization at first, but eventually, you simply forget about the whole thing.

While you may have forgotten about the whole ordeal, the critical thing to remember is that you will never give again.

Don’t let your nonprofit organization follow this path. Here are the top 8 ways to increase donor loyalty with our best practices!

Top 8 Ways to Increase Donor Loyalty

Even though nonprofits have notoriously stringent budgets, you’ll be happy to know that it doesn’t take much money to increase donor loyalty. Here are the top 8 ways to increase donor loyalty with our practices.

1. Connect With Your Donors Regularly
As previously mentioned, the primary method to increase donor loyalty is by staying connected. By regularly engaging with your donors, you are helping to build upon the emotional connection between them and your organization.

Some of the ways you can stay on top of your connections include:

Building a website
Updating your website weekly
Sending out newsletters
Provide video content
Post engaging content on social media

You should take the time to research your donor demographic’s preferred method of communication and hone in on developing those areas of your marketing efforts. And remember, don’t just post boring things. Find ways to engage directly with donors and personalize your efforts as much as possible.

2. Donor-Stewardship
Donor-stewardship is the process of building a relationship with your donors after they make a gift. The main aim of stewarding your donors is to encourage them to donate again. Creating a relationship with your donors will make them feel loyal and increase future fundraising.

Keep in mind the donor pyramid and varying levels of engagement within it. The different levels within the donor pyramid include:

-Occasional donors, volunteers, and event participants
-Annual and recurring donors
-Major gift donors
-Planned gift donors

3. Offer Opportunities for Your Donors to Get More Involved
Remember that your donors can contribute to your efforts more than simply donating money. Always have opportunities for your donors to get more involved with your organization, even if they don’t have the funds to donate at this time.

Here are a few different ways you can get your donors more involved with your organization:

1. Set up a donor advisory board
2. Ask donors to like and share social media posts
3. Host new donor onboarding sessions
4. Organize informal focus groups
5. Send out surveys to donors
6. Create a group chat on social media

4. Thank Donors in a Personal Way
It doesn’t matter what the size of the donation is. Any contributions your donor makes towards your cause should always be thanked. Believe it or not, thank-you mail can make or break a relationship with a donor.

While it can be challenging at times, writing thank-you notes to donors is a great way to show them that you appreciate them. Luckily, with the help of services like Postalgia, you can get the job done quickly and easily.

Postalgia will pen your individualized donor thank you notes on your letterhead with high-quality card stock, taking care of all details, including the address verification, postage, and mailing.

Many of us have grown accustomed to receiving countless messages by email, social media, and text every day that these days, a handwritten note is rare. Therefore, sending a handwritten thank-you card or letter makes your organization stand out and instantly creates a unique and personal connection with the recipient.

Penned by robots but remarkably human, our handwritten letters, notes, or cards to your stakeholders are written using genuine ink. We’ll print and mail these personalized handwritten donor thank-you notes for you for the ultimate convenience.

5. Develop Trust
Another surefire way to increase donor loyalty is by developing trust. To help promote confidence in and amongst your organization, consider interacting with donors face-to-face. There are plenty of different ways to help build trust in your organization. Some ideas might include:

-Hosting an in-person event for supporters
-Hosting a virtual event
-Invite donors to tour your offices
-Ask donors to join your team for a hike

6. Get as Personal as Possible
The perfect world for the nonprofit organization allows you to have a one-on-one relationship with every donor. Unfortunately, that’s not the most realistic expectation for most nonprofits.

Still, you can personalize your content as much as possible by tracking and measuring all of your interactions with donors. Some critical information you should constantly be tracking includes:

-Motivating factors
-Donor demographics or segments
-Preferred communication channels
-How new donors are driven to your organization

7. Remember It’s About Relationships, Not Donations
Instead of focusing your efforts on more donations, change your mindset to instead increase donor loyalty. Rather than funds being the ultimate end goal, you want to view your relationship with donors as an opportunity to make a more significant impact in the long run.

The more you have a two-way relationship with your donors, the more invested they will be in the growth and success of your organization.

8. Create a Donor Loyalty Program
Although you want to thank all contributions to your cause consciously, significant donors need to be thanked with a bit of extra care. Create a donor loyalty program to help maintain the momentum of your top supporters. Ideas for programs might include:

-Branded gifts
-Networking opportunities
-Special tickets to events
-Member-only events
-Exclusive member-only newsletters

Conclusion
The best ways to increase donor loyalty are linked to personalizing the experience. Getting to know your donors, what they like, and what you can do to maintain your relationship with them are critical components of the donor-stewardship.

After all, it’s about PEOPLE. There’s more to building donor loyalty than the basics, of course, but if you start doing these 8 things, you’ll be off to a good start.

Postalgia can help you deliver that personalized touch by creating physical media such as newsletters and fundraising campaigns and also produce beautifully handwritten personalized thank you letters to donors at scale.

Whether you’re running a venture-backed Startup company, a Fortune 500 telecom giant, or a mission-driven non-profit organization, you need more resources – usually cash – to build your team, grow your reach, and scale whatever it is that your organization does best.

In the context of charities, foundations, and philanthropic organizations, if you were to ask anyone who works in a fundraising capacity what their top goals are for the month, the quarter, or the year, they might answer that they are working on stewardship, donor engagement, transitioning one-time donors to monthly donation programs, or acquiring new donors, but it all boils down to one thing: Money coming in.

That boils down to a few different elements of your broader fundraising strategy:

Acquisition – How are you acquiring new donors who have never given before?
Solicitation – What is your approach to raising money from current donors?
Monthly Giving – Are you turning your one-time donors into monthly donors?
Reactivation – How are you reactivating lapsed donors?
Legacy Giving – Do you have a program that allows your donors to make an impact after they’ve passed on?
Major Giving – Can you move donors into higher and higher giving brackets?
Stewardship – How do you keep donors connected so that they stay donors?

Many fundraisers correctly focus heavily on soliciting existing donors – after all, the most likely source of new charitable dollars is past givers who are already connected to and inspired by the mission of your organization.

But donor churn – your donors deciding to stop giving to your organization – is an inevitability, not a hypothetical. Excellent organizations may experience lower levels of donor churn than the industry standard, but with The Association of Fundraising Professionals Fundraising Effectiveness Project pegging 2020 retention rates at 43.6%, that means that you can expect to keep fewer than half of your donors year over year if you run a typical fundraising operation.

Of course, the longer a donor is with your organization, the less likely they are to stop giving (hence the importance of monthly giving programs and stewardship), and a big chunk of the almost 57% of donors that didn’t come back in 2020 were first-time donors themselves (more than 80% of first time donors made one gift and never returned).

But that doesn’t change the fact that you need to replace the donors that you’re losing every year with fresh, new additions to your donor base.

So, without further ado, here are 6 tips to growing your new donor base:

1. Survey your current donors

Before you embark on an involved, time-consuming, and/or expensive process of attracting new donors through what you assume is the way to do so, it is worth asking your existing donors a few simple questions:

How did you hear about our charity, non-profit org, or foundation?
How long after did you donate?
Did you have any involvement with the organization before donating?
Why did you decide to donate to our organization?
Were you asked? If so, by whom? How? Through what channel?
What was the process like when you gave your first gift?

If you have candid conversations with some of your best donors, at different giving levels, ages, and years of involvement, you’ll find strong patterns start to emerge.

If your charitable organization is like most, you’ll find that many of your donors have a personal connection to your organization, had involvement with the organization before giving, give for similar reasons, and were asked to give in similar ways.

This crucial first step will give you a good idea of where to look for new donors, and help you in the next step as well…

2. Create a donor profile for digital advertising

Once the patterns in your donor stories have begun to emerge, you should be able to create a donor profile.

A donor profile could include demographic, geographic, ethnic, religious, professional and income information, all of which can be used to target acquisition campaigns.

For example, if you are fundraising for a children’s hospital in the downtown area of a major metropolitan city, you may discover from your donors that they are mostly suburban parents of 2 or more children, working as professionals (dentists, lawyers, accountants, etc…).

3. Create issues or opportunities-based campaigns

One of the most important things that you will learn from talking to your existing donors is what moved them to donate in the first place.

Deciding to give money is a big step for many people. Chances are that for every donor you have, you have thousands if not tens of thousands of people who support your mission in non-financial ways, even if just quietly and privately in their own minds.

You’re probably asking yourself what good that does you – a non-profit organization with mouths to feed and a mission to undertake.

But today’s donors are yesterday’s activists who were the day before’s volunteers who were themselves quiet supporters the day before that. As the proverb goes, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

In this case, it’s very difficult to fundraise from anonymous supporters that you don’t know exist, but approaching strangers and asking them for money is likely to get more doors closed in your face than not.

Asking for small expressions of support, however – like “sign this petition” or “click to email your congressman” are not big asks. What they do, however, is help you build a list of people who are supporters of your cause, and may one day financially contribute to your philanthropic endeavors. You now have the names, email addresses, and possibly addresses and phone numbers of people who support your organization enough to put up their hands and self-identify. That list is worth its proverbial weight in gold.

4. Turn stakeholders into activists

Speaking of building lists, chances are that many of your donors had interactions with your organization as non-donors before they ever cut a check.

If you’re fundraising for a school, certainly your alumni are a great place to start; but what about their parents and grandparents? If you’re a hospital foundation, studies show that over 80% of grateful patients feel good about donating to the hospital at which they received treatment, to say nothing of their relieved and grateful families.

The people that you helped are not the only stakeholders in your community.

Congregants, community members, teachers, and volunteers of all types often go on to become amongst the most prolific and involved donors in any charitable organization.

5. Create volunteer opportunities, community events, and open houses.

That’s why creating volunteer opportunities is one of the most powerful long-term acquisition strategies that you can pursue. Nothing binds a supporter to a nonprofit organization’s mission like giving their time and energy to the cause.

Ironically, giving in this way makes donors and supporters more invested than receiving does.

Bringing people together through volunteerism, showing off the good work that your organization does, and creating community through causes that people are passionate about takes a lot of work, but the result is that you will attract people who are much more mission-driven, much less transactional, and much less likely to leave after giving once.

These mission-driven people will make up the beating heart of your donor base. They are exactly who you want to make up the core of your organization, and you’ll wish that you could clone them.

6. Have your current donors bring a friend

The next best thing, however, is to have them bring like-minded friends, family members, and colleagues along for the ride.

A lot of fundraisers are afraid to ask their donors for anything other than money; their mentality is that if the donors have already given to the organization, the last thing that you want to do is impose on them in a way that risks alienating them by making them feel put upon.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Your donors are along for the ride for a reason. They are the most passionate believers in the work that you are doing, and nothing makes them feel better than having more opportunities to help in ways that don’t make them feel like they are only viewed by you as a source of more and more money.

Giving them opportunities to bring in friends – especially to community-building events – would be welcomed by your donors as a new and unique way to contribute.

And just like that, your fundraising list just got bigger.

Putting it all together

Suppose you’re fundraising for a  hospital foundation. You speak to your current donors and see patterns start to emerge. You learn that most of your donors are parents with young children, living in one of the suburbs of your city, working as young professionals. You find out that they donated because they’re passionate about combating childhood cancer, something in which your hospital excels. You learn that many of them were asked to donate after being solicited by an existing patient – a loved one, friend, or colleague. Now you have a donor profile.

You use that information to create a targeted digital campaign. The message: a former patient asks parents to please sign a petition calling on the state government to invest more in combating and treating cancers that affect children. For every signature, a major donor will donate a dollar to your hospital foundation.

You collect supporters through that campaign, and add them to your existing lists of stakeholders (which you may have at the ready, or may need to build). In addition to fundraising off of this large, curated list in future direct mail and digital campaigns, you also advertise volunteer opportunities: “Come volunteer with kids in the cancer ward.“

New faces turn up to your volunteer opportunities. You send out a direct mail piece to all existing donors, inviting them to come to a community event to raise money for a state of the art pediatric cancer treatment center, and to bring a friend, because every dollar given by a new donor will be matched by a major gifts donor.

Somewhere on your list, whether it’s one of the petition-signers who now receives your community newsletter, a new volunteer who is moved by the hopeful faces of smiling children, or someone whose colleague brought them to a fundraising gala for the first time to have their first donation matched, is your next million-dollar lifetime donor, just waiting to shake your hand and to thank you for giving them the opportunity to change lives and make a difference.