Forget “digital-first,” adopting a “donor-first” mentality is the foundation of successful fundraising.
Last September, I wrote an article published on Philanthropy Daily titled “The Three Pillars Supporting Long-Term Fundraising Success.” These three pillars are:
- Brand Awareness: Beginning Your Donor Relationships: A well-defined brand resonates with donors, establishing trust and connecting them to your mission.
- Donor Retention: The Power of Long-Term Commitment: Losing donors at a high rate simply isn’t sustainable if your organization is going to survive. Focusing on donor retention ensures ongoing fundraising success and turns donors into advocates.
- Donor Engagement: Building a Community of Advocates: Engagement transforms the donors you’ve retained into ambassadors for your organization. Compelling stories, helpful information, and interactive experiences all draw donors in closer.
Now, although I love the power of threes, I want to add a fourth pillar—or, really, the foundation on which those three pillars rest:
- Donor-First Strategy: Thinking Outside the Digital Box.
Recently, a specific fundraising belief has grown in popularity: you should transform your nonprofit into a “digital-first” marketing organization. Take your organization online! The internet is the best place to reach people! Focus on digital!
This belief is myopic. Yes, we should take digital outreach seriously and it should be an integral part of our marketing outreach and fundraising. (It plays an important role in each of the three pillars above!) But while digital should be part of every fundraising strategy, it shouldn’t be the entire strategy. However important it might be, digital simply isn’t—and empirical results support this—the primary means by which the majority of donors communicate.
This is why a “digital-first” approach is inherently limiting. Centering fundraising and marketing on a digital experience guarantees that we won't reach a significant swath of donors. Digital marketing can feel flashy and innovative, like we're keeping up with the times by using shiny new tools. But if we focus exclusively on digital channels, we ignore the most important aspect of nonprofit marketing: putting the donor first.
You might automatically think your organization should be the focus of your fundraising efforts. After all, it’s your mission, your vision, your impact, right?
Wrong—at least if you want to be successful in your fundraising. Instead, all of our marketing should be focused on making the donor the hero of our organization’s story. We can’t force donors online, but we can tell our story through the channel they prefer. Some donors want a phone call, others to attend an event or volunteer, and still others to receive direct mail. This isn't reflected in a digital-first strategy.
Don’t get me wrong, people are moving online in droves. This is especially true of the younger generation, the “digital natives” who’ve been online from the start and don’t know a world without the internet. So digital might be an effective way to reach them, but that ignores older people, who may prefer a different (perhaps more “old-fashioned”) form of initial communication. They are also gravitating towards the digital, so once that initial contact has been made, digital tools can provide a further, deeper experience.
Long story short: digital is important. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But making it the sole focus of our fundraising and neglecting other means of outreach simply doesn’t reflect the fact that many donors respond better to being reached by more traditional methods. If we ignore that, we forget the foundation supporting the three pillars of successful fundraising: always put the donor first. By making donors the hero, we are well on our way to transformative fundraising success.
