Acquiring new donors can be a challenge. Between making initial contact, informing them about your nonprofit’s mission, and finally directing them to your donation page, your nonprofit devotes notable time and resources toward engaging each donor.
This effort is exactly why maintaining donor relationships long-term is so important. When a donor sticks with your nonprofit, you don’t need to reinvest in acquiring them. Plus, the longer a donor stays with your nonprofit, the more likely they are to increase their average gift size over time.
To help your nonprofit forge and secure these valuable relationships, we’ll explore strategies for forming long-lasting connections with your donors.
1. Practice consistent stewardship.
The donor journey doesn’t end after the first gift. In fact, this should be the beginning of their long-lasting relationship with your nonprofit. To maintain connections that span multiple years or even decades, you need consistent stewardship.
Stay in touch with your supporters by leveraging multiple communication channels, including email, social media, direct mail, and SMS. Pay attention to supporters’ preferences, and reach out to them on the channels they’re most likely to respond to.
If supporters indicate interest in multiple communication channels, changing up how you reach out can keep them connected to your nonprofit and spark interest in unique engagement opportunities. For instance, you might send out an event invitation via direct mail when you usually communicate via email.
Additionally, vary your communication content. If you only ever reach out to ask for donations, supporters likely will have little interest in opening your messages. Instead, encourage them to take a deeper interest in your cause by sharing powerful stories, impact statistics, and inspiring videos.
2. Keep donor data up-to-date.
Your donors lead busy lives, and over the course of several years with your nonprofit, their data is likely to change. Often, donor support can lapse not due to disinterest in your cause but because a credit card expired, a phone number changed, or they moved addresses.
To maintain long-lasting relationships, your nonprofit will need to be prepared for these changes. A few ways you can stay up-to-date with your donors include:
- Auditing your databases. To stay up to date, you need to know when your data is outdated. Audit your donor database and keep an eye out for signs that donor information has changed, such as bounced emails and missing monthly gift payments. The right data management tools can flag signs like these, alerting you that a donor’s information may be incorrect.
- Leveraging donor self-service tools. If you do encounter outdated information, send a reminder to your donors to update their data. With self-service donor profiles, your supporters can update this information themselves, saving your team time.
- Appending your data. Data appends involve updating or expanding your data to correct outdated information or fill in missing details. Nonprofits can append their data in several ways. You can use advanced data research and management tools to stay updated on changes to your donors’ lives, or you can partner with a data appending service to update specific information.
While all donors’ information can become outdated over time, EverTrue’s guide to alumni donor management emphasizes that this can be a major problem, particularly for universities. Alumni donors tend to undergo major life changes in their first few years after graduation as they change careers, addresses, and jobs.
If your nonprofit is a higher education institution or is concerned about changing donor information in general, it may be worth it to invest in sophisticated donor management tools that can track data changes for you.
3. Promote numerous engagement opportunities.
The more ways that donors have to engage with your nonprofit, the more committed they will be to your organization. Engaged donors tend to have long-lasting relationships with the nonprofits they care about. Plus, by participating in your nonprofit outside of just giving, they can provide you with even more valuable support.
A few ways you can get your donors involved in your nonprofit include:
- Volunteer opportunities. Donors often make great volunteers and vice versa. In fact, according to Double the Donation’s volunteer statistics report, 85% of volunteers donate to the organizations they serve. Engaging with your volunteer program gives donors a hands-on opportunity to make a difference, reinforcing their interest in your cause.
- Events. Invite your donors to have a few hours of fun with an event. The scale and purpose of your events can vary from formal galas meant to engage major donors to casual community picnics focused on building a community.
- Membership programs. Make donors feel like a core part of your organization by creating a membership program. Your offerings will vary depending on your nonprofit’s mission, but in general, these programs should provide opportunities to socialize with other members and unique perks in exchange for a recurring membership fee.
Avoid making your donors feel like ATMs by giving them a range of ways to engage with your nonprofit and mission. Plus, high engagement can be a sign that a donor is ready to scale up their support.
4. Leverage AI.
Building donor relationships at scale can be a challenge. Today’s donors expect personalized experiences, and maintaining individualized donor relationships with each of your supporters over the course of multiple years requires technological backing.
Fortunately, today’s nonprofits have AI to help them out. With AI tools, nonprofits can:
- Draft communications. Generative AI tools can help your nonprofit quickly create messages for all of your donors. However, ensure these messages have a human touch by editing any message templates you receive, practicing donor segmentation, and ensuring each communication includes personalized details relevant to the recipient.
- Get donor profile summaries. Donor profiles include details on every interaction your nonprofit has had with each supporter. As a result, for years-long donor relationships, these profiles can be long and hard to parse. With AI, you can get quick AI summaries to see where each donor is in their supporter journey at a glance.
- Track individual donor relationships. AI fundraising tools can help you pinpoint the exact time to advance each donor relationship. AI can assess your donors’ engagement and alert you when it makes sense to request a new gift, ask for a donation upgrade, or even re-engage a supporter at risk of lapsing.
Remember that AI is a tool and should be used strategically to advance your relationships. Donors stay with nonprofits they feel a strong, human connection to, and AI can never replace that.
Long-lasting donor relationships provide consistent support, increased gifts, and a stable community you can count on. To lock down these relationships, leverage your fundraising and communication tools to start connecting with your donors at scale without losing the human touch that inspires loyalty.