How to Engage Donors: 9 Strategies to Build Stronger Relationships
While attending past Engaging Networks Community Conferences in London, I’ve listened to some excellent presentations where people generously shared their campaign ideas, fundraising experiences, and tips on how to engage donors in new and exciting ways. There is a common thread that runs through sessions about successful campaigns: Winning campaigns put the audience needs at the centre, ask for feedback, analyse results, adapt, and make improvements.
So how do we accomplish putting the needs of our donors and supporters at the centre of our attention? Understanding how to engage donors in a way that resonates with them and creates stronger relationships moving forward.
Hopefully these tips will give you ideas on different things you can do to improve supporter or donor engagement and drive impact for your cause. But first …
What Is Donor Engagement?
Donor engagement is an important concept within fundraising that goes beyond simply asking for donations. It involves understanding who a donor is and providing them with meaningful opportunities to engage with your organization in a way that builds strong relationships.
Learning how to engage donors effectively can help your organization strengthen relationships, improve donor retention, encourage repeat giving, and turn one-time supporters into long-term advocates.
By implementing a comprehensive donor engagement cycle, you create experiences that are more than just transactional — they’re transformational and encourage further involvement from donors.
How to Engage Donors: 9 Strategies
Knowing your donors is the foundation of effective engagement, but building stronger relationships requires turning those insights into action. The following donor engagement strategies can help you better understand your supporters, personalise their experiences, and create more meaningful opportunities for them to connect with your mission.
1. Use Donor Data and Analytics to Understand Your Supporters
That’s what the team at the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) did when they designed for mobile. CPRE’s analytics showed a doubling in mobile traffic in just two years. That shift in how users chose to experience their website couldn’t be ignored, so they started their design process with mobile and then scaled up, rather than starting with a website and making it work on mobile. They then used analytics to map user journeys and identify where people drop off or abandon a donation or other call to action. The new design was clearer at every step. It was well worth it. The result? A 20% uplift in donations.
2. Keep Your Donor Engagement Strategy Focused on Supporter Needs
It’s tempting to look at industry numbers or other nonprofit organisations and follow their successes. What works for them must also work for you right? Unfortunately not.
To truly engage donors and supporters you need to remain focused on what your target audience is interested in. Just because a type of outreach works for another nonprofit doesn’t mean it will have the same impact for your audience. To create engaged donors, you need to be cautious about chasing trends and straying from what engages your target audience.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t test out new outreach methods. Testing new outreach is both healthy and necessary for staying on top of changes in the way your target audience may interact with your cause. Finding a balance between testing and maintaining strong outreach through established outreach creates an adaptable and impactful engagement strategy.
3. Make the Donor Experience Easy and Intuitive
Every interaction should make it easy for donors to take the next step, whether they’re making a donation, signing up for an event, joining an advocacy campaign, or learning more about your work.
Your supporters care most about how easy it is to find the information they need and take action. The magic happens at the intersection of design and usability. Focus on the supporter’s needs and experience first.
As donor expectations continue to evolve, nonprofits also need to consider how their technology and digital experiences support the entire supporter journey. For a deeper look at this shift, download our white paper on how nonprofits can modernize the donor experience.
4. Keep Donor Communications Simple and Relevant
When we work for an organisation that we care about, we know so much and want to tell supporters everything. Focus just on the information that they need to know and that is relevant to them. Cut everything else out because that additional information is about your need to give information not about your supporters’ need to know it.
5. Align Your Team Around the Donor Experience
They will want to ask the supporter for as much information as possible, and again this hunger for information is about the organisation’s needs not the needs of your supporter. Manage expectations internally; as an organisation, you must work together to find a way to get the depth of information you want in a way that suits your supporter. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
6. Create Two-Way Conversations With Donors
Engaging donors shouldn’t be a one-way conversation. Give supporters opportunities to respond, ask questions, provide feedback, and share what matters to them through email, surveys, social media, events, phone conversations, and other channels.
Pick up the phone rather than emailing where you can, look for opportunities for dialogue, and have face-to-face meetings. The best insights often come from the exchanges that come up in conversation. Learning how to engage donors through different channels can be a valuable way to improve the quality and quantity of conversations you are having with your audience.
7. Listen to Donor Feedback Across Channels
What do your supporters complain about? Listen in on calls, follow conversations on social media, and read and respond to complaint emails and letters (especially if supporter care is not in your remit). Are there themes or recurring problems that indicate something broader that could be solved?
Listening to your supporters can also help uncover friction points you may not see internally. From confusing communications to disconnected digital experiences, understanding common donor experience problems can help you identify where changes could strengthen donor engagement.
8. Personalise Your Donor Communications
I stopped my donation from a charity recently because I wasn’t receiving any information about how my donation had made a difference. I called several times to request the information and the final straw was when I was told I was in the “wrong batch.” Think about the internal language you use and make people feel like individuals, not data files.
Personalisation goes beyond using a donor’s first name. Consider giving history, interests, previous campaign activity, location, communication preferences, and engagement behavior to deliver messages that are more relevant to each supporter.
When thinking about how to engage donors over the long term, this kind of personalisation can help turn individual interactions into stronger supporter relationships.
9. Give Donors Multiple Ways to Get Involved
And finally, a lot of my work involves helping teams work together. If a supporter cares about your cause, they can fundraise, be a campaigner, a volunteer, and an activist. These activities are not mutually exclusive. In fact, if you send people information that is relevant to them about ways they can help, it strengthens engagement and their relationship with you, and makes it more likely they will do more.
Lucy Gower is founder and director at Lucidity. She is a trainer and coach specialising in the people part of innovation. She led the first innovation team at UK children’s charity NSPCC and it was there that Lucy realized that for innovation to succeed you need the best strategic ideas, processes and technology, but the most important ingredient for successful innovation is the right people working together towards a shared goal. Since leaving the NSPCC in 2012 Lucy has worked with over 50 organisations including Amnesty International, Cystic Fibrosis Trust, Nesta, The Children’s Society, and Greenpeace.
Lucy is also author of The Innovation Workout, a blogger, and conference speaker.