Give Every Donor the VIP Treatment

According to “Giving USA,” the annual analysis of charitable donations, the number of people who give to charity continues to slide, even though the average gift amount is rising. In other words, more organizations have come to rely on big gifts and may be overlooking small-dollar donors.

At a moment when resources are limited for many nonprofits, it might be tempting for leaders to focus on the top of the giving pyramid, but experienced fundraisers call that strategy short-sighted. Small-dollar donors are mission-critical in the long run because they help you build a broad base of support.

“We cannot be steeped in community if we are not reflecting the community we serve in every way, shape, and form,” says Rebecca Mandelman, chief philanthropic officer at the New York Community Trust. “Right now in particular, it’s a moment that underscores the importance for all organizations to really invest in cultivating and stewarding relationships with everyday donors.”

Forward-looking fundraisers are using the newest technology to enhance loyalty among donors at scale. High-touch, personalized communications used to be reserved for the wealthiest supporters, but data mining and artificial intelligence now enable you to make every donor feel valued — no matter their gift size.

Three fundraising veterans spoke to the Chronicle about what they’re doing right now to strengthen relationships with everyday donors. Here are their top tips.

Create opportunities to hear from your donors.

A community foundation with $3.3 billion in assets, the New York Community Trust is taking a fresh approach to events by prioritizing learning and community building — so everyday donors can learn more about the foundation’s work, and the foundation can learn more about its donors.

The organization hosts breakfasts, live Q&A sessions, and site visits, where supporters can see programs in action; it also leads webinars to reach those who prefer online offerings. In both cases, Mandelman says, “we’ve shifted format a bit over the last year to really give donors the space to share their own stories.”

For example, it recently started convening supporters to exchange stories about how their families came to the United States. These discussions spark greater interest in the foundation’s work with immigrant communities in New York and let foundation leaders “do less of the speaking at” donors and offer more opportunities for “speaking together.”

This shift to more listening yields valuable insight into donors’ priorities. “By giving them those opportunities, we are strengthening our ties and relationships with them and getting to know them on increasingly personal levels. All of these are also data points about our donors so that we can better engage them on an ongoing basis,” Mandelman says.

After these events, staff members update donors’ entries in the foundation’s database software to track attendance, issues they care most deeply about, and other important details like how often they wish to be contacted.

The more we know about our donors, she says, “the better we can engage them in strong relationships.”

Craft a data-driven campaign to reach new supporters.

After the pandemic, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America had a waiting list of 30,000 kids across the country — mostly boys of color — who needed mentors.

After working with the data-research company Savanta and receiving pro bono support from Dentsu Creative, a marketing agency, the organization launched the “It Takes Little to Be Big” campaign in September 2023. Through uplifting photos, videos, and stories of powerful mentoring relationships, the campaign aimed to recruit new volunteers. However, the campaign also ended up driving donations, says Adam Vasallo, its chief marketing officer.

“It’s about showing the everyday activities, the low-lift investments that an individual can make to make a lifelong and powerful impact and transformation on the life of a young person,” he says. “Just to tell volunteers that it takes no time and it takes very little skill to be a positive mentor. But what we’ve seen is that it brought our alumni out.”

Since then, former mentors and mentees — or “Bigs” and “Littles,” in the organization’s parlance — have flocked to social media to share their own stories and photographs. Online engagement has soared, and tens of thousands sign up for their emails each year.

Furthermore, Vasallo says the charity’s number of active donors grew by 40 percent last year, and fundraising revenue has increased 32 percent year over year since 2023.

He attributes the long tail of its success to the decision to put storytelling front and center. “I often get asked, ‘Well, when does the campaign end? What’s the end date?’ And I say, it’s not a campaign. It’s a platform — campaigns, conversations, and verticals will now be built off of it,” says Vasallo. “We’ll be here to stay.”

Mix high-tech and traditional approaches to cultivate donor relationships.

Becky Straw, founder and CEO of the Adventure Project, a nonprofit that creates jobs in Africa, says she started her group in 2010 in part to connect with like-minded people who wanted to make the world a better place: “We were trying to build what we knew was missing in the sector… really compelling reasons to give effectively to help end extreme poverty.”

The desire to build community has informed the charity’s donor relations, she says. No matter the size of the gift, all donors receive a personal thank-you email from Straw or her co-founder, Jody Landers, within 48 hours. The Adventure Project has 400 monthly donors, and Straw follows nearly all of them on social media, sending them messages or small gifts to celebrate the birth of a baby or a new job. Last year, the staff mailed out 800 handwritten holiday cards.

“It is something to show that there’s real people at the Adventure Project who care deeply about them,” Straw says. “And it’s not a transaction — it’s really a community and relationship.”

In addition to these human-centered methods of connecting with donors, Straw embraces AI to streamline her workflow.

“ChatGPT is my best friend. It is a full-time employee at the Adventure Project,” she says with a laugh.

Over the past three years, she has trained the AI on the Adventure Project’s messaging, website pages, and blog posts to help it learn the charity’s voice and tone. She enabled Hemingway Editor in ChatGPT to ensure communications are written at an 8th-grade reading level, and the Nonprofit Donation Page Optimizer chatbot to sharpen fundraising appeals.

Now when she uses ChatGPT, it can draft communications that are approachable and closely mimic the charity’s style. “That really has helped us shape all of our outreach so that it’s consistent across our entire holiday-giving campaign. It will say, ‘Here is what your social-media posts should say. Here’s how you should write your SEO,’” she says. “More people should be using it because it’s an incredible resource that’s really shaved hours off of my week.”

Segment your donors and customize content for them.

Data-driven strategies are as important for smaller organizations with leaner teams and fewer resources as they are for large organizations with thousands of donors.

Straw says the Adventure Project uses Salesforce CRM to collect and analyze donor information. The data shows that the nonprofit’s backers fall into distinct demographic buckets, and she can’t use a one-size-fits-all approach to reach them.

For example, the way she communicates with donors who live in Silicon Valley — “they like the data, they like the effectiveness, they want to see the numbers” — is tonally different from her outreach to women ages 30 to 50, who respond best to heart-centered messages about creating jobs for mothers in Africa and supporting families.

“Continuing to send out mass emails or mass texts to thousands of people with the same message is, in my opinion, detrimental to the life of your organization because you’re going to start losing people,” she advises.

Vasallo agrees that segmentation is critically important. Big Brothers Big Sisters also surveys its donors and uses Salesforce to strategize on communications.

“Would they like email? A one-to-one approach? Would they like a phone call? Would they just like to receive letters in the mail? People still love to receive letters in the mail,” he says.

After nailing down those insights, Big Brothers Big Sisters is able to customize its messaging for every segment of its supporters in every channel. “We really analyze that data, and that’s how we’ll determine our approach.”

Take the long view: small-dollar donors may convert into major givers.

Nurturing every donor has a significant prospective upside: Major gifts often come from people who started by giving small sums. Maintaining data on your supporters and keeping track of their big life events primes you for the moment when you can begin to ask for more.

“The everyday donors who were giving in 2010 are now some of our major donors,” says Straw. As they’ve advanced in their careers and become more emotionally invested in the Adventure Project’s work, their gift size has grown proportionally, she says: “We want to be mindful that our everyday donors are actually you and me, and they have the potential to become major donors as we get them more engaged.”

The New York Community Trust has a relatively low $5,000 minimum to open a donor-advised fund, and currently holds more than 1,200 DAFs seeded by donors of all stripes. This past summer, “we had a retired school teacher open up their donor-advised fund with us,” Mandelman says. “We had a retired city official open up a DAF with us — all different walks of life.”

What they share is a deep love of their city, Mandelman observes, which is why many donors add to their DAF balances or put the foundation into their estate plans at turning points in their lives, like after selling a home or entering retirement.

By keeping in touch regularly over the years, the foundation partners with donors through their major life changes and lets them see how they are part of a bigger picture.

“Everyone who sets up a fund with us, or who gives a donation to our community-needs fund, or who establishes a legacy gift with us — they’re getting our same investment and attention,” she says. “Regardless of whether this is a $5,000 donor or a $500,000 donor, that helps to tell us how we can best engage with this person so we can help make their giving as joyful as possible.”