Getting More Out of Fundraising Donors

1. To be popular

2. To feel like part of a group doing something worthwhile.

These are the primary reasons why people give; donors want to be part of something greater, and they want to be asked. When you are fundraising, it is crucial to understand what motivates people in giving; indeed, without understanding this, you will reduce your success rates in getting donations for your cause.

Other reasons why people donate include:

· A need for self-esteem

· Good business-the hope that it will generate sales or interest

· The need for recognition from others

· Pride from being associated with a good cause

· Guilt

· Community responsibility

· Being forced to give (i.e. through an employer)

· Family tradition

· To gain a sense of immortality or in memory of a loved one

People are also motivated by what experts call "towards-away" factors. Let's look at "away" donors.

People who are motivated by "away" or a "push" factor are trying to escape something, to get away from the pain. These people go on vacation to get away from things. They might move to escape a bad neighbor hood or an unsupportive family-not toward something new and wonderful. These people desperately want to get away from pain or things that are unbearable.

Professional fundraisers know this, and include messages that address pain-avoidance donors. Here is one example:

Kim is a stay-at-home mother who feels guilty for not working. She earned a law degree, pays her student loans, but isn't working. She volunteers in her community, but is busy raising two children under the age of three. At church one week she learned of an appeal for money to help orphanages in Asia provide cloth diapers for the children. Kim cried as she read the brochure: Stunted children; two year olds who weighed less than her nine-month-old baby. Children living in reused disposable diapers. Kim donated on the spot. She went home and sorted through all of her children's old clothing and cloth diapers, to mail off to Asian orphanages. Her overriding feeling as she did this: guilt. It was painful to think about how she and her family had so much, but these babies in Asia had so little.

People like Kim give because it is painful not to give. When asking for donations remember this: those hard-luck stories you see in commercials or on donation brochures are written to appeal to "away" donors. Keep this principle in mind when writing requests for donor participation.