How to Engage with Donors in a Meaningful Way!

In this article we are going to explore the reasons we engage with donors, how we find out why, and how this effects our long term strategic marketing plans. Thus allowing the nonprofit organization to come up with new and prosperous ways to enhance the numbers of the giving public and our abilitity to engage this group.

To me the first step in finding out anything is to go to the source, in this case your donor, and ask them why they give. As incredible as this sounds very few of us actually ask our donors this question. You might be surprised at the reasons, some of which have nothing to do with your mission. Maybe a friend suggested they donate some money as both happen to enjoy the comraderie. It's these little nuances that create synergy among your base of volunteers to change something for the good through common interest shared by the group as a whole. The point is to keep an open mind and ears to the different possibilities that could arise in this type of conversation.

The next step is, can we determine how to engage properly with this target audience to drill even deeper into the niche which supplies willing and able donors and the programs they support.? If we can,engage properly, and it seems like we should be able then we can put together characteristics of a given profile that we can then develope strategic methods of connecting with these audiences that exhibit these characteristics.

Seems like a lot, but if we redirect some energy to accomplish our goal by means of this type strategy we will waste less effort and our return on invested time should increase significantly so that we get more for less in the long run. In this economy that is exactly what we need to achieve in order to increase funding but keeping a lid on spending.

This also leads to adopting other measures that benefit our nonprofit organizations and allow donors the ability to fund needed projects they feel passionate about. This helps us to determine what our expected revenues are from general fund raising and to what programs they are connected. We should then be aware of programs that are in need of more funding and we can concentrate our efforts, rather then waiting till a program is floundering because of lack of funding. We are now using tactics based on our strategic planning.

We need to get out of trying to forecast based on past experience. This is archaic and rarely will it led to any meaningful results. Lets start asking the tough questions that lead to specific efforts in order to squeeze the most efficiency out of our systems. We can do that if our strategy is based on solid facts derived from important research on basic reasoning of relationships. The example of the comraderie experienced by two volunteers needs to be cultivated and others included. This is the basis for social media that we have heard about in recent years.

This brings us to the future which is Web 2.0. This is where the internet starts to take on a mind of it's own based on the ever widing warehousing of content on anything imaginable. As time goes on we will find our efforts transferred to the web in order to facilitate the handling of our chartable giving. We enjoy seeing our money help others and we like to connect with people that are doing the same.

Start thinking about how you can use the internet to allow people the opportunity to give to your organization so that their life can take on new meaning and achievement. Remember there are people out there that are looking for a meaning to life and you can give them the hope to successfully acquire that meaning in their life and profit from it.