4 Effective Strategies for Nonprofit Donor Acquisition
- Nonprofit Learning Lab
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
This is a guest blog.
Gathering support for your nonprofit’s mission hinges on relationship-building. Not only do a sense of community and an emotional connection to your work encourage supporters to give, but 67% of nonprofit donors believe it’s essential to trust the organizations they contribute to, and relationship-building also helps instill that confidence in donors.
Lasting connections with donors begin with good first impressions. As DonorSearch’s donor acquisition guide explains, “Acquisition sets the stage for your nonprofit’s other donor engagement activities,” enabling your organization to expand its reach, achieve higher fundraising goals, and increase its potential for growth.
In this guide, we’ll walk through four actionable strategies to improve your nonprofit’s approach to donor acquisition and start your relationships off on the right foot. Let’s jump in!
1. Segment Your Supporters
When you set out to acquire new donors, it’s often helpful to consider your current supporter base first. Segmentation—the process of grouping donors based on shared characteristics—can provide deeper insights into your existing supporters, which you can use to attract other supporters who share similar traits.
Here are a few helpful donor data points you might use as segmentation criteria:
Demographics: Age, gender, location, education, marital and family status, employment, wealth
Psychographics: Hobbies, interests, values, lifestyles, opinions, pain points, motivations for supporting your mission
Giving history: Average donation amount, frequency and recency of giving, preferred contribution channel, lifetime value
Engagement outside of monetary donations: Interactions with marketing materials, event attendance, volunteering, advocacy, in-kind giving
Note which segment(s) each of your supporters belongs to in your donor database. Then, choose a few groups to focus on for acquisition and create donor personas (i.e., profiles of fictional, ideal donors) you can reference as you reach out to individuals who would fall into the same segments. For example, you might create one persona for an older, wealthy donor who gives large amounts by mail, and another for a young supporter who makes smaller donations via text-to-give but also participates in volunteering and advocacy activities.
2. Create a Multi-Channel Marketing Plan
Once you’ve chosen your target audiences, you’ll need to plan your outreach strategies. A multi-channel marketing plan tends to be most effective, since the more touchpoints you create for potential donors, the more likely they are to see your messages and respond to them.
Some popular marketing channels to incorporate into your plan include:
Your nonprofit’s website, which serves as the hub of your online presence and should provide clear information about why and how to give.
Email blasts and newsletters to reach audiences directly, personally, and on a recurring basis.
Text messages—not only to promote text-to-give as mentioned previously, but also to send quick updates and reminders about current campaigns.
Social media, so brand-new supporters can discover your organization through suggested posts and ads, and interact with other donors in comments.
Print communications, such as flyers and direct mail, which are still valuable supplements to digital marketing and resonate strongly with certain supporter segments.
Track data on each of these channels and adjust your strategy to focus on the platforms that see the most activity. For instance, if you notice your email list subscriber count decreasing while your social media followers increase, you might take some of the time and resources you put into email marketing and reallocate them to social media content creation. This way, you’ll be able to acquire donors more efficiently and truly meet your audience where they are.
3. Leverage Community Partnerships
If you feel like your nonprofit’s resources and connections aren’t cutting it for your acquisition efforts, you don’t have to go it alone! Collaboration expands your reach by introducing your mission to new audiences—the existing communities surrounding your partner organizations.
To take your donor acquisition strategy to the next level, you might form partnerships with:
Businesses. Many companies are eager to give back to their communities—Giving USA reported that corporate giving reached an all-time high in 2024, and according to Double the Donation, 94% of US corporations say they want to maintain or increase their charitable contributions. Whether you receive a sponsorship from a business or partner with them for workplace giving initiatives, you can attract new donors from among their employees and customers.
Other nonprofits. Chances are, your nonprofit isn’t the only one in your vertical or local area facing challenges with limited reach and resources for supporter acquisition. Consider contacting other organizations (nonprofit sector conferences make great networking opportunities, but you can also build relationships online) to pool your resources and plan joint fundraising campaigns or co-marketing efforts.
Educational institutions. When you enter into partnerships with local schools or universities, you should expect to gain non-monetary support first. For example, you might promote volunteer opportunities at a high school that has a community service requirement for graduation, or work with a student organization to launch an in-kind donation drive on a college campus. However, these collaborations can lay the groundwork for eventual gifts from families, faculty and staff, and even some students!
No matter what organizations you collaborate with, make sure your partnerships are mutually beneficial. When you approach potential partners about working together, let them know what’s in it for them—whether that’s improving their brand awareness and reputation, solving their own donor acquisition problems, or teaching young people the value of giving back.
4. Conduct Prospect Research for Major Donor Acquisition
The more a potential donor could give to your nonprofit, the more individualized your acquisition strategy needs to be. Rather than relying on mass marketing materials or broad partnerships, attracting major donors to your nonprofit requires a targeted approach grounded in accurate, specific data, which you can collect by conducting prospect research.
Comprehensive prospect research assesses a potential donor’s ability and willingness to make a major gift by looking at three categories of data points (also known as markers or indicators):
Capacity indicators demonstrate whether a prospect could make a major gift based on their wealth. They include various types of financial information, such as real estate ownership, stock holdings, business affiliations, and political giving history.
Philanthropic indicators show how strong a potential donor’s charitable tendencies are. Past donations to your organization and to other nonprofits are the best markers of an individual who prioritizes philanthropy.
Affinity indicators let you know if a prospect would want to support your specific organization. Data points in this category include a connection to or passion for your mission, a history of non-donation nonprofit involvement, and other relevant personal information (interests, values, family ties, etc.).
A prospect should exhibit all three types of indicators for your nonprofit to consider them a good candidate for major donor acquisition. Refer back to this information throughout the cultivation and solicitation phases of the donor’s journey with your organization to help you develop a stronger connection with them and make an ask that gets a positive response.
While the strategies above are a strong starting point for donor acquisition, every nonprofit’s approach will look slightly different. Adapt these tips to meet your organization’s needs and continually track your progress so you always know what’s going well and where you could make adjustments to help you grow your donor base more effectively.
