Making Your Case to Donors: Top 5 Tips to Increase Donations
If you’re a nonprofit professional, you know just how important donations are to your organization. You may receive funds in other ways, such as grants or sponsorships, but consistent donations will launch you toward your fundraising goals.
Making your case to donors through presentations and one-on-one meetings is extremely effective because it allows you to start an in-person dialogue with donors and gather audience feedback. While other outreach methods such as emails and phone calls permit you to reach donors where they are, presentations and meetings allow for a more personalized, hands-on approach to increasing donations.
When you’re making your case to donors in a presentation or meeting, you want to make your cause stand out and prove why it’s important for them to contribute. We’ve compiled a list of tips to help encourage donations, including:
- Get to know your donors.
- Incorporate storytelling.
- Create a sense of urgency.
- Make it clear where donations are going.
- Add credibility to your case.
With these five tips in mind, you can strengthen your relationships with donors and motivate them to give back to your cause.
1. Get to know your donors.
When you understand your donors on a deeper level, you can offer more personalized messages and calls to action. Communicate with donors frequently through a variety of methods to learn more about them and gather feedback. These outreach methods may include email check-ins, annual surveys, phone calls, and social media direct messages.
The more you know about your donors, the better you can reach them. Ask them what interests them most about your nonprofit. Your organization may offer many different services, but matching each donor to the service they’re most passionate about will allow you to personalize your communications when it’s time to ask for donations.
You can store this information along with any other relevant demographic data in a donor data platform. NPOInfo explains that when you store all donor information in one place, it streamlines your communication with donors. You can reference this information to pick up donor communications where they left off and make sure each outreach point builds on previous conversations.
2. Incorporate storytelling.
When you speak to donors, you want to make your message as engaging as possible. That’s where storytelling comes in.
As Be Brilliant explains it, using storytelling in a presentation gives some individuality to your case. For example, you might not be the only animal shelter out there, but what makes yours unique? Perhaps your pet adoption program is so successful because of your organization’s unique pet-matching program that matches people with pets using a personality quiz. You might tell a story about an individual who came in looking for a pet with specific traits and found the perfect new furry family member for their needs.
Instead of drawing on generalities about your organization, use a story to show off exactly what your organization does. Plus, stories are better at eliciting emotions, which can motivate your donors to take action.
3. Create a sense of urgency.
Your supporters may feel connected to your organization, but if they don’t feel inclined to donate immediately, they’ll likely put it off and eventually forget to show their support. The two most popular times to donate tend to be the end of the year giving season and during major crises. However, this tendency can leave your nonprofit feeling strapped for cash in between popular donation times.
To solve this problem, create a sense of urgency surrounding donations. You do important work all year long, and you need regular donations in order to support it. Setting deadlines for donations pushes people to take action quickly.
Another way to create urgency is to connect your case to a relevant campaign or seasonal event. When donors see the larger initiative attached to your request, they may be more inclined to donate. For example, designated giving days like GivingTuesday that have hard deadlines can inspire quick responses.
Lastly, be extremely specific about what action you want your donors to take. When you write a clear and easy call to action, you’re more likely to inspire a quick response. Include all details potential donors will need to contribute to your cause, including a donation link.
4. Make it clear where donations are going.
When people give to an organization, they want to know exactly what their donation is going toward. That way, they can see the impact they’ve made and feel proud of their contribution.
The more specific you can get about the impact someone’s donation will have, the better. For example, instead of stating that donations will help animals in the shelter live a better life, share that the funds raised in the next month will go toward building a new outdoor space where dogs can get a break from the cramped conditions inside.
If you’re planning a live presentation for donors, this should be the bulk of your presentation. Make your current initiatives more tangible for donors with thorough explanations, infographics, pictures, and videos.
5. Add credibility to your case.
One of the biggest challenges of marketing your cause is establishing trustworthiness. It can be difficult for donors to trust an organization they may have never heard of or contributed to before.
However, there are ways to show that your organization is credible. For example, one of the best ways to gain trust when promoting your cause is to display donor testimonials. Ask some of your top supporters to share their experiences with your organization. Adding quotes from real people associated with your nonprofit will help verify your organization’s credibility.
Other strategies to demonstrate credibility include mentioning any seals of approval your organization has received and creating graphics that show exactly where your money comes from and where it goes.
Since nonprofits heavily depend on donations, it’s important to show donors your cause is worthy of their unwavering support. Consider implementing these tips to bolster your case to donors in presentations and meetings and encourage more donations.
