Attracting the Mission-Driven Donor

By Nick Ellinger, Chief Brand Officer, Moore

We will take almost any type of donor we can get: 

• We send emergency appeals, knowing that some of these donors are giving more to the emergency than to our organizations and will be more difficult to retain. 
• We use premiums to trigger reciprocity among donors, knowing that some donors are giving more because of the premium than from an attachment to the mission. 
• We do galas and 5K and other special events, knowing that some donors want the opportunities to wear their Louboutins or Brooks Ghosts more than supporting our mission. 

And yet, all other things being equal, we’d rather have donors who are in it for our mission and organization rather than any external factors. But how do we find and retain these unicorns? A few recommended techniques: 

Go to where mission donors are most likely: your warm leads. These are your volunteers, petition signers, grateful patients, advocates, service recipients, and more. They have already put their hand in the air, saying “I’m here for the mission.” 

Now, not all these people will be likely giving candidates. For example, if you are a poverty alleviation organization, your service recipients will hopefully be in a position one day to support your mission, but likely not immediately after receiving services. 

That’s why warm leads like these are great modeling opportunities. If you start with people who aligned with your mission, then add in those who are already charitable, you are at the center of a very profitable Venn diagram. 

Separate and customize to your mission-driven donors. It’s tough to get away from techniques like premiums that bring in donors. In our 2024 in Review benchmarking report, we found that mail packages with premiums brought in $.28 per name, versus $.17 per name for non-premium packages. They do this by dramatically increasing response rate, at the cost of average gift and likely mission-alignment. So using premiums can allow you to bring in a great number of people; it’s tough to pass that up. 

And you may not need to. You can do what we call Offer Assignment modeling, helping match the right package to the right donor or prospect. Alzheimer’s Association did this for their donors working with Moore’s SimioCloud. After modeling, instead of 100% of their file getting labels, only 43% did. That customization helped with both their premium-driven and mission-driven audiences; the premium folks got labels and the mission folks who didn’t need them didn’t. As a result, they increased revenue by 15% and decreased costs by an additional 15%. 

If you are interested, Alzheimer’s Association is doing a webinar on this topic on October 8 – hope to see you there! 

Aim toward acquisition audiences that tend to be more loyal. When the only ways of finding new potential donors were renting lists and opening the phone book, each new donor was a black box — you knew about them was their name and how much they gave. 

Now, with solutions like SimioCloud, which has over two billion donation records from 700+ organizations, you can know ahead of time who is going to be a loyal donor and who isn’t. And now these solutions aren’t just restricted to mail — we’ve launched SimioCloud Email Acquisition so you can bring the power of co-operative data across channels. 

Using these tools, you can bring in donors who are likely to stay with you because you know they’ve stayed with other organizations. 

This hopefully isn’t a recipe to get rid of donors who may not be as aligned with your mission. With positive stewardship, that person who started without a mission focus may get one over time. And in direct marketing, you always have to kiss a lot of frogs to get one prince. 

But with modeling your warm leads, separating your messages by offer, and using the best possible acquisition audiences in mail and email, you are more likely to bring in donors who will stay for the long term.