I’ve been pondering this thought all day today, but has anyone in the fundraising industry ever tried sending gift stewardship communications (e.g. impact reports or gift fund reports) to their non-donor population? I understand why it is important that we send these types of communications to active donors, but those are people who already showed their trust in our organization. Would a report showcasing how we were good stewards of donor contributions help to convince a nondonor to donate?
I love this idea from an engagement perspective. At Whitworth, we do quarterly impact reports and at least once a year, we will include non-donors as a way to bring attention to the impact donors are making (FOMO) and as a way to thank our constituents for volunteering, attending events and praying for students. We haven’t seen donations increase because of these communications. However, we did see donations increase when we did this with our giving day. We now send two versions of our final wrap up giving day email – one to donors and the other to non-donors. We talk about the impact and provide a giving link to the projects that weren’t quite funded and we ALWAYS receive a significant number of gifts from the non-donor email. I think these donations come from a mix of different types of people: those who intended to give but didn’t get a chance during the 36 hours or those who see that a project is almost funded and believe that their gift will make a meaningful impact.
I’m thinking of this from a feedback loop perspective. The idea being that if you do a certain behavior and have a quick feedback loop (i.e. see impact quickly) then you’ll be more motivated to keep doing the behavior.
Intuitively, I would imagine this will work for your lapsed donors but not so much for non-donors.
Moving non-donors into donors seems to be a problem more related to engagement & trust.
This does inspire some really cool ideas, though:
* Having a counter on the top of the giving page or as a popup that says “XX students helped in the last 7 days.”
* (This one is not new.) Doing an impact report for leadership annual donors.
* Developing a gift impact dashboard that you share every month