According to data from surveys of nearly 10,000 donors performed by Louis Diez and Ron Cohen, those who feel highly engaged with an organization—defined as meeting with people related to and feeling valued by the organization frequently—give at significantly higher levels. In fact, the most engaged donors give at up to 5 times the rate of donors overall.

For organizations focused on fundraising, engagement with donors and constituents dramatically multiplies giving over time. Donor engagement is the X factor that significantly boosts giving from key donor groups:

• Gifts under $1,000: Highly engaged donors gave at 1.2 times the rate of all donors.
• Gifts $2,500-$9,999: Highly engaged donors gave at 2 times the rate of all donors.
• Gifts $10,000-$24,999: Highly engaged donors gave at 3 times the rate of all donors.
• Gifts $25,000-$49,999: Highly engaged donors gave at 4 times the rate of all donors.
• Gifts $50,000 and up: Highly engaged donors gave at 5 times the rate of all donors.

The more an organization can cultivate engagement, the more it will see giving increase over time, especially among mid-level and major donors.

The key is focusing on the three elements of trust that drive engagement: credibility, reliability, and intimacy.

This means communicating transparently and consistently, following through on promises, and personalizing interactions. Donors who trust an organization, talk about it, and feel valued will become partners in its mission.

For fundraising programs seeking sustainable growth, investment in donor engagement will yield significant dividends.

While tactics like increasing call volumes or events may boost short-term dollars, engagement builds lifetime value and transforms donors into advocates and ambassadors. For long-term funding, engagement is the strategic “X factor” that multiplies giving across the donor pyramid.

Nonprofits that make engagement a priority will thrive. Those that don’t risk being left behind.

Get the full recording for this Donor Participation Project session in our resource library!

However, many organizations struggle to make the case for investing in engagement. A recent podcast featuring fundraising experts Louis Diez and Ron Cohen provides data-driven insights on how trust pays off.

Diez and Cohen’s analysis of nearly 10,000 donors from multiple organizations found a clear correlation between donors’ level of engagement and lifetime giving.

Donors who reported interacting with an organization at least five times in the past year and said they felt “always” or “very often” valued gave at higher levels. For example, donors who gave between $2,500 to $10,000 were twice as likely to be highly engaged as the average donor.

Extrapolating from these findings, Cohen estimates that increasing the number of highly engaged donors—even modestly—could result in over $1 million in additional lifetime revenue. Of course, revenue generation is not guaranteed, but focusing on engagement and trust-building strengthens relationships in a way that motivates giving.

How can organizations build trust and increase engagement? Cohen and Diez recommend reporting back to donors on surveys and campaigns to show their impact, acknowledging all gifts sincerely, and inviting more touchpoints that make donors feel valued.

• For major donors, that may mean in-person meetings.
• For annual fund donors, sharing stories of how gifts were used can help build emotional connections.

While relationships take work, focusing on engagement and trust pays long-term dividends.

Diez urges organizations not to see engagement as a “wishy-washy feel good thing” but as a strategic imperative.

By valuing and cultivating supportive communities, organizations build goodwill that generates revenue and spreads through advocacy and word-of-mouth.

Though soft on the surface, trust produces hard results.

The data shows engagement matters—and building trust leads to dollars.

Get the full recording for this Donor Participation Project session in our resource library!

This program has been discontinued. Information below kept for historical purposes.

The “Name My Desk” NFT confers upon you the exclusive naming rights to my desk for up to two full weeks (14 consecutive days). During this period, my desk will be known as the “{{Recognition Name}} Desk” in all official publications. As a bonus, I may feature the recognition name of the current NFT holder in the DPP LinkedIn Live series as well as in other social media posts. Here is what the recognition plaque looks like:

I will make every effort to display a daily photo of my desk at this URL.

The main innovation over a regular sponsorship is that after you’ve used your sponsorship, you can resell the NFT to pass on the rights to another person! A portion of every sale will benefit the Donor Participation Project.

How the NFT Sponsorship Works

1. When you buy the NFT on OpenSea.io, a secret passcode will unlock. Email me with the passcode and the recognition name that you want displayed.
2. If I am unable to verify that you are the owner of the NFT, I may ask that you jump on a screen share with me so you can show me the NFT in your wallet.
3. You can then provide a {{Recognition Name}}, which I will print and will be displayed on my desk for up to 14 consecutive days, or until you sell the NFT.
4. I reserve all rights to determine whether your {{Recognition Name}} is appropriate and may decline to add the one you suggest or ask that you suggest another one. Typically, recognition names should be a company or a person’s name.
5. If at any time and for any reason I am unable to continue to display your name on my desk, your desk will still be known as the “{{Recognition Name}} Desk” for the agreed-upon time period. If the program is ever discontinued, I will post the news on this web page. I strongly suggest that you visit this web page to view the current status of the program.
6. After you’ve benefitred from your sponsorship, you can resell the NFT to pass on the rights to another person. A portion of every sale will benefit the Donor Participation Project.

Value proposition

This naming opportunity may be especially valuable to you right now if you:

• Believe strongly in the mission of the Donor Participation Project and want to support it. Every NFT purchase supports the Donor Participation Project.
• Believe that the increasing awareness and reach of the Donor Participation Project (0 to 1,000+ DPP members and doubled number of LinkedIn followers in year 1; accepted in LinkedIn Creator Accelerator; planning first conference in the Spring of 2022) will make these sponsorship rights more valuable in the future. In this case, the rational behavior is to purchase the NFT right now, at any price.
• Operate a business that would benefit from reaching the Donor Participation Project’s audience of thought leaders in nonprofit fundraising.
• Have some cryptocurrency, already own too many make-believe sneakers or gorillas, and want some recognition of your accomplishments in the real world.

This session has passed. DPP members can access a video recording, slides, and other materials shared by the presenter. We also hold a small group discussion the week after every presentation for further discussion and networking! Make sure to sign up here to get access.

Matthew Lambert, CEO, William & Mary Foundation, and Dan Frezza,  Associate Vice President for Strategic Operations & Annual Giving guided a Donor Participation Project session on the details of their successful alumni giving participation strategy during their last campaign.

Some interesting takeaways were:

• Every donor interaction mentioned the three campaign goals of increasing alumni engagement, increasing alumni giving participation, and reaching the campaign’s dollar goal.
• They exploded their alumni engagement from about 10,000 touchpoints with alumni per year at the start of the campaign to over 30,000 by the last year of the campaign.
• They grew their Class Ambassadors program from 200 to over 800 volunteers.
• Their Giving Day also grew exponentially, and they viewed it as both an engagement and giving participation opportunity.
• Leadership (President, Board, VP Advancement) must make participation a priority.
• It is not a matter of either raising given dollar amounts OR achieving a participation goal, it has to be seen as giving AND participation.
• Success requires a broad-based focus, across campus.
• Diversification of the donor base is key (i.e. women in philanthropy, underrepresented populations).
• The main indicators of giving habits are: giving history, consistency, frequency, and gift amount.
• You must choose one among these three high-level goals: Retention, Reactivation, Acquisition. It will most likely be Retention.
• With Reactivation, time is not on your side. After 5 years, donors are as likely to come back as a non-donor.
• In the Acquisition bucket, newly graduated students were an important source of growth.
• Key drivers of their success were: increased retention (year over year giving), increased gift frequency (within a year), stewardship of good behavior (i.e. consecutive giving society).

Learn more about the Donor Participation Project and sign up here.

Work: Annual fund assessment; Development of “giving event” toolkit; execution of Giving Days, Giving Weeks, and Reunion Giving Days; email best practices training and implementation; optimization of online giving platform

Summary: Our initial assessment identified a high engagement but fragmented alumni base that was not responding to traditional appeals. We developed a standardized “giving event” toolkit that the client could apply at multiple levels of the organization (from individual departments, campuses, and reunion classes to the entire school). Thanks to these, alumni participation went from as low as 9% to as high as 34% for certain segments. The all-school Giving Week raised $253,000 and generated considerable positive donor energy and social media activity.

This highly-ranked graduate school in Washington, DC had a strong major gifts program but needed to increase broad-based support from alumni to meet its full potential. Alumni and friends were highly engaged with their individual programs and among themselves but this was not translating to increased giving.

The Assistant Dean for Development came to us for an assessment of the annual fund program and recommendations for growth opportunities. Based on the strength of our suggestions, the engagement was extended into the implementation phase.

Our initial research discovered that:

• Alumni were highly engaged at a micro-level: with their specific professor/s or functional program, but not so much with the school in itself or even the university.
• Board members were clamoring for increased alumni giving participation.
• Mail solicitation (managed by a central office) was not moving the needle. Alumni complained that it seemed tone-deaf to their areas of interest.
• A school-wide Giving Day did not seem like the best course of action due to questions on how many alumni related to the school as an entity.
• The school had just started a reunion program.

Action Plan

Based on our initial assessment, we communicated to the client the following growth opportunities:

Work with individual programs to educate staff and faculty on stewardship and donor relations best practices, eventually leading to holding several Giving Weeks for individual programs, a Giving Day for each of their milestone reunion years, a Giving Week for their international campus, and a school-wide Giving Week.

Optimize the use of the giving form. While this part of the infrastructure was managed centrally and there wasn’t much flexibility, we discovered ways to use it that were not widely known. This allowed us to implement previously overlooked best practices such as pre-selecting monthly gift options or pre-populating gift amounts in email asks.

Leverage a strong leadership annual giving society to celebrate their first school-wide Giving Week. We provided all the planning elements and assisted the in-house team in running the event: strategy sessions, volunteer engagement ideas, project management, best-practice email templates, copywriting, giving week webpage design and maintenance, and social media/phonathon calendars.

The Results

The Giving Week brought in 250+ new donors and raised over $250,000.

Beyond these results, it thrilled board and major gift donors who got caught up in the excitement. Several leadership society annual donors made stretch gifts and issued challenges during the week.

Alumni participation sky-rocketed in the groups where our strategies were applied going from as low as 9% to as high as 34%.

Faculty and staff were thrilled to understand and implement stewardship and solicitation best practices in their departmental communications which increased their appreciation of working with their Development staff.

What the Client Said

While working with the MarktLab team, at times it felt like we were jumping off a cliff because there were so many things that had simply never been done in our Development operation! Judging by the results, they obviously know what they are doing. Their work transformed our program.

Want results like this for your organization? Let’s talk.

Work: Online giving assessment and giving platform re-design, email best practices coaching, Day of Giving strategy and execution support

Summary: An in-depth assessment of current and needed online giving capabilities led to an 343% increase in online giving. We reviewed technical and copywriting best practices for email and led the design and execution of a wildly successful day of giving that added $134,000 to the bottom line.

Even as its national and international reputation sky-rocketed, this $20M performing arts organization struggled to remain financially solvent. With large deficits, high staff turnover, labor negotiations, and a dwindling donor base its future seemed in question.

They came to us looking for a breath of fresh air and new, cost-effective ideas for their broad-based fundraising efforts.

In our initial consultation call, it was evident that:

• The organization had strong engagement with its constituents.
• Donors were eager to be involved and to increase their philanthropic support but were frustrated with the online giving platform.
• Effectiveness of email communications was below industry standard.
• It was necessary to envision a campaign that would energize and excite the donor base.

Action Plan

Based on our initial assessment, we communicated to the client the following growth opportunities:

Re-design of web giving platform on a budget. We created a completely new online giving experience using existing tools that the organization already had. Previous vendors had quoted outrageous prices to fix the situation and no progress had been made in recent years.

The new online giving platform implemented conversion optimization best practices and allowed them to follow up with donors that started a gift but do not complete it!

This part of the work saw immediate and noticeable performance increases.

Email effectiveness coaching. We taught the in-house team how to build emails that drive results.

For the first time, the organization was able to track donations to individual emails. They vastly improved their deliverability (number of emails that make it to inboxes) as well as the number of people making gifts because of emails.

Fundraising chatbot implementation. Finally, we helped them implement state-of-the-art chatbot functionality on their website.

The chatbot was effective at recovering gifts that would have otherwise not have come through. It provided a conversational, relationship-building interface with donors right at the moment when they were making a gift.

From these conversations, we were able to determine questions that were holding people up in their donations and created an FAQ section to address them.

Day of Giving design and execution. With all these elements in place and performing at a high level, the client felt confident enough to celebrate its first ever Giving Day.

Again, this project needed to happen on a budget. We provided all the elements to help the in-house team rock this philanthropy marathon: a master plan, project management, email templates, copywriting consulting, giving day webpage design, telefundraising volunteer calling effort materials, and social media templates, among others.

The Results

The Day of Giving brought in over 150 new donors and $134,000 in 368 gifts.

Beyond these results, it engaged volunteers and matching gift donors in new ways so they were excited to support the organization even during otherwise challenging times.

As a result of the improvements we recommended in email, website, and chatbot online giving exploded by 343% vs. the previous year.

What the Client Said

It’s important to stay open when coming up with ideas. The MarktLab team are subject-matter experts and really nice to work with. The ideas we generated together saw incredible results almost from day one.

Want results like this for your non-profit? Let’s talk.