By Heather Hill
No matter where you are in the world, as a fundraiser, there’s one challenge you’re probably facing:
How do you find new donors?
Who are they? Where are they? How do you connect with them? What would inspire them to make a gift to your organization?
Your efforts to acquire new donors must include the multiple new prospect research tools and technologies that include relationship mapping aimed at making it easier for you to secure a donor meeting, and/or competitive analysis of similar organizations to discover new donors who are already funding comparable causes to yours.
These tools can help you deepen your strategies for how to reach new audiences, as well as how best to partner with trustees and board members and provide you pathways to grow major gifts.
When it comes to finding new major donors, in addition to acquiring new prospects, some of your best major gift prospects may already be in your database. Have you taken a look at your current donors’ data? Are you unsure how?
Donor data doesn’t have to mean complex predictive analytics or algorithms. Instead it’s important to start with good data hygiene and ensure that the basic information about your donors and their giving is stellar.
For example …
- Do you know your average gift size?
- Do you know when your donors are lapsing or growing in their giving?
- Do you know what your best performing fundraising activity is?
- Do you track donor interests?
Understanding these datapoints is important for assessing your fundraising program and developing or revising your fundraising strategy. Simply knowing the total amount of gifts received does not give you a full picture of your fundraising health.
These datapoints are simple to pull and, in many cases, your database has a function that will do it for you. The caveat, however, is that you have to track and record the information in order to analyze it. If you don’t already have a system in place, there’s no better time than the present to establish one. Maybe that is a good enough reason for to set a time for a call with me?
If you feel like these tools are a new language, we empathize!
Data doesn’t have to be a foreign language for us. We’d like to be your translator who can help you understand what your data is saying, or even go far beyond that to help you find new donors and funders for your crucial mission.
We welcome your comments about this post on the LAPA blog.
