Updated July 5, 2024

Nonprofit Communications: How to Improve Donor Relationships

In 2023, fundraising reports found two important things that happened in the nonprofit sector: overall online revenue went down by 1% and nonprofit investments in paid advertising went up by 13%. What does this mean? Nonprofits are spending more on fundraising but earning less in return. 

 

However, there is a silver lining. This same report found that revenue from monthly donations increased by 6%. This means that more and more donors are committed to giving consistently—nonprofits just need to make solid connections with them first. 

 

All nonprofit marketing strategies should foster relationships with current donors or get new donors on the path to relationship building, but how? These emotional and personal connections are worth their weight in gold, and nonprofits can build them by keeping in touch, sharing engaging content, and sending thank-you letters. 

 

To help your nonprofit build long-term, valuable donor relationships, we’ll walk through five steps for developing a nonprofit communication strategy. 

1. Establish Your Goals

When your nonprofit is first getting started, it can be hard to focus on just one goal. For your donor communication strategy, stay organized by breaking down your approach into three categories:

 

• Mission. Your mission is your nonprofit’s overall purpose. For example, a nonprofit might aim to improve accessibility accommodations in your community. 

• Goals. Your goals are things you want to accomplish to achieve your mission. Using the example above, the organization might raise funding to build a new ramp at a local library. 

• Objectives. Objectives are the specific things you need to do to achieve a goal. This could be improving your emailing strategy to raise more donations for the new ramp. 

 

Put together, this nonprofit now has a more straightforward plan of improving email fundraising conversion rates to raise funds to build a new ramp, improving accessibility. 

 

Unless your nonprofit has a major shift in focus, your mission is unlikely to change. Your communication goals and objectives, on the other hand, should evolve based on your nonprofit’s most pressing needs. For instance, given the trend of decreasing donations but increasing recurring gifts, your nonprofit might turn its attention to your donor retention rate.

 

Also, your goals and objectives should be measurable and have deadlines. This provides clear-cut answers to whether your nonprofit hit your targets, and if it falls short or exceeds them, by how much. 

 

Let’s say your goal is to improve your donor retention rate by 20%. You decide that increasing your email open rates by 50% will have a direct impact on retention. To achieve your target open rate, you plan to send a monthly newsletter, create personalized fundraising appeals, and experiment with engaging email subject lines. 

2. Determine Your Messaging Cadence

Nonprofit professionals have varying opinions on how often you should message your donors to hit the sweet spot of keeping your cause top of mind without spamming their inboxes. 

 

Ultimately, the answer depends on your nonprofit, your audience, and your campaign type. For instance, if you’re running an advocacy campaign, most of your supporters will expect your messaging cadence to ramp up as you get closer to a capstone event. 

 

As a general rule of thumb, the advice seems to urge nonprofits to reach out at least once every 30 days but—with special exceptions like ending a donation thank you letter—not more than twice in three days. 

 

Once you’ve determined how often you’ll message your donors, mix it up a bit by varying your content types! For example, LinkedIn advises nonprofits on their platform to follow the “2-2-1” rule, which is that for every five posts, two should be informational, two should be stories, and one should be a donation request. We recommend applying this same advice to your regular messaging strategy to space out your fundraising appeals and focus on relationship building. 

3. Craft Audience-Centered Messages

Most nonprofits aim to increase donations, so why not just send fundraising appeals over and over again? To put it plainly, nonprofits and their audiences have different goals. To achieve your goals, you need to consider your audience’s. 

 

This means creating audience-centered content. This type of content focuses on your audience’s interests and needs first to create messages they’ll want to engage with. You can achieve this by:

 

• Segmenting your audience. The more your content aligns with your audience’s interests, the more likely they are to engage with it. However, your donors are all individuals with unique interests. You can resolve this by segmenting your audience. When stewarding donors, try dividing them by their donor type, such as recurring donors, planned donors, new donors, and so on. While you can segment these groups even further, even just the step of acknowledging that a recurring donor has given before can go a long way in building a relationship with them. 

• Getting specific. Earlier this year, satirical news site McSweeney’s posted the piece “We Dare You to Figure Out What Our Nonprofit Does,” poking fun at nonprofits who emphasize that they “drive change” and “make an impact” without actually giving any specifics. Nonprofit professionals who read the piece agreed that it hit a little too close to home and have subsequently been spreading the advice to share specifics. Explain what your nonprofit does in clear, plain language your audience can engage with. 

• Emphasizing impact. Donors want to give to causes where they know their gifts are making a difference, but often nonprofits think they’re sharing impact without actually giving enough details. Nonprofit communications consultant Anne Green shared in a recent blog post how nonprofits often provide the facts and stop there to their own detriment: “Some organizations also like to pour on the statistics. These numbers don’t mean much without more information.” She advises sharing stories that showcase impact because these tend to be interesting to donors, give examples of how their gifts make a difference, and highlight why their gifts matter. 

 

Crafting audience-centered content is a skill, and you can get better at it with time and practice. Monitor engagement rates from your messages—such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions—to see what approaches are generating interest and what needs to be refined. 

4. Showcase Your Brand

The phrase “brand recognition” often gets tossed around in marketing circles, but what does it actually mean for nonprofits? 

 

For the most part, brand loyalty is actually a preference and a positive association. Certain companies use branding to associate their products with “ruggedness,” “sophistication,” or other traits they feel their customers value and will apply to themselves if they buy their products. 

 

In the nonprofit world, most of this logic still applies, but there is an additional element smaller organizations should consider: consistent branding inspires trust. Donors often avoid giving to smaller organizations out of fear that the nonprofit is actually a scam or won’t be around long enough to make real use of their gift. 

 

Consistent branding in your communication strategy shows that your organization is professional and reliable. Plus, if a donor recognizes your organization’s logo or brand colors, they’re more likely to stop scrolling and pay attention to your messaging!

 

To keep your nonprofit’s communication consistent, create a brand guide. Getting Attention’s guide to nonprofit style guides shares the three types of style guides a nonprofit can create:

 

• Cheat sheet. If you need a to-the-point style guide that shares just the essentials, a one-pager cheat sheet can be helpful. Consider creating sharable cheat sheets for specific parts of your branding, like one for visuals and one for writing. 

• Style guide. Style guides are the middle-of-the-road option between quick cheat sheets and comprehensive brand books. These documents cover your nonprofit’s editorial and visual branding guidelines in reasonable detail, such as sharing fonts and hex codes, but without sharing extensive examples or covering multiple edge cases. 

• Brand book. Your nonprofit should aim to create a brand book, which is a complete, detailed guide to your nonprofit’s branding strategy. However, if your nonprofit currently lacks a style guide at all, view a brand book as something to work up to creating since these documents tend to be very long (for reference, charity: water’s 2016 brand book is an 86-page PDF).

 

Remember that your brand is more than just your logo and brand colors. Instead, it’s a consistent tone and style that represents the specific feelings and ideas you want supporters to associate with your nonprofit. For example, check out these eCards from the Girl Scouts of Alaska as part of a volunteer appreciation initiative: 

[Alt text: A screenshot of the Girl Scout’s eCards with eCards that show various branding strategies]

 

These eCards are intended for an audience already familiar with the Girl Scouts and thus don’t need the logo to be front and center. Instead, they show a range of branding options, from an eCard that simply uses Girl Scouts’ recognizable green to one that shouts out the brand name directly. 

5. Use The Platforms That Work for Your Organization

Multi-channel marketing strategies are an effective way to reach a wide audience of donors and improve your brand recognition. This approach is useful if your nonprofit can post regularly on all of those channels, creates content that will succeed on those channels, and has an audience on those channels. 

 

Yes, nonprofits that can do a multi-channel approach definitely should, but ultimately nonprofits should use the channels that work best for them. If that means just sticking to email, your website, and Facebook, that’s perfectly fine. 

 

A multi-channel strategy involves more than just choosing a few channels. Optimize your approach to each platform you are active on. For instance, younger donors likely aren’t swarming Facebook, but you might still be able to reach them by creating search engine optimized content blog content on your website that appeals to topics they care about. 

 

Using all the strategies we’ve discussed so far, let’s take an in-depth look at a classic message on a platform nearly all nonprofits use: the donor thank-you email. eCardWidget provides this useful template to help us walk through it:

[Alt text: A template of a donation thank you email with the key elements discussed below]

 

• Subject line. From just a glance at an opened email, your supporters should be able to know who it’s from and be interested in opening it. Make sure the sender for all of your emails is your nonprofit’s official email address so you don’t need to waste space in the subject line explaining who you are. 

• Greeting. Consider which audience segment this email is going out to. If it’s a new donor, you might have an introduction as simple as “Welcome!” but if it’s a recurring donor, you could instead reference their previous gifts by thanking them for their continued support. 

• Gift amount and impact. As we touched on earlier, don’t just share numbers—explain why the gift mattered. What were you able to accomplish with the donor’s gift? Why does what you accomplished matter? 

• Visuals. Think about what you explained in the impact section. Then, find photos or create illustrations that represent just that and show off your nonprofit’s brand!

• Call to action. What do you want donors to do after reading your email? In a donor thank you message, they’ve already just given, so continue the relationship by encouraging them to do something else, like exploring your blog or signing up for your newsletter. 

 

Creating templates or guidelines like this for various platforms you regularly use can help you maintain a high standard of quality. Be sure to mix up your content every now and then to avoid getting stale. For example, instead of photographs, you might share a video or an infographic. 

 

Donor communications are essential for building the relationships that lead to lasting support. While it’s easy to fall into formulaic patterns, keep your messaging strategy fresh by staying on target with your goals, considering your audience’s interests, and making the most of the platforms where your nonprofit thrives.