1. You brand is not being clearly communicated across all channels. – Branding is just as important for nonprofits as it is with any other organization or company. With direct mail, email, websites, social media sites, etc. it can be difficult to maintain brand consistency across all the channels. Take a look at all elements of your fundraising campaigns and make sure everything matches as far as imagery, messaging, logo usage, colors, and your brand’s overall identity.
2. You do not have concrete goals. – As a nonprofit you probably do already have future fundraising goals in place, maybe for the next year or the next five years. But what about what you intend to accomplish with every phase of your campaign? Are you trying to reach a certain monetary goal? Do you want to increase participation by a certain percentage? How many non-donors do you want to convert to donors? Make a list of specific goals you’d like to accomplish
3. You are unsure of the best way to connect with donors. – To make sure you are targeting the right people it’s important to build relationships with your audience so you understand them and know how they prefer to communicate with your organization and what kind of messaging resonates best with them. You can achieve this by opening up two-way communication either by leading them to personalized landing pages where they answer a few questions or by opening up conversations on social media sites.
4. Your messages are not donor-centric. – Your organization may be accomplishing wonderful things, which is very important to communicate, but focusing too heavily on that and not enough on your donors may cause donors’ interest to wane. Your messaging should revolve more around the benefits you can offer donors rather than what they can do for you. View some examples of donor-centered copy here.
5. You haven’t established your niche. – There may be other organizations out there like yours or very similar to yours. Are you clearly communicating what makes your organization different from the others? What can you offer donors that other organizations can not?

It is not necessary to start over from scratch if all five of these items pertain to you so please don’t get overwhelmed.  You can start improving your fundraising today just by focusing on one change at a time and planning small steps that will guide to achieve it.

Here are 3 steps you can take right now:

1) Engage donors - The average person is exposed to 5,000 messages a day but only remembers four. If you are not taking proactive steps to engage your donors then chances are your message is one that is easily forgotten. One of the ways you can engage donors is by reaching them through several channels including direct mail, email, and social media. Seeing a message in more than two channels increases the response rate by 10-15%. Another way to engage donors is through conversation. Find out more about them simply by asking (you can use PURL’s to do this) and apply that to future communication so you are reaching them on a more personal level.

2) Build relationships – As mentioned above, use whatever information you can find out about your donors and apply it to future communication so the messaging is relevant. Relevance is the largest lever on response in marketing and fundraising and is therefore key in building genuine relationships. Also, keep in mind that relevant messaging can receive a response rate 3 times higher than messages that are just personalized with a name. This is not just a once and done thing though. It’s important to maintain communication with appropriate timing and frequency to keep building that relationship.

3) Track results and utilize data – Tracking results is almost always done with fundraising but actually applying the data from the results to future fundraising initiatives is something that often falls through the cracks. Utilize data and make necessary adjustments to make sure you are achieving optimal ROI. 67% of marketing expenditures could achieve significant improvement in results without significant changes and without an increase in investment. These changes could apply to the messaging (perhaps you’ve noticed a change in donor motivations), marketing mix, and/or integration of different channels.

All in all, you want to ensure that the right person gets the right message at the right time and in the right way while applying the aforementioned strategies. If you keep doing this you can ensure fundraising success for your nonprofit both in the short-run and long-run.

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing fundraising expert Bernard Ross speak and have paralleled a lot of his tactics in the fundraising work I do with clients.  Integrating donor psychology with up and becoming cross-channel tactics have been the key ingredients to Pacesetter’s successful fundraising programs.  Ross has been featured in the February 25, 2010 edition of The Chronicle of Philanthropy discussing some of these tips.  I’ve outlined three simple steps that integrate these two approaches to ensure that you’re soliciting donations in the most effective way possible.

1. Identify what donors are responding to and market towards those areas. Yes, I said market.  Every fundraising professional is a sales representative for their organization/institution, and every contact has to be about making that emotional appeal.
2. Determine what mediums of communication your donors are responding to and incorporate tactics that fit the donors’ personality.  This can vary across your overall donor base – segment and attack.
3. Solicit donations when the donor is most likely to contribute. By analyzing donor history, you can cut down on marketing costs by sending heavy solicitations around the timeframe that the donor is most likely to contribute.

Overall keys to success – use smart segmentation and build upon that personal appeal each and every time.