How to Create a Donor Persona for Successful Fundraising
- Nonprofit Learning Lab
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
This is a guest blog.
Most webinars, e-books, blog articles, and other educational resources for nonprofit marketers will confirm the same insight—personalization is the cornerstone of effective marketing. However, to target existing supporters and grow your audience successfully, your marketing team needs to know more about the individuals you’re trying to reach.
A donor persona is a hypothetical profile representing your nonprofit’s target audience based on existing data. Personas can guide your marketing efforts by providing a clear picture of who your audience is and how you should tailor your outreach to motivate them.
Let’s review the key steps your team should follow to develop meaningful donor personas.
1. Outline Donor Persona Characteristics
First, decide what information is relevant to include in your personas. Avoid creating limited profiles focusing only on someone’s willingness or capacity to give. As Insightful Philanthropy explains, some donor data can be misleading without contextual information. This results in a surface-level view of your audience and can produce misguided insights.
For example, let’s say two individuals have the same household income, but one has a lower capacity to give because of the high cost of living in their area. With well-rounded donor personas, your nonprofit can tailor its appeals to best suit a supporter’s circumstances. Perhaps you’ll invite them to advocate for your cause online or volunteer instead of giving monetarily.
For realistic and actionable donor insights, your personas should be shaped by various characteristics, such as:
Demographics: Information like age, household income, education level, occupation, and marital status
Psychographic data: Donors’ lifestyles, core values, motivations, interests, and opinions
Giving behavior: The frequency, amount, and preferred channels through which donors give
Communication preferences: Opinions about communications from your nonprofit, including preferred frequency, channels, and content types
To gather this data, nonprofits must review information from various sources. Before jumping into the research stage, ensure your organization has proper data management practices in place. A clean database will help you find the information about these characteristics easily.
2. Gather Data and Insights
Dig deeper into the characteristics you outlined earlier by collecting data from real donors. Your existing supporters are real-world examples of people who believe in your work, making them the perfect illustrations of your target audience.
Review your marketing assets, such as email campaigns and website analytics, to identify patterns and trends relating to your audience’s engagement. For example, tracking email open rates and the subject lines that received the most opens can reveal insights into the exact language your audience responds most to.
To gather more direct, qualitative insights into your audience’s motivations and preferences, survey existing supporters. Ask questions such as:
Which of our organization’s values do you most align with?
What do you hope to achieve through your donations?
What types of content make you excited to hear from us?
Do you share information about our organization with others? If so, what inspires you to do so?
How satisfied are you with our organization’s donation process?
Have you ever stopped donating to an organization, and if so, why?
What suggestions do you have for ways we can make your involvement more satisfying?
While constituent relationship management (CRM) systems, third-party databases, and other existing information provide a great starting point, be prepared to find gaps in your current data. Use prospect research strategies to collect additional information and verify your findings by checking various sources. You can also conduct a data append to ensure your database is clean and accurate, which is a valuable process for future fundraising efforts beyond donor persona creation.
3. Track The Donor Journey
Your research is a great starting point, but your donor personas should also account for the long-term changes donors will inevitably experience. As they progress through the donor journey, supporters will expect new content and fresh updates from your nonprofit. Not to mention, their preferences and motivations could change, as well.
Create personas for different stages of the donor journey, including:
Awareness stage: The donor is learning about your organization for the first time, perhaps through a social media campaign or your website.
Consideration stage: The donor has taken an initial step of support (like signing up for your email newsletter or following you on social media), but they need further engagement to continue their involvement.
Engagement stage: The donor shows a deep level of commitment to your cause by giving a gift, and they expect consistent communications from your organization.
Advocacy stage: The donor advocates for your cause, perhaps by publicly displaying your merchandise or engaging in a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign.
For example, imagine a donor becomes involved with your cause because of an email that details a beneficiary’s needs using compelling storytelling techniques. After the donor’s first gift, they’ll likely expect an update on the beneficiary or more information about your nonprofit’s work. Furthermore, they’ll want detailed information about your impact when they commit to recurring donations, volunteer roles, or other levels of involvement.
4. Refine Donor Personas Over Time
As mentioned above, donors’ preferences and motivations will change over time. In addition to creating donor personas that address supporters in each stage of the donor journey, you’ll also need to revisit these profiles over time and make adjustments as needed.
The best way to keep your donor personas up-to-date is by tracking supporter information in real time. Leverage prospect research tools that flag significant events that could influence a donor’s decision to give, such as the passing of a key figure in the community who was connected to your cause or a change in ownership of a company your nonprofit partners with.
For example, track specific individuals or topics using Google Alerts alternatives, like a donor news alert service, to receive notifications as soon as they’re mentioned in the news. These tools can also provide access to historical data for more comprehensive insights, which will help you monitor changes in characteristics across personas.
Once you’ve created thorough and well-researched donor personas, it’s time to put them to good use! Getting Attention’s guide to nonprofit marketing plans recommends crafting messages with your ideal donor persona in mind. Pretend you’re formulating a message to only one person: the donor described in the profile. This way, you can achieve the personalized feel of speaking to one person while factoring in the motivations of a broad audience.