Fill the funding gap by finding the right prospects
Except for an increase in donations during the height of the pandemic, the nonprofit sector has faced year-over-year declines in donations, particularly among new and smaller donors. The good news is that wealthy donors have increased their giving from pre-pandemic levels; however, not every organization knows how to access or leverage this charitable segment. Thus, organizations increasingly recognize the importance of identifying, segmenting, and reaching donors with an even more urgent need to identify donors with a high propensity to give.
The first stage of fully leveraging existing and potential donors is to have a complete view of your donor data. Centralizing your data is the first priority. Is your data stored in silos across multiple sources and systems? Do you have proper data governance that balances the security needs with ease of access? Have you invested in mastering your donor data to create reliable, golden records? Do you have a donor data platform that provides a 360-degree view of individuals throughout the donor lifecycle? Based on these questions, you can determine where to invest next and proactively support your organization during a period of dropping donations.
Once your data is centralized and you have a holistic view of donors, you can take your insights further. Leveraging analytics tools, you can visualize, predict, track, and automate how your team moves donors from identification to stewardship. With the right systems in place, you’ll be able to reduce manual efforts, errors, and time spent on reporting while increasing insights, prioritization, and results.
On the foundation and philanthropic side, grantmaking organizations can leverage similar tools to track funding received and grants distributed alongside outcomes for a holistic data view. Tools that can visualize, predict, track, and automate can simplify the view and processes of this end-to-end lifecycle of dollars across the organization. Additionally, these tools can offer the ability to match opportunities to aligned organizations.
Finally, determine the opportunities available for automation to engage donors and put your high-touch efforts where needed most. Imagine if you could write each donor a truly personalized email that showed an understanding of their relationship with your organization, background, giving history, interests, and core values. Everyone responds better to personalized messaging, including your donors. GenAI can quickly and securely generate personalized outreach with just a few pieces of donor data. The key will be to ensure you maximize the human touch where it’s most needed. Technology should never replace your organization's most essential human touches, such as high-level donor outreach.
DYNAMIC PROSPECT QUALIFICATION FOR MAJOR ARTS INSTITUTION
To meet ever-increasing fundraising goals, major gift departments are always looking for new prospects to build their pipeline. Typically, this work has largely been manual—initiating bulk wealth screenings, combing through data, and identifying indicators of ability and propensity to give. Research practices can be time-consuming and often result in static data that loses value over time, requiring additional manual updates. And since major gifts can take years to cultivate, it’s crucial to focus on the right opportunities, which dynamic donor data can best inform.
A major arts-and-culture institution addressed this by adopting a dynamic prospect qualification tool that allows fundraisers to identify a pool of major gift prospects with accurate real-time data on their capacity to give, allowing for quicker turnaround from research to gift officers. As a result, fundraisers and gift officers were able to diversify their outreach beyond already-known major gift donors to target their outreach and uncover the next group of key donors. This improves the quality of the identified prospects and allows fundraisers to focus their efforts on the individuals most likely to give, thus improving and maximizing their existing donor conversation rate. As a result, the institution is now able to significantly increase the chances of securing the next generation of major donors by strengthening their major gift pipeline.