How to Use Donor Personas to Identify New Prospects

You love your current donors, right?

You want more just like them, right?

The best way to find folks similar to your current supporters is to begin by creating a profile of who your best supporters are. So let’s go ahead and create a profile (aka “persona”) for your model donor.

Your Surprisingly Easy Way to Use Personas to Discover New Donors

Donor personas are hypothetical “stand ins” for your nonprofit’s actual donors. They enable you to stand in your donors’ shoes and think from their perspective – a pretty handy thing if you’re looking for people who might like to make an investment with your nonprofit!

Begin with demographics.  Then move on to psychographics.

Start with the basics.

Get out a sheet of paper and grab a pen.

• Write down the names of your top 50 – 100 donors. Leave some space underneath each one so you have room to write in their characteristics.

• Jot down basic demographic information under each name.
  • Gender
  • Age range
  • Marital status
  • Children (grown or young?)
  • Education
  • Guesstimated income range
  • Guesstimated assets range
  • Geographic location (e.g., state, city, neighborhood)
  • Home or apartment?
  • Anything else you can think of

• Add in information about behaviors and beliefs.
  • Years as a donor
  • Years as a volunteer
    • Direct service
    • Committee
  • Other affiliation with you (e.g., alum, parent, grandparent, client, subscriber, etc.)
  • Religious affiliation
  • Political affiliation
  • Other community service (e.g., boards; PTA; politics; other nonprofits)
  • Anything else you can think of

Find the Commonalities among Current Donors

Now see where you find the most commonalities. Even if you find just a handful, this will be helpful in trying to develop a profile of your most likely donors.

Maybe you’ll find a few common donor profiles.

These are different than ‘stereotypes,’ in that they’re grounded in fact (current data, not anecdotes), and they’re more than demographic data.  This is why it’s a great idea to survey or interview your supporters (see below) so you get real information, not just your suppositions. And keep in mind good personas are not static. So if you’re using personas you identified five years ago, it’s time for an update.

Here’s how they might look, just as examples – and you can give them names to “personify” each one and make them easy for you to visualize and remember:

Suzy Soccer Mom

• Female
• Aged 32-50
• Married
• College educated
• Unemployed or part-time
• Home owner or apartment renter
• Active with kids’ schools
• Volunteers in the community
• Listens to NPR; is active on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest

Busby Business Man

• Male
• Aged 40 – 60
• Married
• College-educated
• Employed full-time; C-level or owns own business
• Home owner
• On other boards
• Gives to politics
• Reads the WSJ; Listens to CNBC; is active on LinkedIn

Lucy Lunch Lady

• Female
• Age 55 – 70
• Married, divorced or widowed
• College-educated
• Retired/empty nest
• Home owner or retirement community
• Volunteers in the community
• Attends church/synagogue
• Reads the local newspaper and The New Yorker

Marshall Millennial

• Male
• Age 28 – 38
• Single or married; young children
• College-educated; Graduate degree
• Employed full-time or part-time (flexible schedule); entrepreneurial
• Homeowner or renter
• Volunteers in the community
• Tech savvy
• Gets news online; Watches YouTube

Determine Where You Might Find Your Top Personas

If these were your lists, your next task would be to determine where to go to find more Suzys, Busbys, Lucys and Marshalls.

Think about this a bit.

To find Suzys you might want to see if you could get yourself invited to speak at a PTA or other school group. Maybe you could talk about opportunities for volunteering.  Bring a sign-up sheet and business cards.  Your goal is to collect names and try to make a match between what your organization does and some of these “Suzys” who might want to get more involved with you.  Where else might you find large numbers of Suzys?  A community playground?  A soccer club? An online “Mommy blogger” group to which you might contribute useful expertise or tips?

Where might you find Busbys?  Perhaps you could speak at a local Chamber of Commerce, or at a service club meeting (e.g., Rotary, Elks, Moose, Lions, etc.). Or what about an issue-oriented venue such as the Commonwealth Club?  Or a politics-oriented venue like the City Council, Board of Supervisors or School Board? An issue-related LinkedIn group might be a great place for you to contribute to the discussion.

Where might Lucys hang out? Perhaps your local churches, synagogues or mosques have women’s groups where you could speak. Maybe they’re having a health fair, children’s carnival or holiday bazaar where you can set up a booth. Or perhaps there are other venues where these women volunteer in high numbers, such as neighborhood groups or the library.  Maybe you could write an op ed for the local newspaper that’s related to an issue of common interest?

To find Marshalls you might want to troll online forums like LinkedIn, Google hang-outs or Facebook groups. You’ll want to get on social media and find influencers followed by Millennials. Follow these influencers, and join the discussions. Target Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter. Establish thought leadership by sharing useful information and driving engagement via polls and quizzes. Perhaps you could speak at a new social club, school group or young family-oriented religious community.

Target Venues for Donor-Prospect Recruitment

You want to find venues where you can go (in person or virtually), introduce your mission, and talk with folks about how they feel about your mission.  For those who are interested, this is an opportunity to share how they can get involved.  If nothing else, you want to get contact information so you can follow up more individually with these folks to see if there might be a good match between your organization and them.

What To Do if You Don’t Have Information about Current Donors?

Now is a great time to begin collecting it!  Consider:

• A quick donor survey — Survey Monkey, KwikSurveys, Googledocs and Typeform all have free versions. Remember to keep if brief. It’s best to limit the survey to 1 – 5 questions, and try to avoid questions folks don’t like to answer (e.g., income; specific age).
• Interviews – You can simply call a random sampling of donors and ask if they’d be willing to help you out. Folks like to be asked to help in ways that don’t involve being solicited to give more money. Or you can ask folks to self-identify as willing to be interviewed by putting out a call to respond in your blog, e-newsletter, website or on social media.
• Purchasing donor analytics – You can develop a data-based profile of your current supporters; the analytics will give you different predictions as to other folks in your database who bear similarities to your current donors, such as annual gift, major gift and planned gift likelihood (See here and here for more info).

Get Smart about Donor Identification

Looking for folks who match the profiles of your current donors is a smarter way to go than blindly grasping at whatever straws folks send your way. So, avoid the trap of putting “rich people” in your community on your list just because they have capacity to give.  It doesn’t mean they’ve an interest in what you do, or even that they’re philanthropic.

At least give donor identification as much thought as you’d give identification of folks you might be willing to consider as potential dates.  Put together a list of attributes and affiliations that are likely to mean this individual will be a good match.  That’s your starting point.  Then, move on from there, knowing you’ve done the front-end work that will increase your odds of successfully converting these “leads” into donors.

NOTE: Grab these free resources to help you build your own donor personas:

• Make Personas for Your Nonprofit [Free PowerPoint Templates]
• Do Good Org’s Nonprofit Donor Personas [Free Template/Spreadsheet]
• Hub Spot Academy: How to Create Personas
• Every Action Nonprofit Donor Persona Template
• 12-Point Marketing Persona Checklist from Heidi Cohen

Also, here’s a beginners guide to the difference between demographic and psychographic information.

What are your best donor identification tips?  Please share!

Image courtesy of John Hain from Pixabay