How to Persuade New Donors to Join Your Nonprofit Mission
There’s a first time for everything, if you will it
What makes us think a perfect stranger, who’s never given to our organization before, will choose to do so? It’s highly counter intuitive.
People are most likely to continue doing what they’ve done before.
In fact, “commitment and consistency” is one of Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence, and it’s useful in nonprofit marketing and fundraising. But only if you’ve got existing donors.
We talk a lot in fundraising professional circles about the folly of concentrating too many resources on donor acquisition and too little on donor retention. And for good reason. It’s significantly easier and more cost-effective to keep a current donor than to recruit a new one. Why?
It’s appreciably more difficult to get people to reach a new decision than to repeat an old one.
In fact, whenever I coach volunteers to do fundraising, I always suggest they remind current donors how many years they’ve already been giving to the organization. This acts as a decision-making shortcut for these folks. Aha! They already decided this was a good idea. No need to sweat it out again. Done!
But… what if you’re a start-up organization that doesn’t have many donors?
What if your only choice is to go after first-time donors? How do you make a ‘sale’ if people are making a decision from scratch, with no previous history with you or knowledge about your vision, mission and values?
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