Donor acquisition is a critical part of your giving program and is essential to moving your mission forward. In this guide, you’ll learn the fundamentals of donor acquisition and a proven 5-step strategy for building a sustainable donor acquisition program:
- What is donor acquisition?
- Donor acquisition vs. donor retention
- How to calculate your donors acquisition rate
- Donor acquisition strategy: a proven 5-step process for acquiring valuable donors (even if you think you’ve tried everything before)
What is donor acquisition?
Donor acquisition is the process of finding, attracting, and converting new donors through your nonprofit’s fundraising channels.
Donor acquisition consists of any efforts you make to acquire new donors, on- or offline, including paid advertising, email, social media, direct mail, word of mouth, and more.
What's the difference between donor acquisition and donor retention?
Donor acquisition is the process of gaining new first-time donors, while donor retention is the process of inspiring donors to donate again so that they don’t lapse.
Donor acquisition and donor retention are key parts of a healthy fundraising program. Donor acquisition is critical because you have to acquire new donors in order to have donors to retain.
How to calculate your donor acquisition rate
To calculate your donor acquisition rate, divide your total first-time donors by your total donors and then multiply by one-hundred:
(First-time donors / total donors) x 100 = Donor Acquisition Rate.
What's a good donor acquisition rate?
Determining a good donor acquisition rate should be based on a combination of your goals and past performance.
You’ll need to consider where you want your mission to go in the next 3-5 years and the funding you’ll need to accomplish your goals.
Next, examine the past 5-10 years of giving data to determine an average donor acquisition rate.
With your funding goals and past performance as guides, you’ll have a much better idea about what a good donor acquisition rate is for your organization.
Acquire more donors with a proven 5-step donor acquisition strategy
This donor acquisition strategy is the most powerful way we have ever found to find more high-quality donors and turn donor acquisition practically on autopilot.
- Create a valuable lead magnet
- Craft a compelling landing page
- Use an ‘Instant Donation Page’
- Target highly-qualified traffic
- Automate a New Name Welcome Series
Step One: Create A Lead Magnet
The 5-Step Donor Acquisition Model uses a lead magnet to add more potential donors to your file by offering a free resource in exchange for someone’s contact information.
If you’ve ever tried running ads that point directly to a donation page, then you’ve probably experienced the pain of the heartbreakingly low ROI they produce.
These ads don’t work because you’re asking someone to give before they’ve received — so the value exchange is going in the wrong direction.
Lead magnets leverage the powerful principle of reciprocity to build trust and increase the likelihood that someone will respond favorably to a future donation appeal.
Once you create your content offer, you’ll still need to promote it to new audiences using paid channels (more on this in step four), but your conversion rates will be dramatically improved.
Learn how to create effective lead magnets that attract your ideal donors.
Step Two: Craft A Compelling Landing Page
Your landing page is where people “land” after they click an ad, email link, etc. to learn more about your lead magnet and access it by completing a form.
This is a critical part of the acquisition process because this one page has the awesome responsibility of convincing someone to provide you (a stranger) with their personal contact information — here are a few quick tips to help improve your conversion rates:
- Clarity trumps persuasion: you don’t need to oversell your content offer — you’ll see higher conversion rates if you focus more on clarity than persuasion
- Value, value, value: your headline, body copy, and call-to-action should clearly communicate what your prospective donor will receive and why they should care
- Keep it simple: it can be tempting to overdo it on form fields. But our testing has shown that keeping forms short can have a big impact on conversion rates — we recommend collecting only name and email address on an email acquisition page
Step Three: Convert New Subscribers Into Donors Using Instant Donation Pages
Instant Donation Pages are the “secret sauce” of the 5-Step Donor Acquisition Model.
If you aren’t already using them, instant donation pages can be transformative for your organization’s ability to keep your mission moving forward.
Here’s how they work: When someone says ‘yes’ to your lead magnet, they are primed to make a donation because you’ve just helped them in some way.
The Instant Donation Page leverages this momentum by making a donation appeal “instantly” on the confirmation page.
After someone completes the form to accept your lead magnet, you will want to direct them to a confirmation page that does two things:
- Let’s prospective donors know their free resource is on the way.
- Asks prospective donors to make a donation now (with a form on the same page).
Now you shouldn’t expect massive conversion rates or huge donations on your instant donation pages, but they will give anyone ready to donate now a chance to do so.
This will help you grow you donor pipeline where your New Donor Welcome Series can tell your newest donors more about the impact they have when they give and encourage them to give again (and become recurring donor)!
Two very important things to keep in mind when you create your Instant Donation Page:
- ALWAYS use the very first words on the page to clearly confirm that the resource your potential donor signed up to receive is on its way.
- Use the rest of the page to make a strong donation appeal that is closely related to the content of the resource offered in your lead magnet
These are the two most important things to keep in mind when you create as instant donation page, but there are actually 16 elements our fundraising a/b tests have shown to be key predictors of higher conversion rates.
Learn all 16 elements of a high-CVR Instant Donation Page with this visual guide.
Step Four: Find Your Ideal Donors By Using Relevant Promotional Channels
Now that you have a lead magnet, a landing page, and an instant donation page, you’ll of course need to drive traffic to your offer. Here are just a few of your options for driving traffic to your lead magnet’s landing page:
- Facebook advertising
- Google search advertising
- Display advertising
- In-line offers on your articles
- Emailing existing subscribers
- Many more and newly emerging channels
We could spend 10,000+ words talking about paid advertising (and you could spend $10,000+ testing them all out) …
But to save you time (and budget), let’s focus on the strategy that our experience and experimentation have shown to produce the best ROI for nonprofits who want to acquire new donors online
Facebook advertising has proven time and again to be one of the most powerful tools to find new donors online in the shortest amount of time.
What makes Facebook so powerful is its wild popularity (2.11 BILLION daily active users) and its advanced ability to use that massive amount of traffic to efficiently target people who are most likely to feel affinity for and give support to your mission.
Let’s look at a hypothetical example of how a cat rescue might be able to reach 11 MILLION potential donors (per day!) with Facebook’s targeting.
Our hypothetical organization, Furever Homes, has looked at their data and discovered that their most valuable donors tend to be female, aged 60 and older.
Using this information and Facebook’s unfathomable storehouse of data, Furever Homes can now specifically target Facebook users who are female, aged 60 and older, who have expressed interest in various cat-related activities.
The result? 11,000,000 highly-qualified Facebook users to target with your lead magnet, add to your subscriber list, and inspire to donate to your organization.
Facebook also allows you to target even more highly qualified traffic, including:
- Retargeting website visitors
- Retargeting event lists
- Creating “Lookalike” audiences of Facebook users who are similar to your existing donors to reach brand new audiences
If you’re new to Facebook advertising, try starting with these four audiences to see how they perform for you:
- Website visitors
- Lookalike audience based on existing donors
- Lookalike audience based on existing web traffic
- Facebook users interested in similar organizations/causes to yours
Step Five: Set-Up A New Name Welcome Series
When someone subscribe’s to your organization’s emails, it’s time to take action. But that doesn’t mean leading with an appeal — instead, it means welcoming new subscribers to your file, building trust, and priming them to become donors with a new name welcome series.
Yes, the ultimate goal of a New Name Welcome Series is to encourage new subscribers to become donors … but in order to do that, you have to build an affinity for not only your mission but also your organization (and your brand).
NextAfter’s research on Nonprofit Email Cultivation made some important discoveries:
- Only 52% of organizations sent a clear confirmation of email signup or cultivation email within the first 2 days
- 72% of respondents did not have (or did not know if they had) a new subscriber welcome series
Which presents a huge opportunity for organizations who are willing to take the time to communicate and build a meaningful, human relationship with your donors.
Not only is it the right thing to do, but our research has shown that the first emails you send to a new subscriber are among the most opened and read that you will ever send.
In one of many experiments we have run around email cultivation, we found that a value-based, relational approach to cultivating new subscribers led to a 920% increase in donations — worth sending a few value-based emails before that appeal, right?
This free Google Doc template will help you plan a new subscriber welcome series that builds meaningful relationships with your subscribers and converts more of them to donors in a lot less time.
Conclusion
In this guide, we’ve taken a deep dive into elements of effective donor acquisition.
To effectively grow your nonprofit’s donor base, follow a strategic five-step process:
- Create compelling content offers that provide value and build trust.
- Craft a landing page that clearly communicates the benefits of your offer.
- Utilize instant donation pages post-sign-up to convert new subscribers into donors by capitalizing on the momentum of their interest.
- Drive traffic to your landing page through targeted promotional channels like Facebook ads and email marketing.
- Turn more new subscribers into donors, in less time, with a New Subscriber Welcome Series
This approach ensures your organization is able sustainably fill your pipeline with high-value donors over the long term.
Key learnings:
- Content offers serve as an exceptional vehicle for acquiring new names to your file
- Using our proven 4-step acquisition model, you can also quickly turn those subscribers into new donors
- Content offers need to be actionable, they need to provide tangible value, and they need to align with your donor’s interests to be effective
- Using an “instant donation” page can help you increase donor acquisition dramatically, but there are 16 core elements to getting it right
- You need to use relevant channels (where your donors spend time online) to advertise your content offers
- A new subscriber welcome series can dramatically reduce the time it takes to convert a new subscriber to a new donor
FAQs
Nonprofits can measure the ROI of their donor acquisition strategies by tracking specific metrics such as conversion rates, cost per acquisition, donor lifetime value, and retention rates.
Tools like Google Analytics, CRM software, and social media analytics can provide valuable insights into campaign performance and donor behavior.
Best practices for segmenting and targeting potential donors on platforms like Facebook include using demographic data, interests, and past engagement with your nonprofit.
Custom audiences and lookalike audiences can also be powerful tools for reaching individuals likely to be interested in your cause.
Case studies of successful nonprofit donor acquisition often highlight the importance of a multi-channel approach, compelling storytelling, and clear calls to action.
These case studies demonstrate how targeted outreach, personalized communication, and leveraging data for insights can significantly increase donor engagement and contributions.
You can read over 6,500 fundraising case studies by clicking here!
