How I Increased Annual Campaign Donations by 400%

The Story

Everyone who has worked at a nonprofit knows that raising money is the key to continued success. You can’t serve your clients without the funds to keep the lights on. When I took on the role of Executive Director of this organization, it had been operating at a deficit and depleting its reserves for 6 years. Then, along came a global pandemic!

So what did I do? First, I gathered my resources - I recruited a fundraising committee with experience and read a wonderful book that was recommended to me - Fundraising for Social Change by Kim Klein.

Then I got strategic!

The Plan

Goal - Raise $36,000.

Strategy 1 - Recruit New Donors

We developed a “hot” acquisition list - a list of people who were strongly connected to the organization, but who had never donated before. We built a list of 327 strongly connected potential donors and crafted an appeal letter just for them.

Strategy 2 - Cultivate Major Donors

We combed through past donation records to identify who our largest contributors were. Then we crafted a letter speaking just to our biggest supporters. We shared the inside story on the challenges our organization was facing and how they could help. We added the extra touches of personal notes on each letter and followed up with phone calls from key leadership members.

Strategy 3 - Engage the Virtual Audience

This organization had the benefit of both a social media following and a strong email list. But while it frequently engaged with these two audiences to share content and advertise, it had never intentionally targeted this audience for fundraising purposes. We crafted a two-pronged virtual campaign, focusing on the electronic newsletter subscribers and the social media following.

The Results

The results of this strategic fundraising plan blew us away. We didn’t just meet our goal - we far exceeded it!

Overall Results

We raised $56,800! This was 158% of our goal and four times more than the organization had ever raised in a campaign before.

New Donor Results

Our target was for 2% of people on the acquisition list to respond. This was at the high end of the benchmark rates for a mailing like this of 0.5-2.5%. We ended the campaign with a response rate of 7%!

When we combined that with the results of our virtual campaigns, we ended up with 76 first-time donors, instead of the anticipated 7!

By tackling this problem strategically, we were able to intentionally engage our supporters to achieve outstanding results for this organization.