How to Improve Your Fundraising Strategy: A Mini Guide

Fundraising fuels your nonprofit’s work, but it can also be the most challenging aspect of running a mission-driven organization.

In any fundraising campaign, there are dozens of moving parts to track. From determining campaign goals and selecting the right fundraising tools to marketing your campaign and engaging your supporters, there’s a lot on your team’s plate. And that’s not to mention the other campaigns, regular programming, and day-to-day operations you keep running in the meantime!

To help your nonprofit streamline fundraising and improve supporter retention, this guide will walk you through a few tips for improving your fundraising strategy.

Review your current approach.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to fundraising. In fact, there are likely many aspects of your current approach that work well. To understand which practices can stay and which should be improved, you’ll need to conduct a thorough assessment.

This is where working with an expert like a fundraising consultant comes in handy. These professionals can help you see strengths and weaknesses that you otherwise might not!

With a consultant’s help, take a look at your past campaigns and how your team approached them. Ask yourself questions like:

Which campaigns were most successful? Which were the least successful?
Which marketing channels successfully reached our supporter base during these campaigns?
Is there any feedback from supporters or team members that indicates what did and didn’t work during these campaigns?
What skills and expertise do our team members have that benefited past campaigns? What gaps do we need to fill for the future?

As you answer these questions, you’ll identify areas for improvement. For example, you might notice that you didn’t meet your fundraising goal during a past peer-to-peer campaign because the effort wasn’t effectively marketed to supporters who were willing to participate as volunteer fundraisers. In contrast, you might notice that many of the supporters who created and shared their own fundraising pages have since deepened their involvement with your organization.

Examining both the good outcomes and challenges of past campaigns can provide insights into your strategy’s strengths and weaknesses, setting you up to make intentional, successful changes.

Get to know your donors.

Fundraising is all about connecting with the people who power your mission, whether you’re launching a text-to-give campaign during the year-end season or hosting an event to thank your major donors.

One of the best things you can do to improve your fundraising is to make a concerted effort to get to know donors (and future supporters!) better. Here are a few suggestions for doing so:

Conduct prospect research. All mid-level donors are valuable and worth engaging, but only a select few have the potential to become major donors. With prospect research (the process of examining a supporter’s giving capacity, affinity, and propensity), you can identify which donors to cultivate with the goal of securing a major gift.
Send out surveys. If you have questions about your donors, why not ask them directly? For example, instead of wondering about their reactions to your last fundraising event, send a short survey to attendees. Even a few candid responses can provide you with the information you need to improve your next event or campaign.
Use social media to interact with your community regularly. The beauty of social media is that it gives your team opportunities to talk one-on-one with supporters. Leverage direct messaging and commenting features to chat with your supporters and get to know their needs and interests. Doing so will help you better tailor your fundraising strategy to them.

Getting to know your donors can help you level up nearly every aspect of your fundraising strategy—from creating specific donor segments for marketing and planning relevant volunteer opportunities to thanking them in more personalized ways.

Train your team.

A great fundraising strategy needs a great team to execute it. As part of your initial fundraising assessment, you should have identified any skill gaps within your team. If you did, a few ways you can train your staff include:

Investing in training courses. Online training courses for nonprofit professionals range from short, microlearning experiences for specific skills, to months-long programs that provide official certifications. Assess your team’s needs before enrolling them in any courses. For example, a specialized course on how to approach corporate sponsors will fill a specific skill gap, whereas an intensive training course might be useful for a team member who wants to advance in their career to a leadership position.
Attending conferences. Conferences bring professionals from all over the nonprofit sector together. At these events, your team can attend workshops, make connections, and learn what trends are impacting your industry.
Working with consultants. Consultants can not only help assess your current strategies but also train your team to enact them. For example, your team might work with a Google Ad Grants consultant as part of your online strategy and ask them to teach your digital marketing team how to maximize your Google for Nonprofits account.

When your team starts a new training program, be sure to document and record as much of it as possible. This ensures that when new team members join your nonprofit, they can review your resources and get up to speed quickly.

Craft an appreciation strategy.

The key way to secure future donations is by showing appreciation for the ones you receive now. As such, don’t think of donor appreciation as a separate skill set from fundraising but rather as a vital part of the fundraising cycle.

The first step to designing an effective appreciation strategy is deciding which donors to thank and what level of recognition to provide. Most fundraising professionals will tell you the answer to the first question is “all donors,” but how to appreciate them depends on several factors.

For instance, here are a few ways you can appreciate supporters and which donors each method is appropriate for:

Donor walls: These permanent monuments to your donors should recognize supporters who have made substantial contributions, such as major donors and planned donors.
Phone calls: One-on-one calls help establish a personal relationship. Nonprofits can write a script and recruit volunteers to call and thank recurring donors and mid-level donors. For major donors, the major gift officer, or another leader they’ve been interacting with, should make a personal call.
Cards: A handwritten card feels personal and should be used to recognize supporters who go out of their way to engage with your nonprofit. For example, the last step on your silent auction’s event checklist might be to send out cards to attendees.
Emails: Thank-you emails are appropriate for all donors who aren’t making specialized gifts, like major and planned donors. You might set up your online donation page to automatically send a thank-you and confirmation email. To write more effective emails, eCardWidget’s guide to donor thank-you emails recommends including each supporter’s specific gift amount, a description of their gift’s impact, and a signature from a recognizable figure at your nonprofit like your executive director.

The more donors you can retain, the more productive your fundraising strategy will be. After all, rather than attracting new donors to replace old ones, you can simply add more supporters to your growing community.

Track fundraising metrics you can act on.

Hosting one successful fundraising campaign is great, but making all of your campaigns successful is even better! Set yourself up for sustained success by tracking and acting on fundraising metrics.

Your organization can track many fundraising metrics, focusing on digital marketing, fundraising events, and other specifics such as your board members’ performance. Here are a few popular metrics and how to calculate them:

Fundraising Return on Investment (ROI): This metric tells you whether your campaign brought in money, broke even, or cost you money. Calculate it by dividing total fundraising revenue by campaign expenses.
Gifts Secured: Gifts secured tracks the number of donations you receive over a set time period.
Donor Retention Rate: Your retention rate is the percentage of donors who continue to give year-over-year. Divide the total number of donors who gave this year and last year by the number of donors who gave last year. Then, multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage.
Donor Acquisition: Donorly’s guide to donor acquisition shares that there are three key performance indicators associated with acquisition: acquisition rate (total donors divided by your new donors over a given time period to discover what percentage are new supporters), cost to acquire (the number of donors acquired over a certain time period divided by the amount of money spent on acquisition efforts to discover roughly how much each donor cost to acquire), and return on investment.
Average Gift Size: Average gift size is the average donation amount your organization receives from a specific donor group or during a specific campaign. To find it, divide the total dollar amount of donations received by the number of gifts received.

By consistently tracking metrics like these, your nonprofit can eliminate the guesswork from evaluating your campaigns, enabling you to make evidence-based decisions and set goals for future improvements.

Use these tips to make informed improvements to your fundraising strategy that propel your organization’s growth. In turn, you’ll set your nonprofit up for sustained fundraising success and more opportunities to connect with your supporters and drive impact.

Special thanks to Sandra Davis, Founder and President at Donorly for the expert advice in this article.

Sandra leads Donorly with over 30 years of fundraising experience and leadership. Sandra has consulted on numerous capital campaigns, applying community building techniques, prospect research, and storytelling to help organizations meet and exceed fundraising goals and expand missions. Under her leadership, Donorly has grown to support the fundraising efforts of over 100 clients, helping them raise over $500 million for their respective causes