Nonprofit Communications Plan: How to Pick the Best Platform for Your Message
Nonprofit organizations depend on the generosity of their supporters and donors. As a nonprofit, your mission only works when people feel inspired enough to contribute time, talent, and treasure to it. To that end, you need to understand your donors deeply — their motivations, their preferences, their donor journey with your organization.
One approach to gaining a deeper understanding of your donors: value proposition analysis. Let me explain.
Donor Value Analysis Using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs established that human beings are motivated primarily by the needs they have not yet fulfilled — and that certain foundational needs (like safety and security) take precedence over higher-level needs (like a sense of community and belonging). As a nonprofit, you should be asking:
What are the needs my donors are trying to fulfill through their relationship with my organization?
More specifically, consider donor value analysis through three lenses:
- Transactional value: What tangible benefit does your donor receive from their giving relationship with you? (e.g., the feeling of doing good, recognition, access to special events, naming rights, etc.)
- Social value: What social benefit does your donor receive? (e.g., connecting with a community of people with shared values, association with prestigious organizations or causes, etc.)
- Psychological value: What psychological benefit does your donor receive? (e.g., feeling part of something bigger than themselves, a sense of efficacy and empowerment, satisfaction from having a concrete impact on the world)
Once you understand the profile of value your donor seeks through their giving relationship with you, you can build a communications strategy that aligns with their specific value needs. And understanding those value needs — and communicating with them in ways that align with those needs — is the difference between transactional fundraising (which breeds donor attrition) and relational fundraising (which builds donor loyalty).
What Donors Want
To understand donor value, you need to listen to your donors. When it comes to listening to donors, you want to focus on two aspects of their giving experience:
- What prompted them to give? Understanding their motivations for first giving is valuable. Understanding those motivations will allow you to communicate in ways that address their motivations.
- What is their ongoing experience as a donor? The donor loyalty question is crucial for any nonprofit. Understanding what keeps donors giving is the key to the big fundraising question: how do we retain donors? Knowing the answer will allow you to replicate those experiences for donors across the board.
How to Listen to Donors
Ways to listen to your donors:
- Surveys. Donor surveys can be a great way to gather a lot of listening data quickly. An annual survey focused on understanding donor motivations is a best practice for all nonprofit organizations.
- Interviews. One-on-one interviews with donors are one of the most valuable ways to gather in-depth information about the donor experience.
- Conversations. Any conversation you have with a donor is an opportunity to listen. Listening intentionally during donor conversations can surface very valuable insights, if you take the time to capture those insights.
- Engagement metrics. A donor’s patterns of engagement with your organization tell a story about their preferences. How do they like to give? Do they open your emails? Do they attend your events? Looking at these patterns can give you a deeper understanding of your donors’ value propositions.
The Donor Value Proposition
As you gain deeper insight into your donors, you’re in a position to develop what I’d call the Donor Value Proposition: a clear articulation of the value that donors get by virtue of their giving relationship with your organization.
For donors at all levels, your Donor Value Proposition should articulate:
- The specific, tangible value donors receive from giving to your organization
- Why your organization is uniquely positioned to deliver that value
- How you demonstrate your commitment to delivering that value to your donors
The Donor Value Proposition then becomes the driver for your entire donor communications strategy, and the cornerstone of your organization’s overall fundraising approach. It’s the foundation from which you build your appeals, your stewardship communications, your gift acknowledgements, and your cultivation strategy.
The most successful long-term fundraising strategies are built on a solid foundation of donor value. Understanding donor value — and communicating in ways that align with donor value — is at the heart of transformational fundraising.
