Gabe Cooper is CEO at Virtuous Software, Founder of The Modern Nonprofit Fundraiser Podcast, and Author of Responsive Fundraising.
We got together recently to talk about the concept of Responsive Fundraising, and what it means for the future of the nonprofit sector.
What’s exciting is that the concept of Responsive Fundraising doesn’t require you to throw out everything you’re doing and start over completely. You don’t have to lose ground in order to improve donor relationships and increase revenue.
Responsive Fundraising is really about applying the hyper-personalization that Americans are accustomed to in their daily life to their charitable giving experience. It’s about using data you have at hand (or that you can get your hands on) to develop highly personalized donor experiences that communicate to your donors that you value them, you know them, and you are committed to providing them with a meaningful experience every time they interact with your organization.
Here are Gabe’s key points about Responsive Fundraising:
- It’s less about tactics and technology and more about shifting your mindset.
- The success of Responsive Fundraising requires that you Listen (i.e., collecting more and better data, and understanding how it influences donor behavior), Connect (i.e., how can you use simple marketing automation to deliver relevant messages to your constituents at the exact time they are most likely to want it and engage with it?), and Adjust (i.e., creating a feedback loop so that you are modifying your organizational engagement approach based on what you see and hear from your donors as you deliver them this new experience).
- Responsive Fundraising doesn’t require to stop mass fundraising activities like direct mail, email, and telemarketing. Instead, it gives you a framework for making those interactions more meaningful (and more valuable) to the donor.
- You don’t have to burn your entire program down and start from scratch. You can start small, with just two or three key elements. Once you prove out the value in small ways, use that success to increase the scale of Responsive Fundraising in your charity.
- Embracing and deploying a Responsive Fundraising philosophy and strategy in your organization doesn’t require you to upend everything you’re doing and change staff. It does, however, require that everyone be aligned around the goal, and willing to learn and change the way they’ve worked in the past.
- Change of any kind — but especially change like this — requires a willingness to take risk and embrace failure in the service of creating something better for those you serve.
As Gabe shared, ultimately results matter. Organizations that have adopted this Responsive Fundraising approach are improving their retention rates by as much as 15%, and are also moving the needle on average gift by as much as 10-15%.
You can download your own copy of the Responsive Fundraising Blueprint here.
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