Our donors: Who are they?

source: flickr

Who is the center of our fundraising action? Who is the person that we try to find everywhere? Who is the one that make us awake?
A mighty figure, THE DONOR!
But the most important question is: Who is our typical donor?
Starting from this question we have to build our fundraising strategy.
We have to understand if the one that make donations for our projects is male or female, if he/she reads newspaper or only books, if he/she prefers coffe or capuccino…. above all …we have to understand what he/she thinks, what he/she likes and what he/she wants.

Ruling out the cappucino question the other information is heart-blood for us.
Often we think to know our donors, we belive that they are very litterate, aware, we think that they can remember every think obout us because they love us! This is not true… not for the typical donor… not in Italy at all.

Quite often our donor is old, middle-low education, middle-low income, he/she donate not only to us but to many organizations, he/she doesn’t understand our work at all and he/she barely remember the brand of our npo.

And so, what we can do?
We have to speak their language, we have to think in a way close to them not close to “our people” and we have to understand that low litterate doesn’t mean stupid or underling… we need to learn another tongue and understand “where” people speak this tongue.

So we can speak to them, we can explain our field works, our projects, the difference in between us and the other organization so he/she can choose… and in the other hand we have to reach the others, the small part of our database, the litterate high income donor… but not with direct marketing operation!

Face to face is the answer in this case, overgrowing the one-to-one relations, understanding the needs of this particoular kind of donors never forgetting that they are few but they rappresent a bigger part of our income.

I see many npo make huge mistakes thinking that this smallest part rappresent their typical donor… they wanted that the donor is close to them, same taste, same culture, same political view and so they created message very complicated, very sofisticated and they receved very bad response.
Because we are not “the donor” maybe we are donors, but we make donations with credit cards, surfing on the internet, reading the balance sheet of the npo, and this are not typical donor’s things… In my opinion, if we want success in this field, we have to activate a part in our brain that can think and act like “the donor”… how to do this? I really don’t know… If I find a way, I promise, I’ll write about it… so follow me… we never know

P.S. Writing this post I’m thinking about italian situation, I hope that outside our borders things are different, if so or if it ’s not you have an available space downside to comment.