Think of your donor communication as a seed that blossoms into a lush green plant with staff and volunteer effort. Fundraising marketing is the sunlight and water that keep the plant healthy, so it eventually bears the fruits of donations and gifts.

Just like too much or too little water can damage a sapling, you need to conduct fundraising marketing in the right manner, and we’re here to help you with that.

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In this article, we’ll go over what fundraising marketing is, its benefits and how to build an efficient plan, right from defining marketing goals to campaign execution and performance analysis. Let’s dive in!

Article Roadmap

• What Is Fundraising Marketing?
  • Fundraising vs. Marketing
• Benefits
• How To Create a Fundraising Marketing Plan
• Next Steps

What Is Fundraising Marketing?

Fundraising marketing or nonprofit marketing is the use of marketing tactics to amplify a charity’s mission and build awareness to encourage and maximize donations. Whether you’re an animal shelter, working for underprivileged communities or advocating for LGBTQ rights, fundraising marketing helps tell your organization’s story and connect donors with your cause in an engaging manner.

There’s no shortage of issues that need people’s help. Donors are constantly bombarded with news about the latest global causes, and companies are always trying to sell their products. In a nutshell, every organization is competing for people’s attention. Keeping this in mind, one of the ways to stand out and be memorable is through compelling storytelling.

Seth Godin, author, entrepreneur and public speaker, said:

Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.”

Fundraising marketing helps with that.

Another thing to note is that it isn’t just about asking money from your donors; it’s about building donor relationships, fostering a community around your cause and giving people reasons to connect with your cause.

Fundraising vs. Marketing

Fundraising and marketing tend to overlap sometimes, and both include:

• Storytelling
• Communication with the intended audience
• Explaining the mission and convincing the audience about the end goal (product or service)
• Engaging the audience

However, there are some key differences to note.

Fundraising is for directly soliciting funds, while marketing is for improving brand awareness and perception that helps fuel donations indirectly. Fundraising goals tend to be concrete and short-term and aim to collect financial resources for operational costs and the nonprofit’s mission. Marketing goals are long-term and more concerned with brand building and the organization’s growth.

Fundraising strategies include hosting events and setting up donation pages, while marketing strategies include content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, advertising and more.

To help you understand this better, imagine you’re at a party. You’re doing your own thing, having a jolly time, and out of the blue, a person you’ve never met before comes up to you and asks for 50 dollars.

It would seem off-putting and weird, wouldn’t it?

Even if you do give them the money, you wouldn’t be forming a lasting relationship with the person. Now, suppose there’s an acquaintance who always makes it a point to greet you every time they meet and gradually builds up to request 50 dollars. You’d be more receptive, and they’re likely to retain their relationship with you.

Clever fundraising marketing is communicating with donors regularly and building up to ask, so soliciting funds isn’t as jarring to them.

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Primary Benefits

The benefits of fundraising marketing are multifaceted and crucial for the success of any fundraising campaign.

Increase Awareness, Reach and Visibility

Your nonprofit may be working for a cause for the greater good, but at the end of the day, it is a brand, too. And your company needs to invest in building its brand perception and awareness like any other company.

Fundraising marketing helps you achieve this and stay on top of your marketing game. It enables you to expand your reach and enhance visibility. Especially considering how the internet has shrunk the world, the sky’s the limit, and you can create a global audience.

Improve Engagement and Donor Relationships

Some nonprofits offer monthly giving programs and donation memberships that help supporters stay in touch and regularly contribute to the charity. Fundraising marketing enables you to pop up in your donor’s communication and social media channels and build a consistent financial flow. You can engage givers over a long time period and conduct events and activities that further involve them in the cause.

Create Cost-Effective Campaigns

It’s become easier for nonprofits to harness communication channels, and sometimes, you can even do it for free using digital methods. It’s much more affordable to conduct online fundraising marketing campaigns than regular, real-life ones.

Offline events incur charges for a venue, printing materials, refreshments and more. However, you can also cut costs while having the best of both worlds and conduct hybrid events for different audiences and sets of donors.

Expand Volunteer Base

It’s a well-known fact that a nonprofit’s volunteers are likely to be one of the most consistent donors and revenue sources for an organization. Volunteers who support your cause will gravitate toward you, help you with manpower and lend a helping hand to your staff. Fundraising marketing also fosters a sense of community among like-minded individuals that many people seek out.

Enhance Donor Data

The data you collect while fundraising marketing can help personalize donor campaigns and tailor them to the audience’s specific needs and preferences. With analytical tools of fundraising systems, you can improve your campaign planning and execution over time and generate the impact you’ve been aiming for.

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How To Create a Fundraising Marketing Plan

Creating a fundraising marketing plan is essential for effectively promoting your cause or organization, engaging donors, and achieving fundraising goals. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you develop a comprehensive fundraising marketing plan:

Define Marketing Goals

Khoa Bui, author of “The Goal Setting Playbook” wrote:

Learning how to set and achieve goals is simply a skill. Once you learn this skill, the whole world is your oyster.”

Deciding and defining your fundraising marketing goals will help you transform your big-picture targets into smaller, more manageable chunks. Once you iron out your campaign’s little details, your work becomes easier, and you’ll be able to execute it far better.

To give an example, suppose you’re an organization that’s currently advocating for environmental causes. Now break this down into smaller goals like:

• Posting reels about climate change and fun nature facts on social media
• Distributing pamphlets educating about the cause
• Mobilizing volunteers to perform plays about the issue
• Creating email marketing campaigns

You can also use SMART goals for better goal planning and execution. Let’s take the first goal, for instance.

Qualities	Goals
Specific	Post a 30 to 60-second reel in support of Palestine twice or thrice a week.
Measurable	Increase reel shares by 15% and followers by 10%.
Attainable	The movement is quickly gaining momentum, and we’ve acquired 15% more followers in the last month, so this goal seems attainable.
Relevant	Short-form content is easy to share and will bring more awareness and support to the cause and help mobilize people to organize and protest.
Timely	We’ll start posting two reels a week from the start of next month.

Understand Your Target Audience

Nonprofit marketing is different from other forms of marketing as you’ll have multiple audiences, including donors, volunteers and customers. It’s vital to categorize them into different buyer personas, or in this case, donor personas, enabling you to communicate better. You can personalize your messaging according to donor likes and preferences to persuade them to solicit funds.

Segment Donors

You can segment givers based on demographic details like:

• Age
• Location
• Employment status
• Personality
• Lifestyle
• Communication preferences

Classifying donors based on their gifts also helps. You can consider factors like average gift size, giving frequency, relationship with a nonprofit (first-time donors or recurring donors) and date of last gift.

Fundraising systems let you collect donor information through surveys and donation forms on your website or through email marketing. Another way is conducting post-donation surveys and gathering data during events.

Learn Donor Psychology

Understanding fundraising and donor psychology is key to knowing why your donors behave the way they do, helping you craft communication that resonates with them.

Did you know donors are more likely to donate as you approach your goal? People are also more likely to donate if they identify with the person they’re donating to. Leveraging such insights helps you shape your campaigns better with psychology-based facts.

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Design Your Communication

Creating relevant communication and deciding on key messages you’ll deliver can simplify marketing and keep your communication and fundraising marketing aligned.

Let’s take the example of an organization advocating for queer rights that needs to design communication for different audiences. For mobilizing volunteers, you can appeal to their sense of urgency and sympathy and highlight how being allies can help the queer community. Similarly, for donors, you can convey how donations make a positive impact on queer lives and talk about previous success stories.

Tell a Compelling Story

It isn’t enough what your beneficiary’s story is; it also matters how it’s told. Here are some tips to leverage the art of storytelling and use it to maximize your impact:

1. Find the Human Element
We all face a psychological phenomenon called psychic numbing. This means when the number of people suffering due to an issue increases, our ability to empathize with them decreases. In a nutshell, we don’t respond to numbers. But we thrive on stories due to their singular focus on a subject.

Identify and name your beneficiaries. Instead of saying, “You can help 1,000 flood victims”, say, “Your donation can help Ayesha build a home for herself again.”

2. Have Conflict and Resolution
Make sure the story has a beginning, middle and end or — build-up, conflict and resolution. Stories with an arc are satisfactory to read, and they engage your donors on a personal level.

For example, Ayesha had saved her hard-earned money for five years and built her own home (build-up). Unfortunately, the flood took away this comfort and safety she had worked hard to build and left her devastated (conflict). But with our generous donors’ help, Ayesha got her life back on track and put a roof over her children’s heads again (resolution).

3. Embrace the Power of Details

Details make the story come alive. It comes back to the advice of “show, don’t tell,” and that’s exactly what you need to do. Show readers what Ayesha felt that day and how she’s coping now.

How all-consuming was the flood? How terrifying was the whole experience? Use colors and shapes, evoke visuals through words, and name the emotions.

4. Use Pictures and Videos
Tap into your donors’ emotions with pictures and videos that capture what the story is truly about. For example, you can include visuals of how the flood wreaked havoc and the debris it left behind, and use before and after pictures so readers can really see the loss.

Decide Which Marketing Tactic To Use

Now that you’ve decided what you’re going to do (marketing goals), what you’re going to say (designing communication) and who you’re saying it to (donor segmentation), it’s time to decide which medium you’re going to use.

Marketing strategies refer to the methods you’ll use (email marketing, events, social media and other ways) to communicate your mission and message. Regardless of the tactic you choose, here are some questions to help you prepare better:

• When will the marketing activities take place?
• Why is this tactic important?
• Can you club more marketing tactics into one?
• Where will the activities take place?
• Who’s responsible for them?
• How do they tie back to the nonprofit’s larger marketing goals?

Some old-fashioned time management can further take your execution from good to great. A fundraising marketing calendar helps with that and lets you create consistent campaign communication. It gives your fundraising plan structure and lets you schedule communication and events way prior.

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Analyze Performance and Data

Collecting and analyzing donor data is an excellent way to improve your nonprofit’s performance.

Are you on track to meet your financial goals? Are your fundraising marketing strategies solid enough to influence campaign success?

It’ll be difficult to answer these questions without tracking performance metrics, leaving your nonprofit confused and in the dark. To enjoy valuable data insights, you can monitor:

• Donor retention rate
• Average donation size
• Email open and click-through rate
• Social media impressions
• Donor acquisition rate
• Event attendance rate
• Number of recurring donors

You can use fundraising software to measure these KPIs. Suppose you want to harness digital fundraising marketing channels like Instagram, Meta and X, you can use fundraising solutions to gather social media impressions and identify your target donors.

Fundraising platforms help execute better campaigns and allow you to bring your A-game to the field. With tools to measure performance, analyze client trends and optimize internal and external communication, you can create killer marketing projects that widen your donor base and increase the amount of gifts.

Fundraising Marketing Campaign Strategies

Some fundraising marketing strategies that can help take your campaign to the next level are:

• Email marketing
• Event marketing
• Social media marketing
• Video marketing
• Website
• Public speaking
• Content marketing
• Peer-to-peer marketing
• Google Ad grants

Remember to encourage donors and volunteers to share your content and make sure your staff follows up on donor communications. Our fundraising strategy article delves deeply into the methods that’ll bring you maximum success and some tips and tricks you don’t want to miss out on.

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Next Steps

Fundraising marketing is not a destination but rather a journey. It’s long-term and takes effort from all teams of your nonprofit. To help you gear up and put your best foot, using the right system is necessary. Our free comparison report goes in-depth about the features and benefits of industry-leading fundraising software.

You can also check out our fundraising ideas article for unique and fun event ideas and fundraising campaigns guide that’ll help boost your campaign’s quality.

How are you planning to tell your nonprofit’s story in a compelling way? Are you churning your storytelling wheels yet? Let us know in the comments below!