In these tough fund-raising times, many charities are putting special effort into building ties to donors who give midsize sums, usually $1,000 to $5,000, as The Chronicle notes in an article from its latest issue.
But many organizations need to take a more sophisticated approach to deciding which donors of midsize gifts deserve extra attention, one that takes into account all of the data they have about their supporters, says a fund-raising consultant.
“It’s too easy for organizations to say, OK, we’re just going to pull everybody who’s given us $1,000 in the last six months,” says Kristin McCurry, managing director of Mindset Direct, a fund-raising consulting company in Arlington, Va.
Using those criteria, she says, a nonprofit organization whose work has received a lot of news-media attention—like a relief groups responding to a disaster or an advocacy group whose top public-policy goal is widely discussed during a political campaign—risks spending extra money on people who may not be able to give as much again or who lose interest when the cause falls out of the spotlight.
The organization might also miss supporters who are giving less, but whose actions in support of the group’s mission demonstrate that they are likely to donate more with the proper encouragement.
“If we were going to mail acquisition, we would certainly pay a lot more attention to what names we were pulling into our mailing as warm prospects,” says Ms. McCurry. “In a mid-level program, people are too quick to make snap decisions about who they believe qualifies for this additional treatment.”
Some charities, she says, have had success creating statistical models to help them identify the supporters who are most likely to respond to additional attention by donating more.
Ms. McCurry says that when she works with a charity, she asks its fund raisers to identify four or five groups of supporters to get extra attention and then to carefully track how much money members of each group gives to single appeals and cumulatively over the course of a year.
Those results should be monitored, and charities should keep adjusting their approaches based on what they learn.
“Every time you invest a dollar in a donor who doesn’t merit mid-level treatment,” says Ms. McCurry, “you have another donor on the file who may merit it and could pay off that you’re not able to invest that money in.”
