Fundraisers spend a lot of time thinking about what makes an appeal work.
We test subject lines, envelopes, ask strings, landing pages, imagery, timing, and channels. We know a lot about the tactics that can make one solicitation outperform another.
But those tactics don’t answer a more fundamental question: Why does someone want to give?
There are thousands of worthy causes to choose from, and even the most philanthropic-minded person has to make choices. After all, there are always plenty of reasons not to give.
Our research into the everyday donor reinforces something that seems obvious but is easy to lose sight of: giving is deeply personal. When asked what motivates their philanthropy, 64% of Everyday Donors cited personal beliefs or values aligning with a cause. Forty-four percent cited supporting their local community, and 42% cited feeling emotionally connected to a story or person.
Appeals, incentives, and tax benefits barely registered as motivating factors. While a well-written appeal and offer will improve your conversion rate and average gift amount, it’s important to remember that donors don’t give just because you asked them. Tactics are more often the trigger than the motivation.
This distinction should change how we approach audience strategy.
Build Donor Personas Around What Motivates Giving
Traditional annual giving segmentation has leaned heavily on giving history: recency, frequency, monetary value, previous fund designation, or perhaps a few demographic characteristics. Those variables are useful for predicting behavior. But they don’t necessarily tell us why someone cares.
One way to make this more actionable is to develop likely donor profiles or personas around the motivations that consistently appear in your data. Donor personas are archetypal characters that represent the needs of a larger group. They are a design tool to help develop better engagement strategies and messaging. A good persona should go beyond age, income, and giving history. It should capture what someone cares about, what experiences may shape their connection to your mission, what barriers might keep them from giving, and what types of stories are most likely to resonate.
The goal is not to pretend every donor fits neatly into a fictional profile. It is to create a useful strategic lens for understanding the different reasons people might choose to engage.
A university might distinguish between alumni motivated by student opportunity, institutional pride, or the experience they had on campus. A health system might identify audiences connected to gratitude, community health, research, or a specific area of care. Instead of sending everyone the same appeal with minor personalization, fundraisers can develop different journeys, stories, and calls to action around those motivations. Personas are most valuable when they move beyond a presentation slide and begin shaping the actual donor experience.
This approach requires combining transactional data with engagement data, but also asking donors what matters to them.
Turn Donor Insights into More Personal Giving Journeys
The most successful fundraising programs exist where the organization stands for something. We can’t be everything to everybody—that results in diluted messaging and being nothing to anybody. We should use this deep audience development work to ensure we are finding our people, those who care about what we do and want to be part of our community. And then we build a strategy around them so that we can pair a real need with a donor who cares about it. Is the perfect fundraising Venn diagram.
We should work towards a fundraising operating system that looks less like a calendar of appeals and more like a series of audience journeys—different people receiving different stories based on their interests, experiences, and behaviors.
Because giving is deeply personal and fundraising should be too.
