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Art of Asking: Effective Techniques for Soliciting Donations

Nonprofits rely on donations to power their missions, but asking for money isn’t always straightforward. The key to securing donor support lies in tailoring your approach to meet each potential supporter where they are. From personal conversations to digital outreach, effective solicitation combines empathy, timing, and strategy.

To help you develop a cohesive solicitation approach, we’ve compiled several tips that will make your appeals resonate with donors and help you obtain their support.

1. Understand your supporters.

Effective solicitation starts with understanding your audience. When you know who your donors are and what motivates them to give, you can develop more specific, personalized appeals that align with their interests.

Learn more about your audience and organize this information by:

Directly reaching out to supporters. Use informal surveys, check-in calls, or event feedback forms to gather qualitative insights and reveal donor motivations beyond what’s captured in your constituent relationship management platform (CRM). For example, you may find that a donor who wasn’t on your radar is interested in planned giving, prompting you to send them more information about planned giving opportunities.

Conducting a data append. If you’re missing crucial information about your supporters, fill in the gaps with data enrichment. Deep Sync’s data enrichment guide explains that you can obtain data like demographics, contact information, income, net worth, and lifestyle information from appends. For instance, if you only collect email addresses from your donors, you may conduct a data append to add phone numbers to your database so you can run text fundraising campaigns.

Segmenting donors. Use your donor management software to segment donors by demographics, giving history, interests, and engagement levels. This strategy helps you prioritize high-potential donors and tailor communications more effectively. To start, you may create segments for recurring, major, and lapsed donors to target each of these groups with relevant appeals.

2. Personalize every ask.

Donors respond to messages that feel relevant and personal. By showing them that you understand and value their unique contributions, you’ll deepen trust and improve response rates.

Personalization can (and should!) go beyond inserting a name into an email. Along with using donors’ preferred names, try:

Referencing the donor’s past gifts and impact. For instance, if you’re running a school fundraiser, you may say something like, “Your support helped us provide 100 backpacks to students last fall.” Additionally, let school community members know how their support impacts their own families. ABC Fundraising’s fundraising ideas for kids guide explains that “over 80% of parents who model philanthropic behavior see it reflected in their children,” so inform parents that their contributions may also positively affect their kids.

Using segmentation to tailor messages. Leverage your donor segments to individualize your appeals. This may include inviting past event attendees to upcoming events, suggesting donation amounts that align with donors’ giving capacities, or encouraging recurring donors to upgrade their support to become major givers.

Offering opportunities that match donors’ interests. Let’s say a donor has expressed interest in your animal rescue program in the past. You may ask them to give to that specific program, piquing their interest and encouraging them to contribute. You may also offer non-monetary engagement opportunities like volunteering, advocacy, and peer-to-peer fundraising participation.

By targeting your outreach to individual supporters, you help donors feel like true community members instead of just sources of funding and show that you care about each of them as individuals.

3. Create urgency.

Urgency adds momentum to your campaigns and incentivizes donors to prioritize your ask. To make your appeals more compelling, use the following tips:

Frame your ask around a time-sensitive need. For instance, you may say something like, “We must raise $10,000 by the end of the month to secure a matching grant.”

Use countdown timers. To visually reinforce urgency, add timers or progress bars to your email communications and campaign landing pages. For example, if you’re running a product fundraiser, you may say something like, “Only 17 more flower bulbs sold to reach our goal!”

Align campaigns with giving days. Occasions like GivingTuesday or awareness days that relate to your cause give donors a finite time to contribute. Let’s say you run a soup kitchen. You may run a special campaign on World Hunger Day in which you match every donation made on that day up to a certain amount.

Consider associating your appeal with an upcoming event to build anticipation. For example, you may tell donors, “We’ll be selling cookie dough at our 5K next week to raise extra funds for our cause, but if you purchase a tub ahead of time, you’ll receive a special discount!”

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to soliciting donations. Customize these tips to your nonprofit and audience to develop a strategy that works for your organization.