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From research to practice: implementing academic research on donor motivation to help fundraisers improve relationships with donors

How can fundraisers build stronger relationships with their donors? We argue that by better understanding why a donor chooses to make a donation, and why a donor donates to a specific charity, the quality of the relationship between donors and charities could be greatly improved. A current trend in marketing is hyper-personalisation: creating a personalized offer for each customer. Technological developments such as Big Data and new customer management software make it possible to target each customer with a unique offering. The advantages are clear: more loyal and satisfied customers. Fundraisers can also use hyper-personalisation in their communication with donors, and with that create fundraising requests uniquely fitting with a donor’s interests and needs. However, in order to use hyper-personalisation tools, fundraisers will need to understand what motivates donors to give to their cause. Currently, most charities have very limited information about their donors. They typically have transactional information about past donations to their own cause, and some aggregated sociodemographic data at the postal code level, such as average age, wealth, home ownership, and number of children. They often do not know why a donor chooses to donate to their charity, what motivates them to give, and what a donor gives to other charities. In addition, charities often do not have basic donor characteristics on record that assess a donor’s likelihood of and resources for giving.

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