Winning Donor Mindshare in the Attention Economy

Executive summary

This study examines three key strategies for winning donor mindshare in an increasingly busy and saturated landscape.

“The long-term trend continues to move towards giving to fewer causes, with 42% of the survey’s oldest donors supporting 11 or more charities versus only 22% of middle-age donors.”

Penelope Burk
The Burk Donor Survey 2014

The scarcity of alumni attention has created an ”attention economy” that rewrites the rules for engagement and fundraising. Advancement leaders in this attention economy can no longer rely on appeals to donor loyalty. They must synchronize multiple channels beyond direct mail and phone, craft segmented cases for support, empower ambassadors, and engineer an element of “virality” into their campaigns to capture the interest of an increasingly distracted alumni base.

Make it easy to give

Almost-givers, who sit on the cusp of making a gift to the institution, comprise a surprisingly large portion of the alumni population. Many of them have made a gift in the recent past and have thought about doing so again since then. Sometimes, they open a direct mail solicitation, leave it on the kitchen counter, and forget about it. Others click on an appeal link in a fundraising email and begin filling in their information, but get distracted before completing the process.

All of them have the best of intentions to support the institution. Unfortunately, life gets in the way. To bring more of these donors back onboard consistently—and to counteract the frighteningly high attrition rate from which higher education fundraising suffers— advancement professionals must do more to ensure that distractions and absentmindedness do not impede a donor’s path to giving.

To convert almost-givers and reduce the donor attrition rate, college and university advancement offices employ three strategies. In the first, colleges minimize the “melt window” between when a donor decides to make a gift and when they complete their transaction. They do so by streamlining the checkout process.

The second involves automating follow-up outreach to those individuals who start giving but do not finish. Lastly, some schools have begun to prioritize monthly and recurring giving to circumvent the donor attrition problem entirely. These institutions focus deliberately on high-risk populations, such as young alumni and graduating seniors.

Practice 1: Quick-Complete Giving Form

Advancement leaders replace complicated, cumbersome giving pages with streamlined checkout functionality. To accelerate the giving process, donors are asked to provide only the most critical pieces of personal information. The giving page displays equally well on mobile devices as on desktop computers. For desktop users, cookies auto-populate many personal information fields, ensuring even faster checkout times.

Many would-be donors give up midway through filling out their alma mater’s giving page. The overabundance of required fields, often numbering 25 or more, frustrates donors and contributes to “donor melt” when they are on the cusp of giving back.

Donors who attempt to give using a mobile device—for example, in response to an email appeal that they read on the go—struggle to navigate non-mobile-friendly giving pages. They close the page, intending to come back and complete their gift later. Few do. Ultimately, the gift page restricts the institution’s base of support to only the most committed and indefatigable donors whom no technological barrier will discourage.

Practice 2: Abandon Gift Reminder Appeal

Advancement staff obtain a list (typically from their giving page provider) of prospective donors who visited the giving page but dropped off before donating. Annual giving staff reach out over email or by phone to prompt these drop-off donors to complete their gift. Follow-up comes within a short time after the drop-off, when the inspiration to give is still fresh in these individuals’ minds.

Prospective donors who lose momentum right before giving rarely come back to complete their donations. They may have dropped off due to a momentary distraction or because it was the wrong time for them, but these temporary impediments become permanent when the institution does nothing to reach back out.

Recapturing Almost-Givers at Dickinson College

Practice 3: Young Alumni Monthly Giving Campaign

A targeted annual giving campaign solicits recent graduates for small monthly gifts. Campaign scripting underscores themes that young alumni find meaningful, including environmental conservation and convenience. The case for support touches on the cumulative impact of monthly giving to demonstrate to young alumni that they can make a difference, despite not having major-gift capacity.

Donors who have the best intention of renewing their gift every year occasionally fail to do so. They may forget or procrastinate; regardless, the result is that they don’t give. These risks repeat themselves every year, as colleges and universities require donors to resubmit their one-time gifts annually.

Adding to these challenges, higher education’s success with major-gift fundraising causes young donors with little disposable income to doubt the value of their gifts to the institution. Some fall off after a few years of giving. Others never give at all.

Practice 4: Senior Donor Recurring Gift Pledge

Graduating senior donors receive solicitations that ask for a two-year pledge in addition to a senior gift. Donors provide their credit card information and agree to automatically give the same amount on the next two anniversaries of their first gift. When the anniversary arrives, advancement staff charge donors’ credit cards and steward their gifts appropriately.

Two Strategies for Soliciting Seniors

Event-Based Asks: Fundraisers at senior events trained to ask for recurring gifts

Opt-In Default Online: Email donors must deselect recurring giving to opt out

The vast majority of graduating seniors who give to their class’s senior gift campaign fail to renew during their first year after graduation. Advancement staff lose an opportunity to capitalize on the momentum and enthusiasm of senior year. They must work to restart philanthropic relationships with donors whom they should be stewarding and upgrading. In many instances, these donors never give again to the institution, undermining participation and narrowing the long-term major-gift pipeline.

Cut through the noise

One of the reasons that annual giving offices struggle to win donor mindshare is that their appeals lack the modern marketing features that grab people’s attention. Commercial organizations and nonprofits have made a habit in recent years of circulating high-frequency, high-volume, high-urgency appeals. Customers and donors hear almost daily from the organizations with which they interact.

They receive “expiring offers” emphasizing short-term deadlines for action. In many instances, they may also be promised a physical reward in exchange for financial support. Annual giving appeals pale in comparison. Alumni hear from their alma mater infrequently, sometimes as rarely as once a year. Annual giving staff leave the time frame for action open-ended. Lastly, for alumni who increasingly ask, “What’s in it for me?,” the value proposition of annual giving falls flat.

Practice 5: Concentrated Email Blitzes

Advancement staff send donors multiple email solicitations in a short period of time. The appeals share a theme, such as student scholarships, faculty research, or year-end giving. To avoid donor fatigue, staff position the appeals as a bounded campaign with a beginning and end, rather than an endless stream of email solicitations.

“We wanted to do more in the digital space. Our asks were buried in long copy and contained graphics that had been retrofitted from print media. We saw email and online giving as an area of huge untapped potential for UF and were excited to begin testing different tactics.”

Elizabeth Keppel
Associate Director of Annual Giving
University of Florida

After the end of each campaign, advancement staff scale back donor communications and focus those that donors do receive on stewardship and engagement. The campaigns may repeat multiple times each year, albeit with different themes.

Donors receive either too few or too many email appeals. Many institutions send infrequent one-off emails that donors easily overlook or ignore. Interested non-donors who notice the first appeal but don’t take action must wait months for a follow-up appeal—by which point their inspiration has subsided. At other institutions, email appeal frequency is so heavy and so boundless that donors learn to tune out appeals or—even worse—unsubscribe entirely.

Practice 6: Multiplatform Digital Nudges

Alternative digital channels complement email fundraising efforts by reinforcing the ask wherever alumni’s online attention goes. Paid social media ads, text message appeals, alumni website pop-ups, and targeted web ads present prospective donors with a clear call to action and consistent branding. A branded landing page reinforces the campaign’s message and sustains donors’ inspiration through the end of the donation process.

Donors divide their attention across many digital platforms. Whereas donors once looked to email for most of their inbound digital appeals, today they consider solicitations and advertisements delivered to them through a profusion of channels.

Social media, online video, mobile devices, and other tools occupy a growing share of donors’ time, yet colleges’ and universities’ digital fundraising strategies haven’t kept up. Many annual giving shops continue to take a single-channel approach when it comes to digital. With so little donor mindshare to capitalize on, universities see declining returns from their online outreach efforts.

Four digital channels to test in the multichannel world

• Paid social ads
• Alumni website pop-ups
• Targeted web ads
• Text message solicitations

Practice 7: Society Membership Calls to Action

Advancement leaders use membership in a consecutive giving society to front-load renewals. Rather than wait until the end of the fiscal year, staff select two midpoint deadlines and circulate early renewal solicitations that publicize the selected date.

While donors who do not give by the early deadline still have plenty of time to gain or preserve their membership in the society, the urgency of the appeals inspires many to renew early.

Attrition declines as a result of fewer donors being “at risk” when the fiscal year approaches.

Donors delay giving back in response to open-ended appeals. They assume there is little reason to act immediately, since the institution will always need donations. Many of the individuals who gave last year end up lapsing because they inadvertently miss the year-end deadline.

Practice 8: Give to Get Fundraising Campaigns

Donors receive tokens of appreciation, such as a pair of socks or a tote bag, in exchange for their gift. Unlike with stewardship rewards, advancement staff heavily publicize the token of appreciation up front as part of the campaign.

The item in question possesses an air of exclusivity. In some cases, donors can only obtain it through the campaign. It serves as a visual reminder for the donor of their connection through philanthropy to the institution.

Initially, many donors feel reluctant to give unconditionally. Crowdfunding platforms and nonprofit incentive campaigns have taught donors to eschew action unless they can identify a clear reward they will obtain from their gift. Appeals to pure altruism increasingly fall flat.

Case Study: University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is one institution that has embraced transactional giving. Starting in 2013, the institution began soliciting alumni for gifts in exchange for limited edition pairs of University of Chicago socks. Read the full case study.

In addition, individuals who give often lapse because they forget about their gift. Form thank-yous do little to underscore the donor’s investment in the institution, since many are immediately thrown out. Over a period of months, the act of giving grows more remote, and when a new appeal arrives, donors barely remember their previous generosity.

Practice 9: No-Cost Experiential Rewards

A targeted micro-campaign offers donors rewards in exchange for donations. However, advancement staff substitute intangible recognition for physical objects to reduce the transactional nature of the gift. Instead of offering every donor a reward, advancement staff enter them into a raffle. The uncertainty of the reward conditions donors to give for its own sake.

Prospective donors increasingly fail to give without an incentive for doing so. Yet offering a physical object as a reward for giving may run afoul of some institution’s culture or anger donors who do not want to see their dollars spent on tchotchkes.

Tokens of appreciation may also counterproductively teach donors to ignore appeals that do not have rewards, ultimately undermining retention. Still, advancement leaders know that their non-incentive appeals perform more poorly than their incentive based counterparts.

Connect alumni to a cause

Young alumni have proven particularly skeptical of giving back to their alma maters. Although Millennials give generously to a variety of philanthropic causes, three-quarters of them prefer to support charitable organizations other than their alma mater.

This reticence stems from the perceived lack of impact that young donors can have by giving to their alma maters. When compared to small nonprofits with discrete missions, colleges and universities struggle to show how annual fund gifts allow young donors to achieve their philanthropic goals and affect change in the world around them.

Practice 10: High-Volume Impact Appeals

Advancement staff identify gift designations that a large number of alumni would find meaningful. They focus on experiences that many alumni have in common or areas of campus that alumni would collectively want to impact through philanthropy. The resulting gift solicitations focus on these designations, downplaying broader institutional support. The focus is on a bounded choice of funds to capture a broad segment of donor passions.

Donors increasingly want to give in a way that has a direct impact on beneficiaries’ lives. Solicitations that make a broad, institutional ask do not always align with those passions. Yet donors’ interests are diverse and often highly specific. Advancement staff struggle to scale the work of soliciting each donor for a gift to the exact fund that they find most meaningful.

Practice 11: Priority Population Message Testing

Social media engagement data points advancement staff to topics and themes that resonate with priority populations, such as non-donors. Staff solicit these populations for gifts to funds that align with the content they engaged with online.

Advancement staff struggle to identify what resonates with their most unresponsive donors. These individuals rarely engage through philanthropy or alumni relations programming, so their interests remain shrouded in mystery. Unrestricted asks fall flat, as do open-ended asks for restricted gifts. While staff suspect there’s likely some cause that would move non-donors to give, they can rarely figure out what that cause is.

Practice 12: Affinity Giving Campus Collaborations

Campus partners fill in the gaps in advancement’s knowledge of alumni affinities. They help identify constituents for whom a personalized solicitation from them would prove meaningful.

The resulting solicitations, though automated, appear to come from the campus partners’ personal email accounts. They invoke common experiences and, in some instances, solicit alumni for gifts to restricted funds. The messaging and designations in these appeals align with alumni’s “hidden affinities” that advancement staff would otherwise overlook.

When advancement staff attempt to identify microaffinities in the alumni community, they quickly encounter a problem of reach. Central staff can glean only small amounts of information from the alumni records to which they have access. Even if advancement staff correctly identify an alumnus/a’s particular affinity, sending an appeal from the central annual giving office would not draw enough attention to inspire action. Alumni can easily ignore appeals from the institution as a whole, since they incur no social cost for doing so, and stand to gain no social reward in exchange for action.

Practice 13: Cause-Oriented Giving Pages

Advancement and IT staff overhaul the institution’s giving page to better guide donors to the cause that motivates them to give. The new layout groups gift designations by their overarching cause or theme. Designations sit side by side regardless of their home department or college.

User-friendly layouts present website visitors with cause photos, customized cases for support, progress bars, and other multimedia elements that elevate the giving experience and help sustain momentum through the completion of the gift.

Key Elements of UCLA’S Optimized Online Donor Experience

1. Images feature prominently on fund pages
2. Progress bars increase transparency for donors
3. Most funds have customized cases for support

Advancement staff struggle to identify which gift designations best align with alumni affinities. Whatever information they may have on donor interests quickly grows out of date as donors develop new philanthropic interests. As a result, staff cannot proactively reach out to donors with suggestions about giving options that they would find meaningful.

In addition, donors who visit the giving page encounter difficulties when trying to find those meaningful causes for themselves. The university buries specific gift designations in long drop-down menus that few donors go through the trouble of navigating. Consequently, donors fail to see something they feel passionate about supporting. They ultimately leave without making a gift.

Donor Mindshare Toolkit

Explore the study’s six related tools to accelerate implementation on campus and win donor mindshare.

Interested in more on this topic?

Read our strategies to ensure your fundraisers thrive in the attention economy.