As you interact with your donors, you create a unique relationship with them. Each stage of your relationship with your donors is valuable in bolstering their engagement with your organization. Learn more about the donor journey and how to track each stage of your donor relationship.
What is the Donor Journey?
The donor journey refers to the stages of a donor’s interest in your nonprofit organization. The path details how a donor goes from a stranger to a consistent donor for your organization. Understanding each facet of this journey will help you understand why individuals and other organizations donate to your nonprofit. You’ll also learn why your donors continue to support your mission.
Understanding the donor journey also helps you identify potential weak links, enabling you to improve your donor conversion and retention rates.
1. Awareness
The first step of the donor journey is the awareness stage. As the name suggests, the awareness stage refers to the familiarity individuals and other organizations have with your nonprofit. Nonprofits with greater awareness are likely to have many donors, as individuals can easily find them.
You can use various tools to get the word out about your nonprofit and attract more donors. Advertising and marketing can help get the word out about your organization, especially through social media. You can showcase your events or raise awareness of your cause through paid social media posts or influencer partnerships to get your message out.
You can call individuals or send mailers to raise awareness of your organization. You can also attend or host trade shows and other events.
Another way to get the word out about your nonprofit is to optimize your website and other online content so it appears at the top of search engine results. When someone searches for an organization with a cause similar to yours, appearing earlier in their search results can increase your number of donors. You can optimize your website by creating unique content that individuals would use keywords to search for. Consistently posting on social media can also help boost your leads.
2. Consideration
Once donors are aware of your nonprofit, the next stage is consideration. When people find your organization, they should be able to identify your mission, values, and goals. You want individuals to consider donating to your nonprofit, so you must build an emotional connection with them and help them engage with your mission.
When donors find your organization, they’ll conduct thorough research to ensure your values and goals align with their own. However, donors find you, you’ll want to ensure that they have access to as much information as possible so they can learn everything there is to know about your organization. Think about why individuals would choose to donate, and make it clear how your organization aligns with their values.
3. Decision-Making
Once donors have collected all the information about your nonprofit organization, they should be ready to decide whether to donate to your cause. You should make the donation process as easy as possible so your donors don’t become deterred from donating. A complicated donation process can turn them away, prompting them to find a similar organization with a simpler process.
Keep donation buttons simple and easy to find on your website. The top of your website is a good choice since many people naturally look for information around the header. Include donation buttons in other locations on your website, such as at the end of articles or on your about page.
4. Evangelizing
Now that you have an established relationship with your donor, you’ll want to continue to build on your connection. Your donors can spread the word about your organization and help you create new relationships with potential donors. They can share your social media posts, help you promote an event, or encourage people they know to join them in supporting your cause.
You’ll also want to keep your donors updated and engaged with your organization, encouraging them to make additional donations in the future. Let them know about upcoming opportunities or events via email or text, and invite them to share them with their friends or family. Donors can also help you organize fundraising events or campaigns to gain more contributions to your cause. Allowing them to have some freedom when planning these events can help prevent donor turnover.
Creating a Donor Journey Map
Nonprofits can create their own donor journey map to navigate the relationship between their donor and the organization. Donor journey mapping helps you outline, design, and chart the specifics of a donor’s relationship with your organization, including their activities, engagement, and interactions.
The donor journey map can be simple or complex, depending on your goals for donors. There are two main types of donor journey maps you can create:
Simple Lists
A simple list is one of the most straightforward donor journey maps you can create for your organization. The simple list creates a step-by-step map of your plan, listing each donor’s action and the following steps.
For example, if an individual donates to an organization, the simple list will outline the steps you take next. These steps could include confirming the donation, mailing a thank-you note, and adding the individual to your organization’s newsletter mailing list. The simple list can be as short or as long as you’d like, but it can only be linear. While the simple list is a basic donor journey map, it’s challenging to account for complex events.
Decision Trees
Decision trees are more complex donor journey maps that account for complicated trigger events and various outcomes. These maps will list each event and the different possibilities after interaction with the donor.
For example, a donor can subscribe to your organization’s newsletter. If the donor decides not to subscribe, include an outcome that alters a donor’s journey based on this decision. Instead of subscribing to your newsletter, they can continue to engage with your organization in other ways. Because decision trees are more complex than simple lists, they can more accurately capture the variety of donor decisions.
Using a donor journey map can help nonprofit organizations identify problem areas in their donation process. For example, you may have trouble retaining donors. You can use the donor journey map to determine why this may be happening and what you can do to encourage future engagement.
Donor journey mapping is an excellent strategy for sustaining consistent donations, which are essential to advancing your mission. We’ll cover more about donor journey mapping in later chapters, including its many benefits and how you can implement it in your donor management strategy to help you retain valuable donors.
