Nonprofit Competition Is Real and You Need to Fight As If Life Depends On It
4 Nonprofit Marketing Secrets for Attracting and Keeping Donors, Volunteers, and Supporters
The enemies of nonprofit growth are not government, or political beliefs, or greed, or anything like that. Your enemies are complacency, presumption, and in some cases, a denial that like businesses, nonprofits have real competition.
Your nonprofit must continually work to strengthen your position in the marketplace if you want to move forward with your mission.
No one has to buy a product. And no one has to give to a nonprofit. Presuming otherwise will prevent you from understanding donors well enough to connect with them. And complacency – believing the money will just keep coming in – is a prelude to extinction at worst, or irrelevance if you’re lucky. Complacent businesses – even huge ones like Sears – are no longer huge. And some don’t even exist anymore.
Nonprofit fundraising brings together two worlds that don’t often see themselves as bedfellows. On one hand, you have people motivated by altruism. They want to help. They care about people, about justice, about making the world a better place. These people are not usually into business or marketing.
But on the other hand, successful nonprofit marketing isn’t so different from running a business.
You have competition. You have memberships (recurring donors). You depend on ‘customers’ to survive. You must prioritize budget between your program’s missional impact, your fundraising (which is your lifeblood), and your employees’ well-being (HR). A recent article in Advancing Philanthropy said that 51% of people in the nonprofit world want to quit their jobs within two years. Nonprofit employees are not being supported or paid as they should be. That too is part of competition.
7 Forms of Nonprofit Competition
- Competing for dollars from one-time and recurring donors
- Competing for volunteers and their time and devotion
- Competing for business sponsors and partnerships
- Competing for wealthy donors
- Competing for the best employees
- Competing for abstract things, such as financial priorities
- Competing for attention – from everyone
Volunteers are an often-overlooked area of competition. Meridian Swift from Volunteer Plain Talk says there are about 62 million volunteers in the US. Many of those, as we have noted in previous articles, volunteer with more than one organization, and prefer to do so a handful of times per year.
People only have so much time to give. If someone cares about several issues enough to want to volunteer, how many can they actually commit to? And what can you do to make it easier for them to follow through?
These are BIG questions.
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay
Competing for financial priorities – number 6 on the list – is another we don’t think about enough. The Giving Tuesday concept is an attempt to compete against consumerism. Instead of spending money on holiday gifts, spend some of it making a positive difference in the world.
You are competing against how people choose to use their money.
But besides those, you are also competing with other nonprofits. Most people have a limit for how much money they are willing to give away. If someone is sponsoring a child at $35 per month with another nonprofit and you ask them to become a monthly donor at yours, will they resist because they already give monthly to something else?
How do you stand out?
How do you ‘win’ someone over to your cause?
Even getting a ‘pre-donor’ to sign up for your newsletter is a big win. It puts them within your reach. In your circle of influence. Just like a business that gets someone to try a free sample or a lead magnet.
4 Secrets to Rising and Staying Above and Apart from Your Nonprofit Competition
1. Be Clear about Mission and Impact
Whether a business sponsor, a monthly donor, a volunteer, an employee, or even a peer-to-peer donor, people want to know what they’re giving toward.
What does my gift and my support accomplish?
Who does it help?
Why do they need help?
How does my gift help them?
By communicating these things clearly – what donors care about – your nonprofit will be able to attract loyal donors, because they will believe their contributions are making a tangible and profound impact in people’s lives.
Make clear the need. This is what will go wrong, this is what won’t happen if you don’t give.
2. Know Your Audience – What Your Supporters Care About
So much of marketing is about audience. A person who cares about nature and the environment is a better prospect for an environmental nonprofit than they would be for a museum.
Environmental nonprofits would likely find easier support among outdoors enthusiasts and people who gravitate toward natural foods than they would a technophile. (By the way – don’t worry about exceptions. There are exceptions to everything. But marketing is about probabilities. Go where there are more people who are likely to care about your cause).
Christian nonprofits naturally have an inside track for donors who affiliate with their beliefs. Those kinds of people will give to multiple causes because of the religious motivations behind them. That’s why you’ll find certain child sponsorship nonprofits drawing more Christians, and others drawing more secular people. Because certain nonprofits have staked their identity around their faith-driven approach.
You attract the people who align with your values, who see the world similar to the way you do.
Some people care more about local impact. They will support local nonprofits.
Some care more about international impact, or perhaps specific nations.
Some care about a particular issue or cause, and will give to organizations working in that arena.
Your nonprofit will stand out if it knows who its supporters are. A human trafficking nonprofit is not in competition with a veterans’ nonprofit. And neither of these is in competition with a cancer research nonprofit. These are very different audiences.
And if a person cares about more than one issue enough to donate to both, then they will donate to multiple nonprofits. Lots of people do this.
But a veterans’ nonprofit IS in competition with other veterans’ nonprofits. They are also competing against war memorial funds, scholarship funds for veterans, patriotism-focused nonprofits, and even getting into conservative media nonprofits and even for-profit groups that need outside funding. Lots of overlap within these groups.
See – it’s the values and beliefs that underly why donors give that you are competing for.
3. Broadcast Your Track Record of Success
Track record comes in two main forms:
- Data showing impact
- Stories revealing impact
Data includes things like number of meals served, number of acres preserved, number of veterans receiving care, research progress, recent laws passed – tangible evidence that the supporter is making a difference.
Stories are what move people emotionally to keep coming back to your nonprofit. Stories connect us, and demonstrate the most powerful motivation to give. See the anatomy of fundraising storytelling – 6 components for every well-told story.
If you have to choose – choose stories over data. But to build credibility and quickly demonstrate broad stroke impact, well-presented data can be powerful.
4. Nurture Your ‘Customers’
Image by Ian Lindsay from Pixabay
This is probably the area where most nonprofits can make the greatest improvements.
Just like businesses too often neglect their loyal customers and keep over-spending trying to attract new ones, nonprofits do the same. They fixate too much on new donor acquisition and neglect the volunteers, subscribers, donors, and partners already in their circle.
Neglect them long enough, and they will leave.
This goes back to complacency and presumption. “This person gave last year, so we can count on them again this year.”
No you can’t.
Never presume a volunteer will stay forever or always say ‘yes.’ Never presume a monthly donor will keep giving. Never presume a major donor will keep sending matching grants. Always nurture your most loyal and generous people. Always.
How do you nurture your best people?
- Keep talking to them – don’t ever let the communications cease, or they WILL forget about you or lose their passion and connection to your mission
- Use multiple channels – email, direct mail, phone, in-person
- Prioritize major donors and recurring donors – these are your greatest sources of ongoing revenue. Don’t let them get away!
- Prioritize your most committed volunteers
- Continually deliver ‘value’ – this means you never stop talking about items 1 and 3 on this list – track record and missional impact
- Thank, thank, thank – never stop thanking donors of all types, volunteers, sponsors (16 places to thank donors)
- Continually offer other ways to get involved
Volunteers can (and do!) donate. Donors can become volunteers. Sponsors can become sources of volunteers and donors. The more ways a person connects with your nonprofit, they longer they will stick around.
Where does this eventually lead?
To your nonprofit occupying a prominent place in estate plans and wills. Bequeathed gifts are a major source of revenue for nonprofits who prioritize it. And for your best supporters – it’s an easy ask, because you are such an important part of their lives.
See 5 tips for getting more planned giving commitments.
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