How to Build Trust With Donors

Much is made in some circles about vetting charities before donating to them.Sites like Charity Navigator are often put forth as places to go so you can verify a nonprofit is for real. Articles like this one (as is typical, not written by fundraising professionals) cite statistics like “35% of people don’t  trust charities.”

(By the way, you can tell fundraising isn’t their specialty. Most of their suggestions about building trust, though good practices in themselves, are more about damage control. But trust isn’t damage control.)

And of those 35% who “don’t trust charities,” how many of them would actually give if they did somehow come to trust charities? The truth is, many people who say they don’t trust charities really just don’t want to give, and that’s how they justify it. And that’s fine – no one’s a bad person because they don’t want to give to charity.

But you don’t need to build trust with those people. You need to build trust with the other 65%.

Here’s the question that rarely gets asked about trust:

What are potential donors (not the 35%) looking for before they will trust your nonprofit? Do they just need to see your Form 990 and a good rating on a charity watchdog site, and now they trust you enough to give?

No. That’s not how most donors think. And here’s the biggest problem with that line of thinking:

It presumes your donors are suspicious of you from the outset. The above article even uses that word – “suspicious.”

The reality is much different.The people who will actually give to your nonprofit are not suspicious of you. They want to give, because they care about your cause. But they do need to trust you, because there are no doubt other charities fighting the same cause. It’s not fun to think about, but those other charities are in some ways your competitors. The one that earns the most trust gets more donors. And you aren’t going to win their heart just by ‘trusting’ in your listing and rating on some watchdog site.

Building trust with new donors, and keeping it with recurring donors – that’s your job, not theirs. Here’s how to do it.

The Foundation of Donor Trust

Trust is built upon communication. Just like a friendship or a marriage. If you aren’t talking, you aren’t building trust.

But in today’s wacky world of web-based craziness and ever-shifting audiences, platforms, and distractions, how can nonprofits communicate consistently and effectively?

The short answer is consistently communicating across multiple channels. Don’t just do it one way. Do it lots of ways. Offline is better than online at building trust, but you need both. Live and in-person is better than distant. In other words, the more expensive the form of communication, the more it probably builds trust. Trust costs.

But that’s not all it takes. It takes a special kind of communication, delivered through specific means.

So now let’s answer the question of trust in more detail:

What Kind of Communication Builds Trust with Donors?

This is the heart of trust – communicating well. For fundraising purposes, communicating well means sharing the things that donors want to hear. And this is why I opened by criticizing the Charity Navigator approach. Those tools have their place, when you’re dealing with scammers trying to profit off the goodwill of people who care about kids, veterans, or cancer (the most commonly scammed areas of need).

But real donors don’t want to see your Form 990. They want to see IMPACT. Here are four types of content you should be consistently communicating with donors:

1. Stories of donor impact

Don’t tell stories from your perspective. Tell them from the perspective of the recipient of the service.

Wrong way: We just gave a thousand pounds of food away to disaster victims. Our team felt so great giving this food away, and smiled and cried as they felt such compassion toward the people who desperately needed their help.

Right way: Your gift has helped provide a thousand pounds of food to disaster victims. The people who ate it asked us to thank you because the disaster stole their entire livelihood. Without the food you gave, they would literally be starving. Thank you.

With real context, this would be much better of course.But do you see the difference? When a donor – your audience – reads the first one, they will think, “That’s nice. I bet it did feel good. Good for them!”

But when they read the second one, they’ll think, “Wow, I really saved some lives.”

Which of these reactions connects the donor to your cause?

When you communicate impact, you’re giving the donor a reason to give again. You’re also making them feel known.  Feeling known and being thanked by a charity – no matter how large – makes you trust them. 

2. Feature Volunteers

Don’t spend too much time on this, but telling human stories about things humans are doing makes your nonprofit trustworthy. It’s one thing to show a picture of a person with a curable disease and ask for money to help. It’s quite another to show a volunteer helping that sick person, and then telling the volunteer’s story. Both are important. But the second one builds more trust than the first. Why?

Because volunteer stories fill in the holes in the story. This is how the work gets done. But rather than dictating your inner processes of how aid gets delivered like you’re at a seminar, tell a story of a volunteer.  The information gets communicated, but it’s interesting.

Dry and bureaucratic language doesn’t build trust, in part because it bores people to sleep.

3. Feature Donors

Just like telling volunteer stories, donor stories humanize the work and show impact. Introducing other donors and volunteers builds community. Together, we’re fighting for a cause. Sometimes the cause can seem overwhelming. We know we can’t do it all.

Hearing about another donor not only communicates impact, but shows there are more people out there than just me who are doing something about this.

Community builds trust.

4. How You Do What You Do

I hesitate to put this one on here, because many nonprofits go overboard on this. They love their processes, and love talking about themselves. Stories, impact, thanking donors, and consistent communications are the keys to building trust.

But how you accomplish your mission does matter. This is the inherent flaw with crowdfunding. There’s no credibility. I have to trust that this individual asking for money so they can go to law school really is going to law school. For that matter, I have to trust they are really a person.

There are loser groups out there that post rentals online for homes people are already living in. Once they get that initial deposit, they go dark, and you’re out the money.

Crowdfunding is barely a step or two above that in terms of trustworthiness. I would never give to a crowdfunding site if I didn’t already know the person.

So, it helps to share your process a little. But do it in an engaging way. Don’t be boring! And don’t put this front and center in your communications. It takes a skilled communicator and someone who understands the order of priority to fit this part in effectively. It’s fourth on the list because it’s the least important way to communicate. But it IS important if you want to maximize trust.

Remember the Married Couple Test. 

If one spouse wants to give, but the other one doesn’t, how will the donor convince the spouse? You’ve got to give them some ‘ammunition’ to use to break through the defenses of a spouse who doesn’t want to give their money away.

The skeptical spouse will want facts. Moving and emotional stories will help, but they will want some facts. How does this work? Where does my money go? What does the organization actually do?

You need to supply this kind of information – not just to build trust with the donor, but to build trust with the people the donor may need to win over.

How Should We Communicate to Donors?

Here’s a list of ways to communicate that build trust more than social media and email (as important as those are) can ever accomplish:

• Visit them – especially crucial for mid-level and major donors. See them in person.
• Call them. I’ve been personally called and thanked by volunteers for charities I give to. It always catches me off guard and surprises me. It feels good. There’s no substitute for this.
• Use video. It’s hard to fake videos showing the impact of a donor’s gift. For online fundraising, video is the number one trust-builder.
• Use photos. Look – I’m the first to push for writing. I’m a writer. But you can’t write what’s in a picture. Isn’t there a saying about that? Thousand words or something… Photos communicate impact in a way writing can’t. Photos build trust.
• Personalized writing. When you do write, use their name. Get their address as soon as possible so you can send stuff in the mail with their name on the letter too. Send handwritten thank you cards. Send signed photos – with their name on them too. The point of all this – make them feel known as much as you can from a distance. It works.
• Send gifts. Scammers don’t like to give money away. Send gifts to thank them, or items made by people their money is helping.

All these methods and more will keep your donors connected to your cause and build trust so they want to keep giving. And that leads to the final point:

Why Build Trust with Donors?

There are two primary reasons to build trust with donors.

First, trust deepens the relationship and prolongs their giving. It’s the primary reason some donors will stick with certain nonprofits for years, even decades. Trust is also the reason they will put your nonprofit in their will. Receiving money from a deceased donor is pretty humbling, but it also provides huge boosts to your fundraising efforts.

Your work now becomes part of their legacy. They care enough about the work you do that they take some money away from their heirs, and give it to you. It’s an amazing and extreme act of unselfishness. Putting a nonprofit in their estate plan is the capstone of trust.

Second, trust motivates them to tell other people about you. Your trusting donors are your advocates and ambassadors. They are your ‘affiliate marketers’ – only you don’t have to pay them a percentage of each gift. They do it for free. Your nonprofit becomes a natural part of their conversation, because you are a fully integrated part of their life.

They might pay bills with a scowl, but they give to you out of joy, passion, conviction, faith, or some other positive belief or emotion. They trust you, because your values align with theirs, and you’re in this together.

Need Help with Trust-Building Communication?

ProActive Content can help, and we work within ANY sized budget. No matter how small your budget, building trust is possible. It might take a little longer, but you can do it.

Schedule a free 60-minute call and see what you can do to build more trust.