DonorVoice

Fundraising isn’t asking for money—it’s about asking for permission. And that starts with something simple: caring enough to discover who your donors are on the inside. Identity isn’t hiding in plain sight; it’s revealed when you ask the right questions. A small tweak—gathering this insight during checkout—unlocks not just permission to ask, but an obligation to respond authentically. Census, not sample. Identity A gets message A. It’s not just smarter fundraising; it’s respectful, effective, and long overdue.

Donors don't think of nonprofit as a noun or label. Nonprofit is an action or aim. This means people helping people is seen as just as Nonprofit-y as a 501c3 helping a person. If nonprofits cling to the belief that their label alone guarantees relevance or loyalty, they’re toast. The public has spoken: Nonprofitness is about the what and the why, not the who. The challenge for us? Prove we’re not just another outdated institution but the best vehicle for creating real change.

F2F fundraisers, are you tired of chasing conversions like they’re Pokémon, only to see retention vanish faster than a donor’s memory of why they gave? Enter DonorVoice, your behavioral science sidekick—and yes, we’re a proud Power Partner (alliteration is what got us...) for the 2nd International F2F Fundraising Congress in Vienna this April! What’s the big deal? F2F isn’t broken, but it’s stuck. We’re here to help you: 👉 Stop guessing at motivation. 👉 Start using real-time behavioral insights to lock in donor loyalty. 👉 Shift from “sign ‘em up” to “keep ‘em around”—because retention is the real ROI. What we’ll bring to Vienna: ✅ A killer approach to understanding donor motivation. Spoiler: it’s NOT guilt or vague reference to emotion or the donor experience. ✅ Tools that prove F2F can convert and retain donors when you treat them like humans, not ATMs. ✅ A little iconoclasm—because someone has to shake up the "that’s how we’ve always done it" crowd. 🎟 Grab your tickets: https://lnkd.in/e8KrMbb8 👋 Find us at the Congress for a chat on how to turn F2F into the most sustainable, donor-centric channel out there. #F2FCongress25 #FundraisingScience #DonorMotivationMatters #RetentionOverHype #BehavioralScience

ROAS reporting is wildly wrong. It's not because platforms are deliberately lying (well, mostly). It's because they're all claiming credit for the same donations. It's like every player on a basketball team claiming they scored all 100 points because they touched the ball during each play. Suddenly, your $100 donation becomes $400 in channel reporting. The problem this creates isn't the revenue side or even reporting, it's the spending side. ROAS should, in theory, be your guiding star. But when every channel inflates its impact are you going to argue to increase spend in paid search, mail, email and ads? The person in charge of each channel surely will. The key takeaway is this: before asking for more money, fix the current budget by shifting when spend (too much in 4th quarter likely) and where (channel). The solution isn't to stop measuring channel performance. It's to think and do differently.  Read more for suggestions.

All campaign-level reporting is wrong—and I mean all of it. The only difference is in how wrong and in which direction. If your November mailing brought in $50k, did it really? What if someone donated online after seeing the mailing? Does that count as mail revenue? What if their decision was nudged by your Facebook ad from three days earlier? Worse, what if your mailing just pulled forward dollars that would have come in December anyway? Congratulations—you didn’t raise more; you just sped up the inevitable. Standard A/B testing will never answer these questions. Incrementality testing will get you much closer to truth and it's pretty simple.

Nobody believes people are all the same. Why do we fundraise in violation of this with one size fits all? Segmentation is desirous but only if we have a reasoned, pragmatic way to do it. Otherwise, it's lots of extra squeezing with no more juice. What if you could have a segmentation scheme on your entire donor file tomorrow that tapped into the unique motivations of your supporters? --And it easily lived in your CRM as a single, custom field. --And you'd get a simple cheat sheet to know how to change the words, tone, images and design to match each segment.

What's 82 Seconds Worth? If there’s one thing that trips up fundraisers again and again, it’s this: we’re too quick to ask. This speed over connection choice plays out in the calendar of pushes and within a given appeal. The fundraising playbook has conditioned us to believe that the sooner we get to the ask, the better the results. Here’s what the data tells us. We analyzed thousands of telephone fundraising calls, breaking them into two categories: success where donors signed up as monthly givers and failure where they didn’t. The difference? On average, fundraisers made the ask 149 seconds into failed calls versus 231 seconds into successful ones. The successful calls took 55% more time to get to the ask. That’s time spent doing…what? Storytelling. Connecting. Relating. Building a foundation for the ask to actually work. Why does this extra time matter so much? 1. Connection Before Conversion People give because we help them reinforce their values and goals. This makes them feel in charge, smart and personally connected. Those extra seconds create space for fundraisers to align with the donor’s identity and values; a deliberate effort to build trust and shared purpose. 2. The Flow of a Good Story Our brains love stories, but they hate interruptions. When you jump to the ask too soon, it’s like cutting off a movie in the middle to show a commercial—it feels unnatural and annoying. The best fundraisers take time to create a seamless narrative. The ask doesn’t feel like a pivot; it feels like the next chapter. 3. Reducing Cognitive Friction Decisions take mental energy. Asking for a gift too early forces the donor to make a choice before they’re ready—before they’ve been given enough emotional or rational reasons to say yes. That extra time reduces cognitive friction, making the donor feel more confident and comfortable with their decision. The Parallel with Fundraising Letters It’s not just phone calls. We see the same problem in direct mail. Too often, letters follow a predictable (and ineffective) formula: --Start with a vague, generic statement about the problem. --Offer a partially developed story—more descriptive than connective. --Abruptly interrupt the narrative with the ask, like a bad commercial. In a world where donors can skip commercials, unsubscribe, or swipe left on anything that doesn’t feel authentic, this approach, whose rationale was always lacking, is even more out of sync. What’s the Alternative? Think about the successful calls. They take the time to immerse the donor in the story—to create an experience that feels relational, not transactional. The ask becomes the obvious next step, not a jarring demand. Fundraising isn’t about finding shortcuts. It’s about building bridges. The donors who cross them feel invited, not forced and they'll reward you by sticking around because they feel part of something bigger.

Time is a precious commodity, take more of it with supporters, not less. Cutting to the chase and making the ask after a brief intro is like cutting to a commercial in the opening scene. This applies to fundraising calls and extends to other comms - e.g. letters.

How can you get beyond one size fits all fundraising with a segmentation you can have in your CRM tomorrow and with specific, paint by numbers guidance on how to tailor messaging to match the segment? That's also proven to lift fundraising results... Unicorn? No, applied behavioral science.