Reaching everyday donors and persuading them to give is more challenging than ever. If you’re tasked with raising funds for your 501(c)3 organization, you know you’re competing for attention with other nonprofits alongside GoFundMe appeals, political campaigns, and mission-driven businesses—not to mention, traditional corporate advertisers who have seemingly unlimited ad budgets. Meanwhile, the economic climate and pressures on household spending can impact huge swaths of low-to-middle income donor populations.
But there’s one thing working to any fundraiser’s advantage: the rewarding sense of creating meaningful change.
Donors are not buying widgets. When people give, they express and reaffirm what they stand for and what they value. Some give to carry on a cherished tradition, or to feel a private sense of fulfillment, or to see a satisfying return on their generosity in the form of others’ lives being made easier. What each donor gets out of giving touches a very central part of their identity. It validates their purpose. When you make the case for giving, it is your job to find the most effective way to connect with individuals on that level—and it’s our job as your agency partner to help uncover all the ways prospective donors might approach the giving decision.
One tool we use to train ourselves to see and be sensitive to varied donor styles is Archetypes. Archetypes are narrative templates that recur again and again in fiction or in our culture. They give audiences something recognizable to latch onto, inviting audiences to delve deeper into a story.
One example of Archetypes in pop culture: The Avengers. This team of Marvel superheroes displays an incredible range of fantastic abilities. As a team, they share a goal—to overcome an urgent threat—but each hero approaches the task in a different way. And audiences love them for it. Some in the audience wait impatiently for the screen to fill with green menace as the Hulk smashes his way toward a solution. Others cheer to see the precision of Black Widow’s aim dismantling the enemy threat. For those who don’t relate to supersized abilities, Hawkeye is there to show what mere humans can do. The entire audience wants the collective team of heroes to win, but individually, each person in that movie theater tends to connect with a certain hero.
Your audience of prospective donors is as varied as this audience of moviegoers. When they see the ways you depict solutions or problem-solvers, they are intuitively looking for evidence that their way of looking at making a difference is reflected somewhere. Ideally, you’ll be sharing stories that represent an array of ways of thinking about creating impact in the world.
At Lipman Hearne, we’ve observed nine Donor Archetypes that appear on our radars again and again. Each of these Archetypes offers audiences a template for a way to approach making a difference. These archetypes are:
The Closer
The Strategist
The Enthusiast
The Explorer
The World-Changer
The Power Shifter
The Calculator
The Free Spirit
The Helper
To give you some insight into how these Archetypes operate, we’ll look at The Helper. A Helper appearing in a story about donor impact is depicted as big-hearted, eager to make an immediate difference of any kind, and driven by the emotional lift the Helper gets from helping others. Those in the audience who enjoy feeling that way themselves will feel welcomed to explore more about the organization.
A contrasting example is the Strategist. When we see the Strategist depicted in a story of donor impact, we see a person driven to get to the underlying cause of an issue, to understand and gather evidence about what sort of help will bring about enduring change. Some in the audience who might not connect with a story depicting a Helper (giving a person a fish so they might eat for a day) might instead be excited and intrigued to encounter a story about a Strategist (teaching a person to fish so they might eat for a lifetime).
Learn more about these Donor Archetypes and ways they can inspire you to welcome more donors into your work. View a recording of our webinar, hosted by nonprofit consultancy Alford Group as part of their wonderful webinar series, here. And stay tuned for more to come on this topic soon!
The Future of Philanthropy
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The 2024 Giving USA report was released in July. In the days and weeks since the release, we’ve seen smart …
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